'A moment for him to deliver': Pierre Poilievre will face two very different audiences at his leadership review

OTTAWA — When Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre takes the stage at his party’s convention on Friday night, he will be  facing two very different audiences. 

The first, comprised of delegates preparing to cast their vote on his leadership of the party, are those he must win over immediately to secure his current job.

The second   audience is a key group of Canadians who may be watching closely: voters who are anxious about the geopolitical moment the country finds itself in and who did not vote Conservative in the last election, but who the party must win over should it hope to form government.

For former Conservative cabinet minister Peter MacKay, Poilievre, whom he credits as a skilled communicator that knows the task before him, must speak to both.

“He understands fully that this is a moment for him to deliver,” he said.

When he speaks in downtown Calgary on Friday night, it is expected that Poilievre will deliver a speech that weaves his messages around affordability and charting a path to a future election victory with some of what he shared in his 12-minute rebuttal to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos, which was meant to show Canadians how Conservatives would handle the current moment.

The convention itself represents a chance for Conservatives to turn the page from 2025, the year the party saw its 20-point lead over the Liberals swallowed up by the exit of former prime minister Justin Trudeau and the emergence of a more emboldened U.S President Donald Trump, who targeted Canada with tariffs and comments about coveting it as a “51st state.”

Not only did Poilievre lose the election, with his campaign facing criticism from within that the party failed to pivot fast enough to focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship, he ended that race without a seat in the House of Commons, which sent him back to the hustings over the summer to win a byelection in a safe Conservative seat in rural Alberta.

By the fall, Poilievre caught Canadians’ attention with his vow to end the federal temporary foreign worker program, a marked shift for the party that until then has focused largely on cost-of-living issues.

Other changes were evident, too. Reins were loosened on caucus members to travel, with new faces granted more speaking time. The party also sought to address its rules around nominations, a widespread complaint from local campaigns during the last race. Poilievre also granted more interviews to traditional media outlets, even appearing at the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner, an event that he had up until then boycotted.

But comments he made during a YouTube interview calling the RCMP’s leadership “despicable” over its handling of Trudeau-era scandals, combined with two of his MPs defecting to the Liberals and others in caucus harbouring the belief that his approach to politics would make him unelectable to enough Canadians to keep him from the Prime Minister’s Office, Poilievre ended the year on much shakier ground than he entered.

Heading into his leadership vote, the first the party has held since former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper captured 84 per cent support after the party’s 2004 election loss, many Conservatives expect he will leave with a strong showing.

Ontario MP Jamil Jivani would be among those.

“I believe Pierre represents (the) modernizing of the Conservative Party, bringing in a lot of new people, young people, working class Canadians, and I think people are still very strongly supportive of that modernizing,” he said.

Poilievre’s work ethic is another factor, Jivani said. “I think Conservatives believe in him as the man for the job.”

Other factors working to his advantage: No one has organized to replace him, with the leadership review held in deep-blue Conservative Alberta. 

Whatever popularity may be baked in among the party’s base, Poilievre has been meeting with delegates to drum up support, emphasizing the gains his party made during the last election: A double-digit growth to the party’s seat count,  especially in must-win regions like Ontario and capturing 41.3 per cent of the vote, a historic surge for the party.

Andrew Scheer, the party’s house leader in Parliament and longtime colleague of Poilievre’s, suggests the convention is less about page-turning than “building on success.”

Poilievre, he said, is a leader that focuses on what unites Conservatives and has also “broadened the appeal of the party beyond anything that the modern Conservative Party has ever achieved,” with party members feeling like “minor adjustments” will do the trick for next time.

More than that, Scheer said he’s expecting to see many new faces at the convention which he attributes to excitement around Poilievre, noting how in his riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle roughly 60 per cent of delegates will be first-timers.

Anecdotally, he said he has heard the same elsewhere.

“It’s a significant increase of first-time convention-goers.”

Still, recent public polling suggests many challenges lie ahead. Not only have negative perceptions of Poilievre grown, the party faces a difficult electoral landscape, especially with concerns over Trump in the forefront of Canadians’ minds, with voters 55 and older sticking with the Liberals

A new survey by Leger, which polled Canadians from Jan. 23 to Jan. 26, days after Carney delivered his speech in Davos, suggests support for the Liberals had swelled to 47 per cent, as compared to the Conservatives, which saw its support increase to 38 per cent.

Andrew Enns, executive vice-president of Leger’s Central Canada operations, said that means Poilievre ought to think about the long-term. “It’s a uphill battle right now,” he said. 

Leger’s recent data also showed that 24 per cent of respondents who say they would vote Conservatives say they are supportive of the job Carney is doing.

For Enns, that suggests Poilievre ought to be thoughtful in his criticisms of Carney, given that a segment of his own voters appear to approve of Carney.

As he approaches his leadership review, some former colleagues of Poilievre’s have publicly offered up advice on how best to counter the Liberal surge.

In an opinion piece penned for CTV News, former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore outlined how the party should use the time to flesh out more policy, “ not just vent anger at the Liberal status quo.”

MacKay, who led the now defunct Progressive Conservatives that merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative party, says the convention provides the chance for the party to “regroup” and “an attempt to recapture the significant momentum” it enjoyed up until the last election.

It would be wise, he suggested, if Poilievre and those around him engaged with “high placed Americans,” while pulling back on partisanship.

In terms of bringing back those 55 and older, he offered up the antidote of more solutions and “a little less of the needling.”

National Post

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