By Don Newman

November 7, 2025

A defection to the Liberals and a controversial resignation from the Conservative caucus in the House of Commons have increased the pressure on party leader Pierre Poilievre as he faces a vote in January on his continued leadership of the party.

Unless there is an unlikely crumbling of support for him in the Parliamentary caucus, Poilievre will win his leadership vote. However, the size of the victory will tell how crippled his leadership has become. Even more important for Canada going forward, what Stephen Harper built in 2003 to change the Canadian political landscape may be crumbling.

Harper, with the help of then Progressive Conservative Leader Peter MacKay, agreed with conditions, to merge that party with his own, the larger Canadian Alliance, to form the Conservative Party of Canada.

The amalgamation was driven by the realization that as long as anti-Liberal votes were split between the two conservative parties, those parties were destined to sit on the Opposition side of the House of Commons while the Liberals were destined to sit in government in perpetuity.

Harper made the amalgamation move shortly after he won the leadership of the Alliance in a coup d’état to dispose then leader Stockwell Day. McKay agreed after pledging he would resist putting the parties together to win the Progressive Conservative leadership.

Despite a whiff of betrayal amid the obviousness that what had happened was a takeover by the Alliance, the amalgamation seemed to work. The first election with the two parties together drove the Liberals into a minority government and the next one, two years later, delivered a minority government for the Conservatives.

By 2011 the Conservatives led by Harper had a majority government.

That and party unity lasted until the the Liberals defeated Harper in 2015. Since then, the Conservatives have had three leaders, each of whom has lost a national election to the Liberals and been replaced at the head of the party.

Why are defections and unrest in the Conservative caucus putting at risk more than just the fate of the leader? Because the party is in an identity crisis.

Now, Poilievre is facing a vote on his leadership at a convention in January in Calgary. The vote is being held in the Conservative stronghold of Alberta and in the leader’s hometown to give Poilievre every advantage after he surrendered a 25-point lead in opinion polls to the Liberals and their new leader, Prime Minister Mark Carney, last April.

The national results of the election were devastating enough to Poilievre’s leadership. Even worse, he lost in his own Ottawa riding of Carleton, which he had held for 20 years, and had to go to the safe Tory heartland of Alberta to re-gain entry to the House of Commons via byelection.

The Conservatives and their leader have been trying to take solace from the fact that the Carney Liberals have a minority government, and that that is a “victory” for their party. The Liberals have been three votes short of a majority until this week, when the House of Commons holds votes on the government’s budget which, if lost by the Liberals, would trigger another general election.

The gap between minority and majority dropped from three to two on the day the budget was presented. Chris d’Entremont, elected as a Conservative in his Nova Scotia riding, announced he was crossing the floor to become a Liberal because he had grown disaffected with Poilievre’s combative leadership style. That switch had been rumoured, as have other possibilities of disaffected Conservative members leaving to join the Liberals.

That prediction came partly true as the first vote on the budget was being held Thursday. Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux announced he too was leaving the party caucus. Not to join the Liberals, although he had talked to the Prime Minister, but to “spend more time with his family,” spending more time with one’s family being the political euphemism for either being fired or quitting without revealing the real reason.

Why are defections and unrest in the Conservative caucus putting at risk more than just the fate of the leader? Because the party is in an identity crisis.

Since the Conservatives lost power in 2015, there has been low-key struggle between the majority hard core of the party represented by the original Reform Party and the more moderate members who came from the traditional Progressive Conservatives represented by the more centrist politics of Brian Mulroney.

It is not rigidly defined, but hard-core Reformers generally come from the Prairies and the Progressives Conservative from Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.

After 2015, Conservatives in Ontario were talking about “taking our party back,” a clear misreading of who the majority of party members are. Since then, there have been three leadership votes and each time the winner has been the candidate on the farthest right with a background in the Reform Party. The clearest example of this was in 2022, when Poilievre won the leadership, defeating the nationally popular former PC leader, federal cabinet minister and Premier of Quebec Jean Charest by an overwhelming margin.

Now, Conservatives like d’Entremont are leaving the right-wing combative leadership at the top of the party. Their departure will not affect the vote on Poilievre’s leadership unless enough of them go to convince the more conservative base that he is damaged goods and and cannot change. At the moment, there is no organized effort to make a leadership change.

The vote is three months away. Poilievre will survive but there is a danger that the party Steven Harper built will be shrunk to something more like the Reform Party that came out of the West in the 1988 election.

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.