Get ready for conservative civil war

As the reality of the federal Conservative Party’s defeat in last week’s federal election manifested, infighting within the movement erupted, particularly between the leaders of provincial Progressive Conservative parties and the federal party. This was, in turn, met by accusations by some federal Conservatives that Ontario premier Doug Ford was some kind of Liberal booster, and that he was somehow sabotaging their campaign when Ford’s campaign manager called out Pierre Poilievre for blowing a 25-point lead before the election was even half over. That fighting spilled over into legacy media—including a lengthy Ford interview in Politico and a fiery on-camera moment from Conservative MP Jamil Jivani on election night—and on social media, where speculation picked up as to who might be looking to replace Poilievre, who had lost his own seat in the election.

Part of this infighting has to do with the distance that the federal Conservatives kept from Ford and his brand, which was considered toxic early in his first legislative session, but his popularity rebounded after the pandemic. A tit-for-tat erupted where federal Conservatives refused to help volunteer during the recent Ontario election, and Ford subsequently declared that his MPPs were too busy during the federal election to help the federal Conservatives (though that didn’t stop some of Ford’s ministers, including Caroline Mulroney, from endorsing Poilievre). Similarly, Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative premier Tim Houston said he wouldn’t invite Poilievre to campaign with him during the province’s election as he wasn’t a member of any federal party, and that led to a feud and an angry phone call with Poilievre’s campaign director, Jenni Byrne. 

For the moment, though, it doesn’t look like Poilievre is going anywhere. The caucus has expressed support for him continuing as leader, and he is seeking a new seat in the safe rural Alberta riding of Battle River–Crowfoot (where incumbent Damien Kurek, who is resigning for Poilievre’s benefit, got 81.8 percent of the vote on election night), but that doesn’t mean he will last. Both of his predecessors, Erin O’Toole and Andrew Scheer, were also given votes of confidence after their losing elections, only to be pushed out months later under different circumstances, and the same could still happen to Poilievre. The party’s grassroots membership also has a leadership review vote coming up in a number of months where they could decide that he was the problem that cost them the election, as many Conservatives were reportedly telling media outlets in the days after the election loss.

Nevertheless, there has been speculation that a number of current and former conservative premiers are looking to replace Poilievre, starting with Ford, though he denies it—and I believe him in this case. He doesn’t speak French, and he seems to very much prefer being “mayor of Ontario,” preoccupied with the municipal affairs in the province (and Toronto most especially), as opposed to his actual provincial responsibilities, such as stopping the healthcare system from collapsing, not dismantling the post-secondary system and ensuring that housing is being built at a pace to meet the challenge of the crisis Ontarians are facing.

There is plenty of speculation that former Alberta premier Jason Kenney—who featured prominently in CBC’s onscreen election-night analysis—is gearing up for a federal leadership bid, particularly as he challenges the “Maple MAGA” crowd online. But that challenge stems in part from the bitterness of being forced out of the job in Alberta by this particular crowd, whom he termed the “lunatics trying to take charge of the asylum.” The problem there, however, is that Kenney empowered this group of radicals at the political fringes of the province in how he built the United Conservative Party to take over both the old Progressive Conservative and Wildrose Alliance parties. In his bid to “unite the right,” Kenney wanted a “pure” conservatism at its centre, while he pushed out the centrist normies who had made up the old PC party (which was more of an amorphous centrist party than it was conservative by the time of its demise). Or, as I like to put it, he invited the face-eating leopards into the house and made them a nice warm bed, intent on having them eat the faces of his enemies, but they soon realized that his face was right there.

The other name that has come up is Nova Scotia’s Houston, who put out an introductory video of himself just as these tensions were exploding in the wake of the election loss (though he presented a very sanitized version of Nova Scotia history that didn’t mention segregation or the treatment of Black Loyalists who settled there after the American Revolution). And while plenty of people, mostly outside of Nova Scotia, have insisted that Houston is the kind of Conservative they can see winning federally, there are also things in Houston’s recent past that could prove a challenge to overcome. In particular, there was an incident in the Nova Scotia legislature where one PC MLA was forced out of the party, and Houston was threatening to have her expelled from the legislature entirely after she was pursuing justice for a deceased staffer who had allegedly signed an NDA related to an alleged sexual assault by a someone in the party. While the matter was eventually dropped, I heard directly from a now former member of the legislature that Houston was acting like a bully throughout that situation. This is the kind of thing that gets blown open during a federal leadership bid, especially by those factions trying to keep any east coast Red Tories from the top job. 

Between criticisms of Poilievre, and the comparisons with premiers like Ford or Houston, Canadians need to beware that they could be manipulated by the various camps. There are claims that Ford didn’t have to attack queer and trans people to win—and yet, Ford did, both in how he first became premier riding on a wave of vicious homophobia directed at Kathleen Wynne, and most recently claiming that students were being “indoctrinated” by “gender ideology.” And then there are the conservatives, particularly federal ones, who believe that Ford’s brand of conservatism is hollow and meaningless—empty populism that is not culturally conservative, particularly given his spendthrift tendencies—which is one of the reasons they have developed an antipathy toward him. And while the various brands of conservatism in this country compete, they are put into contrast with the authoritarian horror show on display in the U.S., to which they compare very favourably, rather than the better examples in our own history such as the actual progressive conservatism of former prime minister Joe Clark, who has no spiritual successor in the current landscape. Perhaps that is where conservatives in this country should start looking, rather than to which populist example they can best emulate.