By Lisa Van Dusen

July 16, 2026

If you’re Pierre Poilievre, you must be wondering, on some level, where everyone has been.

Why are so many Tories suddenly complaining about the same personality you’ve had all along, and which they seemed to find so beguiling — or at least useful — when its most caustic bits were mobilized and sent into battle against Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership, albeit with such ironic results?

In the same way that the internet and social media have turned the news cycle into a news blob, they’ve obliterated what was once known in politics as “summer”— a season when, if you weren’t on television because the House wasn’t sitting, you didn’t exist for three months except to your family and your constituents.

Now, if you’re the prime minister or the leader of the opposition, your performance continues to be scrutinized hourly in an unbroken spool from solstice to equinox, your input sought on all manner of question and conundrum.

While the job of being prime minister is infinitely more difficult, the role of being prime minister is easier in summer than that of the opposition leader because the prime minister has more to do — news to announce, things to explain, questions to answer, dodge, or dismiss.

Which is why Pierre Poilievre is having such a bad summer. Poilievre had one job in July — to make a unifying speech at the Calgary Stampede at a time when Alberta separatists, Russian bots and Trumpian proxies are mustering support for what could be an independence referendum-catalyzing referendum in October.

The fact that one line in that speech unleashed a whiplash-inducing onslaught of friendly-fire denunciation and a weeklong vortex of internecine Tory-on-Tory warfare is now well known.

But the recent deluge of what seems to be pent-up disgruntlement directed at Poilievre is of a tone, volume, calibre, source, and Claude Rains-ian astonishment that may portend a new chapter in his leadership trajectory.

Poilievre has been taking such a thrashing that even the one spot of seemingly good news of Monday’s Liaison poll that narrows the Conservatives’ gap with Mark Carney’s Liberals to six points at 41% to 35% is actually bad news for him.

The recent deluge of what seems to be pent-up disgruntlement directed at Poilievre is of a tone, volume, calibre, source, and Claude Rains-ian astonishment that may portend a new chapter in his leadership trajectory.

The major battlefield variable acting as a challenger repellent for Poilievre has been Carney’s popularity. No serious competitor or potential leadership usurper would leave a successful provincial political career/lucrative law career/more lucrative business career to languish in opposition while a seemingly invulnerable Mark Carney exhausts his honeymoon with Trump-traumatized Canadians.

A few more polls like this and those potential challengers will be thinking that Carney isn’t as invulnerable as he was six months ago, and that with another — newer, stronger, less polarizing leader, i.e. them — the Tories would be closing that gap much faster. That perception could be doused if the Conservatives’ Q2 fundraising results, due by month’s end, offer Poilievre a reprieve.

The unprecedented internal backlash against Poilievre has been what one might call a second-level shellacking, whereby regular complaints about his abrasive style and combative tone have given way to more substantive criticism about depth, intellect, and maturity — a shift that seems inevitable more than a year into his role opposing a Liberal leader smart enough to be the only former central banker in history who served two different G7 governments.

The larger issue is that being prime minister of one of those G7 countries is not what it used to be. In the last three years alone, three G7/NATO heads of government — Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and Keir Starmer — have been removed prematurely and against their will by non-electoral methods. Politics in 2026 isn’t just harder than central banking, it’s harder than politics has ever been.

The confluence of unaccountable, undeclared special interests, hypertactical actors, narrative warfare operators, and performative propaganda that defines politics in besieged Western democracies these days is so toxically potent that it has produced the takeover of the world’s democratic superpower by the reality show of Donald Trump’s preposterous presidency not once but twice.

To lead Canada in this moment means being able to navigate the minefield of all of the above while maintaining the confidence of voters by being as transparent as possible about your choices, beliefs, and values. Amid an operational war on the longstanding world order, on the global trade and economic status quo, on human rights, on truth, and on democracy, people may care more about where you stand on the future than where you stand on the political spectrum.

Whatever Carney’s weaknesses and however they may emerge, anyone running against him starts with a deficit based on his global experience, the highly specialized field in which that experience was earned, the web of contacts it has built, and the problem-solving advantage that all of that adds up to.

In other words, if he fails or falls, it will be for reasons that somehow eclipse those advantages on unrelated fronts or reveal their downside in an unexpected fashion.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre’s cruel summer may segue into a withering fall as Stephen Harper re-emerges to promote his memoir, Here for Canada, and provide an uneasy contrast to his successor in depth, intellect, and maturity.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.