How long does Pierre Poilievre stay?

Pierre Poilievre had his moment. Twenty-five points ahead of the Liberals before the 2025 election. A trucker convoy behind him, a party unified, a country tired of Trudeau. Then Mark Carney walked in, wearing a suit that looked more conservative than half the front bench, and Poilievre started losing the only asset that ever mattered to him: momentum.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a number of podcasts lately, but I must turn to the Curse of Politics podcast. Four voices, one from each corner of the spectrum, releasing weekly since long before Carney was a name anyone outside a central bank recognized. Kory Teneycke sits in as the conservative voice, the man who ran Doug Ford’s three winning campaigns. He is not an outsider lobbing grenades from the sidelines. He is inside the tent, and he has spent over a year telling Poilievre the same thing every week: you cannot win by being against everything.

Poilievre didn’t take the advice. He took a shot at the people giving it.

At the Calgary Stampede this month, Poilievre congratulated Kerry-Lynne Findlay on winning the BC Conservative leadership “against Liberal lobbyists from out east,” as CBC News reported. Findlay won. She wasn’t the target. The remark was aimed at Caroline Elliott, the runner-up, whose campaign manager happened to be Teneycke. Elliott didn’t let it go. She said she’d backed Poilievre from start to finish, and accused him of celebrating her political demise as though she’d defected to the Liberals, a detail Chantal Hébert raised on Good Talk. Elliot’s point, unstated but obvious: a federal leader’s job is to unite the conservative movement, not settle scores with the runner-up in a provincial race he had no business commenting on.

Teneycke didn’t let it go either. On the Curse of Politics, he said somebody needed to do a wellness check on Poilievre, because picking fights with conservatives across the country makes no sense for a man who is supposed to be leading them.

This is the pattern. Not a one-off spat, not a bad week. Ford defended Teneycke publicly over a year ago when Teneycke called the 2025 campaign a disaster in the making, telling reporters, as the Globe and Mail recorded, that sometimes the truth hurts. It still applies. The people telling Poilievre he has a problem aren’t Liberals. They aren’t strategists auditioning for Carney’s team. They are Conservatives who worked campaigns, won elections, and are watching him burn goodwill inside his own party the same way he used to burn it against Trudeau.

That’s the real story of Poilievre’s decline, and it has almost nothing to do with Carney. Carney governing from the centre-right took away Poilievre’s easiest arguments, the ones about inflation and overreach that used to write themselves. But the deeper problem is that Poilievre never built a second gear. He knows how to be against something. He has never shown Canadians, or his own party, he can be the next Prime Minister. Listing grievances is not a platform. Naming enemies is not a plan.

A leader who spends his energy pointing out what is wrong with everyone else, Liberals, lobbyists, provincial leadership candidates, eventually runs out of people to blame who aren’t standing next to him. Poilievre is there now. He picked a fight with the runner-up in a provincial leadership race he had no reason to comment on, and in doing so, he picked a fight with the strategist who has been diagnosing his campaign’s failures in public for over a year. Teneycke didn’t start that fight looking for a fight. He started it because he watched a winnable election get lost, and he has been saying since why it happened.

Poilievre’s supporters will call this disloyalty. I’d call it the last warning a party gives a leader before it stops giving warnings. Doug Ford, one of the most successful conservative campaigners in the country, backed Teneycke’s diagnosis while Poilievre was still the frontrunner, and has since told reporters that Poilievre didn’t lift a finger for him in the Ontario election and told his own MPs to stay out of it. Caroline Elliott, who just lost a leadership race, still had enough standing left to tell the federal leader to knock it off. When the people inside your coalition are more willing to name the problem than you are, the problem isn’t Carney. It’s you.

The floor crossings make the same point from a different angle. Four Conservative MPs have joined the Liberals since November, and one of them, Chris d’Entremont, didn’t dress it up as a policy disagreement. CBC News reported he said he left because of Poilievre’s leadership style. That is a former caucus member, not a podcast commentator or a provincial premier, naming the exact problem Teneycke and Elliott were pointing at. And yet Poilievre walked into January’s mandatory leadership review in Calgary, the one his own party’s constitution forced on him after the election loss, and cleared it with 87 percent support among delegates on hand, according to CBC News. Worth being honest about what that number is. It’s 87 percent of 2,588 delegates, a small, structurally loyal slice of a membership that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, drawn from riding associations and gathered on Poilievre’s home turf in Calgary. That’s not a rigged result, it’s how every party leadership review works, but it’s also not a plebiscite of the base. It measures organizational loyalty, the people most plugged into the party rewarding an incumbent. The floor-crossings measure something else entirely: sitting MPs with direct knowledge of caucus and campaign mechanics making a judgment about competence. Both can be true at once. The grassroots haven’t turned. However, MPs like Chris Warkentin, who posted that Canadians are “rejecting Carney’s bait and switch,” are still out defending him publicly. That’s the real shape of this story. It isn’t a party unanimously plotting his exit. It’s a leader bleeding caucus members and taking friendly fire from people who’ve run winning campaigns, while the base still isn’t ready to admit what some of its own MPs are already saying with their feet.

Chantal Hébert put a number on it. On Good Talk, she said she isn’t sure Poilievre survives the year, and that she hasn’t been sure for months. She also laid out the mechanism that actually removes a Conservative leader who won’t go quietly: not more floor crossings to the Liberals, but caucus members choosing to sit as independents, the same route that forced a leadership vote on Stockwell Day years ago. She waved off the excuse that there’s no one ready to replace him, pointing out that a movement which has produced sitting premiers and a full Harper cabinet clearly has people capable of leading it better than the man doing it now. And when her co-host floated that a full membership vote might back Poilievre by something like 95 percent, she pushed back immediately, calling that number a guess with no real backing and repeating that delegates at one convention were never a stand-in for the whole movement.

There’s a reason this costs Poilievre more than it earns him, and it isn’t just my opinion. A Conversation review of the political science on negative campaigning keeps landing on the same uncomfortable finding: attacking constantly makes a leader look sharper but less trustworthy, a trade that reads well in a debate clip and poorly over years. People who feel like they’re being worked on rather than spoken to tend to push back against the source, not the target, a reaction researchers call psychological reactance. The same research links sustained negativity to voter exhaustion rather than persuasion, hardening the people already on your side while doing nothing for anyone else. A 2023 Pew survey cited there found nearly two in three American adults feel drained just thinking about politics. I doubt the Canadian number is much better, and Poilievre’s style is built entirely on giving people more of the thing that’s draining them.

That matters more than usual right now because of where the exhaustion is already coming from. Trump is running economic wars, military posturing, and PR campaigns against half the world at once, and Canadians wake up to some version of it daily whether we want to or not. I don’t need to hear the opposition leader adding another layer of dread on top of that. I’m not asking for false comfort, the kind that pretends the trade war or the cost of living isn’t real. I’m asking for the version of hope that actually lowers stress: a leader who names a problem once, then spends his energy on what he’d do about it, instead of spending every appearance re-litigating who’s to blame. Carney, whatever else is true about him, mostly sounds like a person describing a plan. Poilievre mostly sounds like a person describing an enemy. Given what’s already coming out of Washington, Canadians don’t need more of the second thing from inside our own borders.

Poilievre still has time to change course. However, time is the one thing his critics keep saying he’s running out of.

Vince Hill writes weekly on life, politics, and education.