The Conservatives Know Who They Want. Do They Know What They Want?

Conservative Party members from across the country are gathering today in downtown Calgary for the federal party’s convention, set to run through the weekend. They’ll cast non-binding votes on a variety of policies and conduct a mandatory leadership review. But their real task will be to demonstrate that the party is both unified and gaining momentum, even after a federal campaign this past April in which the Conservatives lost their grip on a twenty-four-point lead, and party leader Pierre Poilievre lost his own riding, allowing the Liberals to stay in power with a minority government.

Many Conservatives argue that President Donald Trump’s return to the White House was the decisive and uncontrollable factor that transformed Poilievre’s early polling lead into Prime Minister Mark Carney’s April victory. Trump’s shadow continues to loom over the party. An EKOS poll, in late October, found Conservative vote-intenders almost perfectly divided on Trump’s job performance, with 49 percent approving of it, and 51 percent disapproving. Among Liberal, New Democratic, Green, and Bloc Québécois voters, disapproval was near universal.

That split among Conservatives captures Poilievre’s central dilemma heading into the convention. He cannot loudly embrace Trump-style populism without shrinking the party’s appeal to the country he hopes to govern. But he cannot fully repudiate Trump either, at least not without alienating a substantial faction of his own coalition.

Despite that tightrope, those expecting Poilievre to stumble in his leadership review are likely to be disappointed, according to party insiders. This vote won’t involve “average Canadians” or even “average members” of the party, says Ginny Roth, who ran communications for Poilievre’s leadership campaign. It is a vote of delegates: committed party volunteers who have won positions within riding associations and have been nominated to attend the convention.

That distinction matters. Poilievre won the Conservative leadership in 2022 with an overwhelming mandate and claimed to have brought 312,000 new members into the party in the process, though previous party leaders have contested that figure. Many of those members remain intensely loyal to Poilievre.

Carl Qiu, a thirty-year-old Conservative volunteer and former Ontario provincial candidate, says Poilievre remains deeply aligned with what party members believe the Conservatives should stand for: an intense focus on cost of living, crime, and economic frustration.

Even after two Conservative members of Parliament crossed the floor to the Liberals in late 2025, pushing the governing party to within inches of a majority, Qiu says support for Poilievre remains unshaken, in part because there are no other serious contenders for the job. Jamil Jivani’s and Leslyn Lewis’s views, he says, don’t align with those of most Canadians—they swing too far to the right to take away votes from Carney. Michael Chong and Erin O’Toole’s progressive conservatism is losing ground. The party appears strikingly confident in Poilievre and convinced he represents the Conservatives’ best chance at winning the next federal election—even if it were to be called in the near future.

For all the attention it will attract, this weekend’s convention is unlikely to determine Poilievre’s immediate future. What Calgary will reveal instead, says Roth, is the shape of the politics Poilievre intends to practice next. She’ll be looking to his keynote speech and the tone it will take.

The convention offers Poilievre a stage to demonstrate his dexterity and signal how he will guide the Conservatives to reconcile two impulses at once: one that seeks confrontation, cultural edge, and a harder tone; and another that wants clear distance from Trump and a form of Canadian patriotism that feels domestic rather than imported.

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There’s a risk the Liberals’ current focus on economic and energy projects could “squeeze out the Conservative Party,” says Qiu. “As an opposition party, you always want to be different” and hold the government accountable. It hasn’t helped that Carney’s policies have shifted the federal Liberals rightward, starting with his government’s early repeal of the carbon tax, a move Poilievre had long championed, and one that had helped attract centrist voters.

After Carney and Alberta premier Danielle Smith signed the memorandum of understanding, in late November, that would pave the way for a new oil pipeline, among other outcomes, the prime minister received a standing ovation at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce event—unheard of for a Liberal politician among the historically blue crowd.

With the New Democrats weak, and Carney comfortable governing without leaning left, the Conservatives face a branding dilemma: differentiate too sharply from the government and risk alienating moderates, or fail to differentiate at all and risk appearing redundant.

How Poilievre reacts to Trump’s policies exacerbates that pressure. During last year’s federal election campaign, Poilievre took a strong tack against fifty-first-state rhetoric, saying “there is no justification for what President Trump is threatening on Canada.” But he also explicitly echoed some Trumpisms: calling for a “Canada First” economic policy, meeting with divisive figure Jordan Peterson, taunting former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh with the nickname “Sellout Singh,” condemning “woke censorship ideology”—the types of mimicry the Liberal Party highlighted in election attack ads. Asked whether he would replicate Trump’s repeal of transgender-rights-related bills, Poilievre stated that he was “not aware of any other genders than man and woman.” More recently, when United States forces seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Poilievre congratulated Trump in an X post, adding, “down with socialism.”

On social and cultural issues, Poilievre has leaned into his stances on battling crime and illegal drugs, as well as gender-related debates around women’s spaces and sports—including backing Premier Smith’s policies in Alberta regulating trans women’s participation in female sports. Samuel Duncan, a former staffer under Stephen Harper, and Roth both argue these positions reflect what they describe as “common-sense” views shared by many Canadians. Roth adds that, while Carney might talk about being tough on crime, Poilievre’s Conservatives have pledged more serious action: vowing to push back on a Supreme Court decision and use the notwithstanding clause to change criminal sentencing provisions.

On addressing drug use, Poilievre has advocated for involuntary drug and psychiatric treatment of minors and prison inmates, defunding safer supply programs, closing supervised injection sites—which he calls “drug dens”—near schools and playgrounds, expanding recovery programs, and instating life sentences for anyone trafficking over forty milligrams of fentanyl, which is a fraction of most street users’ dosage. Roth and Duncan claim his views, which some harm reduction advocates have criticized, have expanded the party’s popularity. A recent Abacus Data poll, in collaboration with the Toronto Star, found a consensus among voters that “deterrents to crime are not tough enough” and that “governments should focus more on treatment than harm reduction for those struggling with addiction to drugs.” But that same poll also found that, while Poilievre’s personal ratings among Conservatives remain strong, they’ve dropped to their lowest point among voters overall since Abacus Data began tracking in mid-2023.

Such policies might appeal to a broader base in what the Conservatives like to call their “big tent” of supporters. But like most things in politics, unifying an ideologically diverse tent is more complicated when in power than from the safety of the opposition. If Poilievre survives the convention and becomes prime minister in the near future, he will need to walk a fine line in his interactions with Trump while re-negotiating CUSMA and co-operating on defence agreements. Domestically, the fault lines between the socially conservative and liberal ends of the party could deepen depending on how Poilievre handles Alberta’s growing and highly vocal separatist movement.

Of course, far-right voters in Canada have another option in the People’s Party of Canada. And while Duncan dismisses the PPC as mostly electorally irrelevant—though he conceded the PPC is helpful in distancing the Conservatives from extremists—Roth cautions that splinter movements on the right cannot be ignored entirely.

“I think, in many ways, the story of the last election was that conservatives consolidated conservative support, and liberals consolidated progressive support, meaning the NDP collapsed and the PPC collapsed,” says Roth. If the Conservatives were headed by a “moderate, centrist, more liberal style leader who was a lot more like a Mark Carney,” she says, “you would see a much stronger PPC, or some other version of a right-wing alternative.”

Roth anticipates that Carney’s appeal will fade gradually, and centrist voters will return to Poilievre. “There was this moment where Mark Carney could say he was going to do things, and people would really give him the benefit of the doubt,” says Roth. “And I think that moment is waning.” At the convention, she says, Poilievre could say, “I will take a different approach, and I will actually fix these problems for you, and his consistency on issues will pay off.”