Opinion | Pierre Poilievre needs to unite Canada’s conservatives. This looming battle is a must-win test of his leadership

MONTREAL—Since Pierre Poilievre secured a first-ballot leadership victory last fall, peace has broken out on the Conservative caucus front.

Those of his MPs who harbour doubts about their latest leader’s bare-knuckled approach to politics have so far been discreet.

Some of them want to protect their chances to be appointed to a future Conservative cabinet. Others are planning to go quietly into the night once their current term in Parliament is up.

With polls showing he has a fighting chance to lead the party back to power in the next election and money pouring in to party coffers, no one wants to rock the boat.

But outside the parliamentary bubble, the picture is less rosy.

By all indications, uniting Canada’s conservative movement in time for the next election remains very much a work in progress.

For instance, these days Poilievre and his team are making a virtue of necessity by bragging about the fact they are keeping their distance from the many premiers who at least nominally should be their top allies.

Doug Ford is keeping his distance

That task is undoubtedly made easier by the fact that the likes of Doug Ford, François Legault and Blaine Higgs are not lining up at the federal leader’s doorstep.

Meanwhile on the ground, conservatives are once again going to war against each other.

In the Ontario riding of Oxford, a normally safe CPC seat soon to be in play in a byelection, a messy nomination battle has led the outgoing Conservative MP to switch sides.

When a date is set to fill his vacant seat, Dave MacKenzie — a 19-year House of Commons veteran — will be campaigning for the Liberals.

Another vacant riding is about to become the scene of a battle between Poilievre’s Conservatives and Maxime Bernier and his breakaway People’s Party of Canada.

For his third attempt to enter the House under his new party’s label, Bernier has set his sight on the Manitoba seat of Portage-Lisgar. In 2021, the People’s party earned its best score — 22 per cent — in this deep-blue riding.

Poilievre must win this byelection

Bernier’s move was greeted with consternation in some Conservative quarters. Poilievre certainly cannot afford to walk away wounded from his first engagement against the leader of the fledgling People’s party. He needs a decisive win on his right-wing rival.

But the challenge also amounts to an opportunity to relegate Bernier and his party to the distant margins of the conservative movement once and for all.

After all, it is not as if Poilievre did not have a strong hand to bring to the Portage-Lisgar table.

The anti-vaccine movement provided Bernier with impetus in the 2021 election, but it has lost a lot of steam now that COVID-related restrictions have been wound down.

For many of its supporters, the prospect of running Justin Trudeau out of office now resonates more loudly than the echoes of the pandemic. That’s a goal that is well out of Bernier’s reach.

And then, in contrast with Erin O’Toole in the 2021 campaign, Poilievre has accumulated political capital with the anti-vax constituency and those of its members who occupied the federal capital last year.

The battle against Bernier is clearly his to lose.

A new conservative party?

That still leaves another challenge to conservative unity in the shape of another breakaway party, hailing, this time, from the progressive flank of the movement.

By Sept. 20, a group of Conservative activists will decide whether to launch what they describe as a “new centrist” federal party.

The “Centre Ice Canadians” have set their sights on what they believe to be a large contingent of voters uncomfortable with both the left-leaning Liberal turn under Justin Trudeau and Poilievre’s scorched earth approach to policy.

It is far from clear that the crowded federal scene offers enough room for such a party to take hold. But the existence of the group and its quest for a more centrist alternative to the Liberals feeds the narrative that Poilievre is too extreme a leader to offer those fatigued with Trudeau a safe harbour.

In a general election campaign, friendly fire along those lines could do as much or more damage to Poilievre’s Conservatives than any Liberal attack ad.

A word in closing: it was Fred DeLorey, the Conservative 2021 election campaign manager, who put both Bernier’s byelection bid and the prospect of a breakaway party on the left flank of the conservative movement squarely on the radar this week. He did this through two much-noticed Substack columns.

DeLorey earned his stripes as a strategist under Stephen Harper. He is the kind of insider who would normally not need a public platform to deliver his party’s leadership team a message.

The fact that he did suggests — as many Conservatives are privately lamenting — that listening to the drums that are beating outside their bunker is not a virtue Poilievre and his palace guard cultivate.

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