Matt Gurney: If the CPC is now figuring out their Trump answer, better late than never

Writing off the President's comments as aberrations that won't recur starts to become an awfully risky proposition when they indeed keep recurring.

By: Matt Gurney

Conservatives are beginning to gather in Calgary for their national convention. It’ll start today and run through to Saturday; The Line will be covering it, so stay tuned for more. One of the items on the agenda, and a rather important one, is going to be a review of how Pierre Poilievre performed during the last federal election, which was held nine months ago yesterday.

I haven’t heard even the slightest credible whisper that Poilievre faces any real challenge to earning an endorsement to remain as leader. And that is, for him, good news. Because he has challenges enough. Including the same one he’s had since the election, and that he may only now be starting to realize is a problem: the Liberals are absolutely dominating the “Trump question,” and they’re going to win as long as that remains true.

And this is something that I suspect my Conservative friends still haven’t really made peace with, at all. They should start. In fact, they should have started 10 months ago.

Remember 10 months ago? The election was just getting underway and the smart money was still on the Conservatives winning. You all remember what happened next. Trump kept talking about us being annexed as a state, and the Liberals pivoted fast to rebutting that and came roaring back, falling just a few seats shy of a majority (thanks to some defections, they’re only one seat shy today).

I cannot begin to tell you how this blew the minds of many of my Tory friends. I talked to a lot of them after, and a few during, and the consensus really was that a freak event had taken them out. Poilievre was perfect for the issues everyone had good reason to think the election would be fought on. If it had remained a campaign about cost-of-living and quality of life — axe the tax, build the homes, stop the crime — they were convinced they’d have won. That’s especially true if the opponent had still been Trudeau. But then Trump went full Trump, Carney and the Liberals figured out what the public wanted to hear and how to package Carney as a material improvement over the old guy, and the Tories spent weeks in a state of stunned disbelief, showing up at rallies to trot out their slogans while the Liberals draped themselves in the flag and shot up in the polls.

It was honestly kind of baffling to watch. I’ve been doing this gig longer than I like to admit, and I’d never seen anything quite like it. The entire country was seized with concern or even fear over what the Trump White House was going to do. Carney and the Liberals leaned into that aggressively and without a moment’s delay — opportunity knocked and they answered. And for week after week, as Carney met the voters where they were, Poilievre would show up to some rally and go out there and give the same speeches he’d been giving for years.

The Conservative campaign did begin to pivot, eventually, but only partially and belatedly. You could tell that they’d concluded that they needed to say something, but they never quite seemed to settle on what exactly to say, and how loudly to say it. As one CPC insider friend of mine confessed to me during the campaign, he began to get nervous when he realized that Poilievre, known for being a shameless and unapologetic attack dog, only ever sounded cautious and measured when criticizing one person — Donald Trump. He worried voters would notice that, too.

They just might have, at that!

I’ll give my Tory friends this much credit — many of them have said that a stronger, harder pivot to respond to Trump wouldn’t have mattered, and that could well be true. I confess that I think it probably would have helped more than what they ended up doing, but I can’t prove it, and it’s possible I’m wrong. I can’t deny the possibility that the Liberals just owned that piece of real estate too thoroughly. It also would have been awkward for a party that has a considerable overlap between its core voters and those dwindling number of Canadians that like Trump and MAGAism, and would have knocked the Tories off the messages they’d spent literally years honing.

Or, as one buddy of mine told me dejectedly, “Sometimes, you’re just unlucky.”

Fair enough! That could be true. But I do think the Tories have a problem here — and Poilievre has it in particular. The notion of the last election being a freak event makes a kind of sense, but how many times does a freak event have to happen in a row before it stops being dismissed as some unforeseeable wildcard? Trump continues to Trump. He’s actually Trumping harder on Canada now than he has been for a while. Until this stops being an automatic advantage to the Liberals, who didn’t need any time to figure out what their position was going to be, the Tories are going to remain stuck in the mud.

And it’s not clear to me that they get this yet. There is a very real danger here that the CPC concluded that the last election was a fluke largely because that spared them the necessity of having some conversations and making some decisions that were going to be very awkward and uncomfortable. It was easier and probably more comforting to conclude that they’d been unlucky in a way that wouldn’t repeat than to consider that they’d been stubborn and just plain refused to adapt to a change in circumstance that stood every chance of killing them in the next election, too.

And now? Ten months later? Writing off Trump as an aberration that wouldn’t recur starts to become an awfully risky proposition when it keeps recurring. I also think we cannot discount the extent to which the U.S. president outright enjoys being a chaos agent. The guy loves the spotlight, he always has, and if he knows he can dominate news coverage in Canada by sending off a few tweets whenever our next election ends up being, I think all of us, including and maybe especially CPC HQ, has to assume he will simply because he can.

Running an election on why they’re the better bet to stand up to the U.S. is clearly not something that appeals to the Conservative leadership. And there’s plenty of valid reasons for them to prefer to fight on other hills. But this isn’t something they get to control. Like it or not, they’re going to need to find not just an answer on Trump, but an answer that’s compelling enough to at least eat into the Liberal advantage there. Even if a stronger anti-Trump pivot couldn’t have saved them the last election, given the fact that the issue has not gone away, they’d be better off today if they’d decided this months ago and began working on it.

But … they might be now? Maybe? Potentially? Consider just a few days ago, when Poilievre came out and largely endorsed what Carney said on his recent trip to Davos. It wasn’t a total endorsement, and the Conservatives did have measured and, I think, reasonable criticisms and comments to make. Poilievre himself responded well; CPC MP Michelle Rempel Garner did, too. Their responses were smart, fair, balanced and, thank God, on target. This is what they need to be doing.

Politics is what it is. The modern Conservative party is indeed a big tent and it has a lot of different groups it needs to keep happy. I don’t pretend for a moment that it’s easy.

But after a long nine months, it was getting harder and harder to understand why the Conservatives seemed bent on continuing to hand Carney an automatic advantage on an issue that is clearly not going away any time soon. It’s not good for the country to have an opposition party that has nothing to say on the biggest issue of the moment, and it certainly wasn’t doing any good for the Conservatives, either. Their confab in Calgary is a damn good place for them to have the talks they probably should have been having months ago.

So let’s see what happens. If they’re finally turning their attention to this, I have only one comment to make, and I make it with total snark-free sincerity. Better late than never, friends. Keep it up. We’ll all be better off for it.

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