Does Nobody Care Enough About Poilievre To Tell Him The Truth?

(Personal news to start, which I just realized I never announced here: I’m back in the political betting game. Covers.com was nice enough to hire me to cover the 2026 midterms down south for them - odds movement, key races, and more - and I’m thrilled to do the work.)

Does Pierre Poilievre not have anyone in his life who can tell him it’s over?

The last week’s seen 5 polls released so far, all with Conservative deficits above 10%. EKOS and Nanos are, for reasons not particularly coherent, dismissed, but Liaison went from a 9% Liberal lead to a 13%, and then new polls from Spark, Leger, Research Co came back all at varying double digit numbers.

I could do a lot of analysis of those numbers - including that for Leger, it’s actually a slight swing back to the CPC (and a big swing back in Ontario), but that the addition of an EKOS and a Research Co back into the mix of pollsters with a (semi-)recent poll means that the effect should be muted on a good model. I could point out that there’s a tariff deadline next week, and that maybe events could change something. Or I could even point out that there’s still no evidence of who the alternative is that would win the next election for the CPC. But nobody cares.

At some point I’m sure I’ll get around to putting the polls from this week in my model. At some point I’ll probably tweet a model update again. At some point I might even bother mapping the model out for people. But I don’t give a shit to do so today, because it doesn’t matter. Whether the Conservatives project for 94 seats or 87 won’t make a lick of fucking difference, which is that until the Conservatives realize that they can’t keep being the way they’ve been, they’re fucked, and it won’t get any better.

..

There’s a new Anthony Bourdain biopic out today, and I’m fascinated to see it. Bourdain’s been oft-cited in these pages as an inspiration of mine - his famous 1999 New Yorker essay is one of the pillars of my writing style, and formed so much of how I think of good writing. Don’t Eat Before Reading This is the single piece of work that most embodies what I want to strive for, even if the totality of Bill Simmons’ catalogue edges out the influence of one masterful work of Bourdain’s writing.

Don’t Eat Before Reading This was Bourdain at his most caustic - a reflection of the time he was in, and of his disillusion with the food world of the time. It is a far cry from the Bourdain that we saw when he was on our TVs, first with No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, because he grew up. I love Bourdain, but the angry, bitter man who called vegans a splinter group of vegetarians akin to fucking Hezbollah in 1999 was not the same man who showed the world the depth of cuisine and culture across the globe for years on TV. He grew, he evolved, and he became something different when the moment called for it.

And that’s where I come back to on Poilievre. Pierre was one of this country’s most effective Opposition Leaders, a force to be reckoned with who systematically drove out a Prime Minister. It took a leader switch and a political act of God to stop him becoming PM. But unlike Bourdain, there’s no pivot coming.

This week saw Dean Allison hold a press conference where a doctor he platformed claimed that COVID vaccines did more harm than COVID. That same doc was an ivermectin truther, for what it’s worth, and when Allison was asked whether Poilievre supported the (self-titled) Allison Inquiry, the answer is allegedly yes. And certainly by no means has Poilievre told the legion of idiots in his party to sit down and shut up.

Poilievre’s policy on trade isn’t any better - we need to make no concessions but also get Donald Trump to completely divest from his longstanding obsession with tariffs as a form of economic strength. Poilievre definitely thinks he’s being clever - no matter what happens on the 19th, Carney will have failed the bar Poilievre set! Either he doesn’t get tariff relief or he conceded too much and Poilievre can say that he would have gotten relief without concessions! It’s genius! Except for the small problem that Canadians aren’t dumbasses.

Poilievre is inventing this fictional reality where the trap he is setting has to be accepted as the framing, but that only works if people believe the premise is fair. But the thing is, Canadians are not willing to accept Skippy’s framings anymore, because they view the person in the office as a fundamentally reasonable person. Trudeau had squandered much of his good will by the end, and the issue set Canadians cared about was one where Trudeau was viewed to be responsible. Now, Canadians view Carney as doing a good job in handling a lunatic. They won’t be mad at Carney for not being to make chicken salad out of Trump’s chicken shit just because Poilievre demands it.

The polls are, if anything, getting worse, and the idea of any sorts of green shoots of recovery is built entirely on the false premise that you can hack and slash the data in such a way that creates the narrative you want. As someone who has routinely fallen victim of that, mostly (but not exclusively) in an American context, it feels good until you’re punched in the face with a loss. Then you feel like a fucking mug, and that’s how so many Conservatives will feel in due time if Poilievre doesn’t resign soon.

The ability to pivot from the stylings that made you successful and at your first peak is hard to capture. It’s hard to understand that the thing that worked for so long is now the problem. Bourdain understood it, and in so doing became not just a firebrand, but a broader part of our public life. Pierre Poilievre will not be a successful Conservative leader anymore, because he cannot escape the talent that brought him to the brink of the government benched. And it is shocking to me that nobody close to him can see what is self-evident to the rest of us and tell him that.