Don Martin: Pierre Poilievre's road to apparent victory will soon start to get rougher

OTTAWA -

He may be peaking too soon.

Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives appear to be on cruise control to a rendezvous with the leader’s prime ministerial ambition.

This week’s byelection in a riding just east of Toronto featured a Liberal show of force, including campaign visits by the prime minister and a parade of cabinet ministers, to try to make it a close contest. It ended up being a cakewalk with 57 per cent of the vote steamrolling to Conservative heavyweight Jamil Jivani over the hapless Liberals at 22 per cent.

OK, so byelections are mostly low-turnout referendums on the government’s popularity and this was, after all, a Conservative seat. Yet the historically-high margin of victory seems to confirm all the lopsided polls foreshadowing a Poilievre majority in the making.

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Still, despite this week’s Nanos Research poll which pegs Poilievre as the most popular voter choice for prime minister in 10 years, the Conservatives might be passing their best-before moment to send the Liberals back to a well-deserved term in Official Opposition, if not a return to third-party status.

Despite chronic Liberal efforts to render themselves unelectable by rolling out gaffe after gaffe over boondoggles galore while enduring global humiliation amid a carnage of fiscal ineptitude, there’s a chance the seemingly inevitable Conservative victory is not yet cast in stone.

The problem for Poilievre is that he needs an election NOW to capitalize on his party’s strong popularity. Having negotiated a pharmacare package with the tagalong NDP, the Liberals should be able to retain power until the scheduled vote in October 2025 - and that’s a long time to hold for the Conservatives a commanding lead.

So far, it’s easy for Poilievre to merely oppose everything, particularly this government where it’s fish meets gun in barrel, but the need to propose a future Conservative course in government is where the rocks lie for his breezy sail to victory.

While the Liberals have failed to hire judges, buy back banned firearms, refine medically assisted death and fallen down in a multitude of other areas where they promised action and delivered footdragging, they have introduced some popular big-ticket programs which will be hard to unwind.

When the inevitable ‘where?’ questions confront Poilievre’s plan to reduce the bloated federal government spending rung up under Justin Trudeau’s reign, the Liberals will unleash all manner of fearmongering about the takeaways coming under Conservative rule.

And that’s a big problem for a leader who needs growth in moderate support beyond his base to claim the majority he needs to govern without facing the risk of losing power to a left-leaning coalition of other parties.

Repealing the new pharmacare program will be unpopular for women who will soon have free contraceptives and anyone needing diabetes prescriptions. It will be hard to scrap free dental care for lower income Canadians. Subsidized daycare is impossible to take away now.

Poilievre can’t cut military spending, an underfunded embarrassment on the world stage Canadians want rectified. Health care transfers are untouchable as are the huge Indigenous reconciliation budgets.

The justice system would seem immune from cost-cutting given the Conservative law and order focus. And while there may be strong support to axe the carbon tax, Canadians will still demand efforts to fight climate change, which won’t be cheap.

Complicating Poilievre’s drift toward destiny as prime minister is the risk NDP support collapses and drifts Liberal as nervous voters strategically aim to prevent the Conservatives from winning so big they preside over a one-party Parliament with token opposition.

From every current vantage it seems unlikely Trudeau can rebound from fighting with the NDP for distant second place in the polls.

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But the Canadian political battlefield is littered with leaders who went from ‘sure-thing’ to ‘huh, what happened?’ after a U-turn in their fortunes once voters tuned into the campaign.

Paul Martin’s so-called ‘juggernaut’ was supposed to hand the Liberals 200-plus seats before the new leader limped across the 2004 election finish line as one-term minority fizzle. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was supposedly doomed to lose the 2023 election to a resurgent NDP. And, of course, the rise of Justin Trudeau in 2015 is Exhibit A for unforeseen political resurrections.

For peaking Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservatives boast a growing list of impressive candidates who hope to fill a future cabinet, the road to apparent victory will start to get rougher.

As the prime minister in waiting, his performance will be soon judged more on clear answers than question period.

That’s the bottom line.