Poilievre’s failure is a disaster for British Tories 🇨🇦📉

The map route to victory has been lost to history

Election coverage in the United Kingdom naturally centres around British general, regional and local authority elections. Presidential elections in United States are the next most covered, as the hegemonic power and global leader of economic and foreign policy. Germany and France follow – primarily for their strong influence over the direction of our nearest neighbours in the European Union. Everywhere else is covered in the back pages. Except for three countries: Australia, New Zealand and Canada – the developed, English speaking countries of what was the British Empire. Each with their own governor appointed by the Crown, Westminster-style parliament, and relative cultural and political familiarity.

Out of the three, Australia gets the most attention. The camp, evil drama of deposing its Prime Ministers through treacherous leadership spills every few years is a good story in of itself. Then there’s the relentless brutality of its short three-year electoral cycle – which gives plenty of experience to Aussie political strategists that hop on a plane to Britain in fallow years, to instruct campaigns for their sister parties (see Sir Lynton Crosby, Issac Levido). Elections abroad are rarely big news when the governing party does not change. But the recent Canadian federal election was noted in the UK more than usual.

Five short months ago, Pierre Poilieve had a golden ticket to the Canadian premiership. Buoyed by a successful campaign centred around housing affordability, the cost of living and federal carbon taxation, he was odds-on to lead a majority government. Then three things happened. Justin Trudeau, the longtime Prime Minister and increasingly unpopular leader of the Liberal Party (the main centre-left and governing party of Canada) resigned – to be replaced by former Bank of England governor, Mark Carney. Fourteen days later, Trump assumed the US presidency. And the New Democratic Party, to the left of the Liberals, collapsed.

From an unassailable lead… to their leader losing his own seat. Image source: Undermedia, Wikipedia.

Poilievre went from near-certain landslide victory to the humiliation of losing his own riding¹ of Carleton – a seat he had held under various boundaries since 2004 – on April 28th. It’s a cruel lesson in just how volatile the business of politics can be – Canadian politics in particular. But important as Trudeau’s replacement by Carney was, the clear reason for this abrupt shift is not primarily rooted in domestic Canadian politics. It’s the choices and politics of the president of their neighbour – Donald Trump. Canadians are absolutely hopping mad about the capricious, unprompted and unneighbourly behaviour south of the border. It’s almost inconceivable that the United States could do this to its ‘little brother’.

“What the President said, and he has said this repeatedly, is he was told by the previous Prime Minister [Justin Trudeau] that Canada could not survive without unfair trade with the United States, at which point [Trump] asked, ‘Well, if you can't survive as a nation without treating us unfairly in trade, then you should become a state.” – Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State

It would be humorous in its absurdity if it were not for the radicalised, nonsensical intent behind Trump’s statements on annexing Canada and declaring it the 51st state. Canada’s politicians are warning against taking his proposals quasi-seriously. In his second term, surrounded by ‘yes men’, the days of ‘take him seriously, but not literally’ are over. Then there’s the tariffs, which assign Canada equal blame for America’s fentanyl crisis as Mexico with its notorious drug cartels and leaky border. Canadians have responded by boycotting American goods and reducing visits south of the border. Carney still ran on the tired legacy of the preceding Liberal Party governments – but, for Canadians, a rejection of Trumpian America, and renewal of Canadian identity, won out.

And that did for Pierre Poilievre. He might be a very different politician to Donald Trump, but even whiffs of similarity – like attacks on the funding model of the Canadian public broadcaster, CBC, and his anti-‘Ottawa elites’ and ‘Liberal gatekeepers’ rhetoric – convinced Canadians against endorsing a right-of-centre victory. That doesn’t mean Poilievre’s Conservatives didn’t do better than last time – their vote share rose by 7.6 percentage points, and they took an extra 23 seats. But Carney’s Liberals strongly outperformed even that, uplifting their own vote share by 11.1 percentage points, taking an extra 17 seats.

But it’s not just a disaster for Poilievre and the Canadian Tories. It’s a disaster for British Conservatives too. The exact same mistake was being made by the incumbent Canadian Liberal Party as the British Tories – overseeing a mounting housing crisis, rooted in a tightly regulated planning system, while leaving the immigration tap running freely. In Canada, that left Poilievre free to attack the Liberal government in explicitly postwar conservative terms: ‘government overreach is making your rent skyrocket and shunting homeownership out of reach – we should hack back the state, give you a home of your own, and lower your cost of living’. Of course it’s much harder for British Tories to trash the identical record of their own party in government than the Canadian Tories of a Liberal government.

But what Poilievre once offered was a Conservative victory template. A pathway to making centre-right politics relevant to young people in 2025. A winning narrative that could have taken root in newsrooms, opinion columns and activist WhatsApp groups: here is a proven path to Conservative revival in comparable circumstances, why are the British Tories not taking it? Perhaps it’s too naive and optimistic to imagine that a far away victory could have served as such an salutary yet instructive lesson for the British Conservatives, or to imagine that it could be as easy as copying and pasting the arguments. But then again – with every next council or by-election loss could have been the renewed opportunity to share the story of a proven route back to power, offering the possibility of productive introspection.

The biggest problem that the British Tories face, proven by the recent local election results, is complete and utter irrelevance. Not the typical irrelevance of regular opposition politics. There’s barely even a question before the question mark any more – what are you for? In the past, the temperance of sound money and non-ideological, competent government was a trusty backstop to the party’s identity. Now? The party offers nothing that Reform cannot bid-up without immediate consequence, and has an atrocious, incompetent recent record in government. The party is a surrealist joke to under-25s. The reason the threat to the party is quite so existential, is because Conservatives themselves are quite uncertain why they exist at all.

In Canada, until Trump fouled up the plan, Poilievre’s Tories had a very clear idea of what they were for – reestablishing the living standards of young Canadians by restoring the dream of homeownership. That path back to power now appears to have been closed off – lost to the chaos of history. It is for the Liberal Party to decide if it will pick up the mantle of reforming planning and restoring the dream of homeownership in Canada. In Australia, coincidentally, the centre-right Liberal Party (not to be confused with the centre-left Liberal Party of Canada) experienced something very similar to the Canadian Tories only a few days later on 3rd May – losing heavily to the incumbent centre-left government, with their leader, Peter Dutton, also losing his own seat of Dickson². Similar comparisons were made between Dutton and Trump during the campaign trail.

It’s painful today, but it might do the developed Western centre-right a great deal of good to have been denied victory twice by Trump. There are few things more motivating than righteous anger. It can force fixed, foundational assumptions to be re-examined and challenged. Victories twice denied by Trump will be fuel to a raging fire, forcing the global centre-right community to ask questions about who, and why it is – and crucially, what separates it from the politics of the populist, Trumpian right that has just wronged it. The route back to relevance just got even more elusive for the Conservative party, but furious determination abroad might be the first ingredient in finding it.

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What now feels like a very long time ago, I previously wrote about what was behind Poilievre’s surge in the polls, and how he communicates his conservatism to young people. If you enjoyed this article, you should check it out.

1. What Canadians call their electoral subdivisions, interchangeable with constituency. Interestingly, Britain used to use ridings more in the past, and this is where the term originated.

2. Good name 👍