By Don Newman

July 16, 2025

Two-and-a-half months after a federal election that made him the third consecutive Tory leader in a decade to lose to the Liberals, Pierre Poilievre’s leadership of the Conservative Party is now a numbers game: His vote percentage in a byelection, his support in a 2026 leadership review and his polling numbers at the beginning of next year, ahead of that review, will determine his future.

At the moment, Poilievre’s numbers, according to a recent Research co. poll, are 44% personal approval vs. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 61%. The Conservative Party lags 10 points behind the Liberals at 37%.

Poilievre’s future is in doubt because, in addition to the Conservatives losing an election in April that had been a sure-thing, projected majority just weeks before, he lost his own Ottawa seat of Carleton, which he had held through successive elections since 2004. Although they lost, Poilievre and the Conservatives spun the election results as a victory; the party had won 144 seats in the House of Commons and captured 41.3% of the popular vote. That was the highest total of any Conservative Party since 1988.

But they still lost an election that for over the past two years public opinion polls said they would win in a landslide. Circumstances changed with the election of Carney as Liberal leader, Poilievre was slow to adapt, and now he is running in a byelection in the rural Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot trying to regain a seat in the Commons.

He will very likely win that seat; the question is by how much. And the answer to that question will impact on another vote he has to face in January. Under the Conservative Party constitution, the election defeat has triggered a mandatory review of Poilievre’s leadership and a vote on whether he should continue as party leader. That vote will be held at a party convention next January 29th in Calgary. He is also likely to win that vote, and, again, the question is by how much. The answer will determine his fate.

Battle River-Crowfoot is a riding that has been a Conservative stronghold for years. In the recent election, Damien Kurek won 82% of the vote. That result makes it clear why Poilievre and the party wanted him to run there. But the leader’s challenge is to roll up enough votes to make a similar popular vote showing to Kurek, and that may not be as easy a task as it might look.

At least seven serious or semi-serious candidates will be on the ballot, plus names from the Long Ballot Committee, a group that is protesting the first-past-the-post system used to elect candidates. They do that by qualifying around 100 people to put their names on the ballot. Their aim is not to win, but to sow confusion when people vote and aggravation when the votes are counted.

But the one candidate whose vote will be scrutinized along with Poilievre’s is the candidate for the Alberta separatists. In East Central Alberta, where Battle River-Crowfoot is located, Alberta independence has found a receptive home and the level of support it can gain in a federal by-election could cut into Poilievre’s margin.  Particularly when the Alberta-born Poilievre represented an Ottawa riding for 20 years and, after moving east, changed the pronunciation of his name from “paw-luh-veer” to “pwah-lee ehv”.

The instant conventional wisdom about the race is that if the results for the Conservative leader in Battle River-Crowfoot fall below 75% of the vote, he will still win handily but be damaged nonetheless. If he can crack 80%, he’ll be out of the woods.

So far, there is no credible challenger to the leader’s mantle and no discernible mutiny afoot of the kind the Conservatives were once infamous for, but if Poilievre lagging after the byelection or fails to reassure in the fall session of Parliament, that will change.

Should he win, Poilievre will be back in the House as Opposition leader, ready to challenge the Prime Minister on an almost daily basis. How he does that will be important. The Conservative leader has always been known for his slash-and-burn style of performance, even when he was a cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper government.

It has not gone unnoticed that, in his absence, the Commons has been a quieter, even more co-operative place. Will Poilievre be able to moderate his style into that of a calmer, more serious questioner? The Carney government has a lot of difficult and controversial problems to deal with, including the unprecedented challenge of Donald Trump’s tariffs and other trade disruption tactics aiming to cripple the Canadian economy, as well as a promised budget to reconcile the country’s bloated bottom line with the promise of massive defence spending increases in the years ahead.

If Poilievre can moderate his question period performance, it may disappoint the red-meat, gung-ho base of his party. But it may convince other Canadians that he has learned the lessons of his recent setbacks sufficiently to sit at the grown-up table. Ideally, this transition would be served by the sort of epiphany that could offset the appearance of opportunistic shape-shifting that became an issue in his national campaign. So far, that hasn’t happened, and even if it does, the odds it will be seen as performative are fairly high.

This gantlet of challenges will culminate in a convention that has been moved to Calgary from Ottawa because of  Poilievre’s personal electoral loss in the national capital and the uncomfortable fact that no Conservative MPs were elected in the region. So far, there is no credible challenger to the leader’s mantle and no discernible mutiny afoot of the kind the Conservatives were once infamous for, but if Poilievre lagging after the byelection or fails to reassure in the fall session of Parliament, that will change.

Indeed, prominent party supporters may start looking outside the party caucus for a credible candidate, the way the Liberals did to get Carney to replace the unpopular Justin Trudeau. That process may be hampered by the fact that many Conservatives on Bay Street and in provincial capitals like Carney, seeing him more as a business-friendly technocrat than an ideologue, and one who was admired by the late finance minister, Jim Flaherty, still an icon among conventional Tories.

For now, Poilievre supporters are organizing to pre-emptively muster enough support to make the next six months a cake walk instead of an obstacle course. In what seems like an unlikely place to begin, Ontario MP Arpan Khanna is canvassing defeated Conservative candidates to convince them to come to the Calgary convention and support Poilievre and bring delegates from their ridings to do the same.

Why candidates and their supporters who just lost an election the party was supposed to win would now back the man who led them to defeat is a tactical mystery. The important this is what it says about both Poilievre’s vulnerability, and his determination to avoid being yet another Tory leader pink-slipped in the wake of an election defeat.

Policy Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a lifetime member and a past president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.