A recent poll that showed Poilievre had narrowed the gap between him and Carney - now he's only 6 points behind, instead of 9.
The thing is, this isn't going to stand up.Not after Lethbridge Liberace and all the fallout this week.
And I don't know how Poilievre can read these columns and not at least consider resigning.
First is from the Public Consent substack (also reprinted in The Walrus), where public affairs consultant Dan Robertson, a Conservative, describes the crazy last few weeks in Conservative Land and tells Poilievre to grow up:
....For those spared the spectacle, a brief summary: at the Calgary Stampede, Pierre Poilievre celebrated Kerry Lynne Findlay’s victory in the British Columbia Conservative leadership race as a win over “Liberal lobbyists from out East.”And also this Globe and Mail column by Gary Mason
The people he described were not Liberals. They were Kory Teneycke, Nick Kouvalis, and Anthony Koch, among the most accomplished Conservative operatives in the country. What followed were days of digital crossfire involving former Poilievre communications directors, columnists, influencers, and operatives, culminating in Brian Lilley asking in print whether the leader is serious about winning and Ben Woodfinden, who gave years to Poilievre’s office, confessing he has never been more depressed about the state of conservative politics in this country.
Everyone involved believes they are right. Some probably are. Here is the thing about being right in politics: it doesn’t matter. Winning elections is the point. Not winning the argument.
Which brings me to the onus. In any organization, responsibility for cohesion rises with rank. A volunteer can hold a grudge. A staffer can nurse a grievance. A columnist can keep score. The leader cannot. The leader of a political party cannot be one combatant among many because the leader is the only person whose job includes the coalition itself. When the leader picks a fight, it is not a fight; it is a fracture. When the leader can end a fight and declines to do so, HE is the cause of the fracture.
This is the hardest lesson in our movement’s history....
There is no version of internal conservative warfare that ends well. There are only two versions: the one where the leader stops it early, and the one where it stops him....
...Every other participant in this brawl can afford to be right. The leader can only afford to win. If mending fences with Doug Ford and his team adds a single point in Ontario, the phone call costs nothing, and pride is not a reason.
Canadian voters are watching a party that trails in the polls ripping itself apart. They will draw the obvious conclusion: a party that cannot govern itself cannot govern the country....
...“I’m more depressed about the state of conservative politics in Canada right now than I think I’ve ever been, I won’t deny it,” Ben Woodfinden, former director of communications for federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, recently said on X. “I look at all sorts of conservative camps and factions right now and I see intellectual poverty everywhere.”In my post yesterday, I quoted some of the remarks made by Teneycke showing how angry he was at Poilievre for his needless insults. I guess his anger is nothing compared to the rest of the Conservative brain trust.
Mr. Woodfinden’s remarks stirred much debate in conservative circles. Federal Liberals, of course, loved it and are delighted by the caustic infighting cannibalizing the Conservative Party at the moment. As always, the golden rule governing these internal imbroglios is a simple one: The problem is always traced back to the leader.
Mr. Poilievre is failing his party on an epic scale. Many Conservatives can see this. His negative ratings with the public are at 60 per cent, according to Angus Reid polling. His favourables are heading toward 30-per-cent territory. ...
There is a reason: Mr. Poilievre is a man ill-equipped, intellectually, for the times the nation faces.
He is most at ease when he’s lobbing gratuitous, often childish insults in the direction of whoever is prime minister, all while wearing a look of smug self-satisfaction. He seems incapable of reading the room. Faced with an existential threat from Canada’s closest neighbour and strongest trading partner, Mr. Poilievre delivers vacuous sound bites about how all would be fine if only he were in charge.
This from a political leader at the top of a party whose priorities, it would appear, include an inquiry into the COVID-19 vaccine. The self-described freedom convoy folks and anti-vaxxers must be thrilled they still have someone fighting for them in Ottawa.
Mr. Poilievre recently ignited fresh hostilities within his own party, too, by attacking Caroline Elliott‘s campaign to win the B.C. Conservative leadership race. She lost in the fourth and final round by just 60 votes to Kerry-Lynne Findlay on May 30. Last week, Mr. Poilievre said he was thrilled Ms. Findlay won over the “Liberal lobbyists from out East” who worked on Ms. Elliott’s campaign. This was a shot at folks like Kory Teneycke and Nick Kouvalis, prominent Conservative strategists from Ontario who have been critical of Mr. Poilievre.
Many Conservatives were dumbstruck and angry that the leader would further fuel the internal dissent eating the party alive. Talk about a major backfire.
Many in the party have seen enough. I talked to one prominent Conservative donor in recent days who told me he is done with Mr. Poilievre. He doesn’t believe he’s capable of changing. Worse, he believes Mr. Poilievre doesn’t think he has to change.
Like Donald Trump, Mr. Poilievre appears to own a mirror that tells him every day he is the fairest leader of them all.
It is inevitable, however, that one day he will have to come face-to-face with an unpleasant reality: He’s not the person who should be leading the federal Conservatives.
The thing is, it was painfully obvious why Doug Ford and his Conservative operatives refused to help Poilievre win Ontario a year ago last spring. They all knew their province and their premier would be significantly better off if Canada's trade deals with Trump were made by international banker Carney rather than inept and inexperienced Poilievre.
And Poilievre certainly hasn't changed their minds since.
Speaking of Trump, I have the impression that Carney's Davos speech is working -- one feature of the recent NATO meeting was how many of the NATO leaders were virtually ignoring Trump (Rutte excepted, of course).
Tonight, Black Cloud Six shared his opinions about the NATO meeting.
This isn't going to go well for Trump. I wonder if he is panicking yet?
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Fresh Data... Liberals continue to climb in the polls while the conservatives keep taking on water and sinking. I wonder when they will learn the lesson that Poilievre is not the right man to lead the party. Canada is tired of his constant stream of sewage that he emits on a daily basis.
— Pierre Polyester (@canadian-critic.bsky.social) July 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM
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Speaking of Trump, I have the impression that Carney's Davos speech is working -- one feature of the recent NATO meeting was how many of the NATO leaders were virtually ignoring Trump (Rutte excepted, of course).
Tonight, Black Cloud Six shared his opinions about the NATO meeting.
...Casting a dark shadow over NATO is, of course, Donald Trump.In his substack, Paul Krugman summed up the NATO meeting as "a shrug":
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was conciliatory and genial during private meetings in Ankara. I think one must take this with a grain of salt.
Whatever goodwill Trump may have generated in private was promptly overshadowed in public by his renewed demand for Greenland, his direction to staff to “cut off all trade” with a “wasted cause” Spain, and the resumption of his bizarre and increasingly irrational diatribes towards Iran.
The latter, of course, still occupies much of Trump’s attention as we lurch from “ceasefire” to open warfare and repeated threats from both sides over the Strait of Hormuz.
There is no obvious end in sight. Trump will never willingly back down, while Iran has little incentive to do so. Indeed, it remains difficult to determine what political or military end state the United States is attempting to achieve.
Somewhat troubling is Prime Minister Carney’s occasional rhetorical support for Washington’s stated objectives throughout this fiasco. While it is true that his words mean virtually nothing in practical terms, I’m not sure that encouraging Trump — even while simultaneously calling for a genuine ceasefire — does much good...
... Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.Now, increasingly, we are seeing countries fire back.
And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.
The combined effect of these humiliations for Trump and his minions has been a drastic reordering of America’s place in the world. For most of last year foreign leaders kept trying, desperately, to appease Trump. These days they’re mostly just humoring him, building a world in which his sundowning won’t matter.
It’s extremely unlikely that anything substantive will come out of this NATO meeting. And a year ago the prospect of a failed summit would have been a source of deep concern. Now it will be met with a shrug: Nobody expects anything but chaotic bluster from Trump, and what he does matters less and less.
NEWS: NATO just picked Sweden's Saab over Boeing for its new $4.5B early warning fleet — and the snub landed the same day Trump touched down in Türkiye for the NATO summit. Awkward.
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) July 7, 2026 at 10:37 AM
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🇺🇸 Trump: "I am not speaking with Spain, they are a waste of time. I want them to leave NATO, let's cut all ties and impose sanctions..." 🇪🇸 Sánchez: "Stay away from us. Instead of picking a fight with us, explain your own relationship with Epstein."
— 🇨🇦 🦋LaFerrari17🦋 🇨🇦 (@aperta17.bsky.social) July 15, 2026 at 7:30 AM
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This isn't going to go well for Trump. I wonder if he is panicking yet?
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The FIFA World Cup on Sunday in New York will be won by Spain. Tr*mp will be present during the ceremony. The Spanish King Felipe VI will be there as well as PM Pedro Sánchez and Tr*mp will be booed out of the stadium. I can't wait!!
— Paul van der Meer (@paulvandermeer.bsky.social) July 15, 2026 at 1:47 AM
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