An election campaign leaders’ debate, like the one Tuesday in British Columbia, means quite different things to people obsessed with politics and those too busy to be so. The participants better have objectives for the latter because the former have pretty well made up their minds.

It meant the three party leaders—BC NDP’s David Eby, Green Party’s Sonia Furstenau, and Conservative Party of BC’s John Rustad—had to jockey and pivot through the event to tick the boxes and answer the questions they wanted more than the questions they were asked.

The belief in the electoral value of the figurative knockout punch to the jaw of an opponent is a commentariat canard; more likely, voters are after statements that are knockouts of a good kind—that is, do they present the positive case for themselves, not just the negative one against the other candidates?

Eby needed to show that he gets the widespread discord in the province over how and how fast he’s moved; Fursteau needed to argue that the legislature needs some of her low-polling Greens as a watchdog; and Rustad needed to introduce himself and his demeanour to those non-obsessed citizens who had heard his party was on a roll and wanted to see what all the buzz was about.

On that basis, no one failed the test.

It’s unlikely the debate will disrupt the campaign’s trajectory of Conservative momentum that has an unclear ceiling and an NDP defensiveness of its record that has an unclear floor. Polls remain where they’ve been for weeks now, in what is called a statistical tie due to their margins of error. Once one party builds a nine or 10-point lead, we can call it, but that seems unlikely before the October 19 judgment day. I admit to more friends outside than inside the governing NDP, but at first canvass following the 90-minute TV show, neither cohort is cocky.

It’s now a ground war more than an air war.

The campaign will now move into the proverbial frenzy of finding friends in swing ridings, repeating core messages into self-nausea, and keeping eyes on your feet to step over the tripwires, open manholes, and landmines. The social media warriors neck-deep in this campaign won’t convince many, but the leaders at the microphones and particularly the candidates at the doors in the next week will.

The debate was much more about performance than policy, and in this case, there were elements that bear takeaways.

First, what worked best. Green leader Furstenau, in her second official leaders’ debate, is effective when she is afforded the same stage with (and exemption from criticism by) the main party leaders. The general take was that she created a difficult choice for voters angry at the NDP.

Eby, in his first debate (his leadership opponent was disqualified late in his 2022 party leadership campaign), is effective when he sticks to citing stats like an adult wonk and suppresses his frequent eye-rolling and the mugging displeasure of a child.

Rustad, a fellow rookie in these political tangos, is effective when he injects energy and uses personal examples to illustrate the social and economic conditions he says he would change.

There were some not-quite-good elements, too. Furstenau didn’t focus on hauling away the Left-of-Centre vote alongside her main focus on decrying Rustad. Eby didn’t focus on what new prescriptions he had alongside his main focus on denouncing Rustad. And the decried, denounced Rustad was mild-mannerly and soft-spoken to a fault, letting himself be interrupted and “Left-splained” in early- to mid-sentence all show.

If Rustad is going to take the helm through the last week of the campaign, he needs to go where the debate almost never did: to the top issue. Namely, the affordability challenges British Columbians are suffering through, with no apparent NDP strategy to address this, except Eby’s addiction to writing cheques from the taxpayers’ bank accounts and claiming this is a problem everywhere and thus not any of his doing. Sound familiar Mr. Trudeau?

Conservatives have their own rebates and relief measures in mind, but they also have a revenue and restoration plan of resource development and tax reforms to stimulate our stagnant economy. Neither questions nor answers in the debate explored what Rustad and his candidates will now need to exploit.

The most open question isn’t whether the Conservatives can fix the script but whether they possess the machinery known in politics as “GOTV.” Getting Out The Vote on E-Day after voter ID is, in the end, all that matters by night’s end. In this sense, Conservatives are little different than a startup business intent on disrupting a legacy industry.

It bears reminding that little more than 13 months ago, they weren’t even a recognized party in the B.C. chamber: just Rustad, fired by BC Liberals leader Kevin Falcon, a lone legislative presence for a Conservative party that hadn’t elected anyone in a half-century (and that MLA soon left).

When another BC Liberal crossed the floor in September 2023, Conservatives gained official status to participate in question period, debates, committees and procedures, and to receive legislature funds for staff and research. From a statistical polling rounding error of three or four percent a year ago, the party has propelled itself into a statistical tie, and in many polls a slight lead.

Along the way, Falcon ill-advisedly changed his party’s name to BC United and so struggled to connect and so seriously collapsed its standing that he was compelled to extraordinarily suspend its campaign in mid-August. Ostensibly he wanted to see late in the day if that could unite the Right.

The jury is still out on whether the more conservative element of United had already fled to Rustad by then, or if there are still more who will migrate to the Conservatives one week Saturday. No question, the change option on offer is stark when it comes to the financial and social involvement of government.

Public opinion in B.C. is increasingly uncomfortable with Eby’s handling of the economy and worsening public finances. Many are infuriated by hospital wait times, scared about safety on our streets, and impatient with his plans to address housing construction and unaffordability. This election was supposed to be a referendum on his performance, but he has found ways to deflect some of this into a referendum on the change agent.

A major mystery is whether Rustad will be such a target that traditional Greens will abandon their party for the NDP and traditional Liberals will hold their noses to entrench the Dippers. If British Columbians have been fed an image of Rustad by opponents, it has been a harsh caricature of a wolf in sheep’s clothing—a climate change denier, health-care slasher, and vaccine repudiator. All untrue.

More accurate is that he thinks that there are immediate crises more urgent than climate change at the moment, that there are health care efficiencies that would be more profound than blindly pouring more money into the system, and that there were pandemic restrictions that proved (more and more in hindsight) to be ridiculous.

That being said, the recent campaign days have created conundrums. For the Conservatives, it’s whether voters who dislike Eby are prepared to waste their ballots on the Greens rather than vote for them. Much of that is predicated on Rustad and the residuals of his campaign performance.

In exclusive polling for The Hub, the polling firm Pollara says it now finds that one-quarter are so mad they’re considering either spoiling their ballots or staying home.

Regardless, in just a few months, Rustad and the Conservatives have created the government’s existential crisis, the result of which we won’t know until next Saturday’s outcome. Those claiming certainty on it aren’t even fooling themselves.

While there are no inevitabilities in life, it seems at least close to inevitable that the next government will be a Conservative one; and, what’s more, the party appears to be on the precipice of winning a historic majority of well over 200 seats. But this is old (and increasingly less interesting) news. While a weary government continues to delay, Conservative attention has increasingly moved towards the questions of what needs to happen after the election. This includes the as-of-yet unresolved but necessary articulations of how the party will, first, actually accomplish the broad agenda they have set for themselves and, second, do so off of the support of a manageable electoral coalition that is sizable enough to stay in power.

Indeed, aspects of the Conservative Party’s rhetoric and support suggest that, while not fully articulated, its leaders are after more than just politicking and a favourable turn of the electoral cycle. For the first time in decades, the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives can legitimately claim to have a truly nationwide appeal that finds resonance in nearly all parts of the country. Alongside the sloganeering and message discipline, there are elements of an overarching vision of national potential.

And yet, determining at this venture the relationship Canadians will have with a Conservative government in the coming years is challenging because it is so open-ended. Although an electoral victory opens a range of opportunities, it also threatens several pitfalls that have been endemic to past party administrations. Moving forward, it will have to better clarify exactly what kind of government it will want to be.

The fact is that while the commentariat continues to obsess over Poilievre’s communication style, the party’s success is not actually that historically surprising or noteworthy. Instead, the sort of nationwide landslide expected next year has been a norm for Canada’s Conservatives. Both John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney—who together form 50 percent of Canada’s post-war Conservative prime ministers—had accomplishments at this scale. 1958 and 1984 remain—alongside 2025?—the most disproportionate election results of the contemporary era.

Like Poilievre, both Diefenbaker and Mulroney aptly delegitimized incumbent Liberal administrations that had grown arrogant, complacent, and self-serving; and, again like the party’s contemporary leadership, each articulated a governing strategy that was truly pan-Canadian in its structure and aspirations. Poilievre has especially emulated Diefenbaker’s notion of a “One Canada” realized through national economic development, anti-elitism, and local communitarian enrichment.

But we must also recognize how these both ended. Although winning a slim minority in 1963, Diefenbaker had by then lost much of his initial support, faced an economic downturn, and been drawn into conflicts with a publicly rebellious cabinet. Mulroney left office in 1992 with historically low approval ratings, and his Faustian pact between Ontario, Quebec, and the West destroyed the historic Progressive Conservative party of Canada.

The reality is that, outside of a few large majority wins, the story of federal conservativism in Canada has disproportionately been one of loss and limitation. The Liberals not only win most elections (15 of the last 24) but are effective at maintaining power over long periods. Contrastingly, while Conservatives can periodically gain significant support, it is lost rather quickly. The 1988 election, for example, marks the only time that the party has won two consecutive majorities in over 100 years.

In many ways, the mistake of the Conservatives has been to forget the fact that they are and have often been the winners of a widespread anti-Liberal sentiment that is not really about them. Many voters are looking to vote against the Liberals, not necessarily for the Conservatives. Seen through this lens, the support they are currently getting is really quite predictable: an unpopular incumbent government has, after almost nine years, resided—among other issues—over economic decline, a spike in crime, and a housing crisis.

Although the Poilievre Conservatives can legitimately claim a popular mandate, the ongoing experience of Kier Starmer’s massive Labour government—now more unpopular than its predecessor—is an illustrative example of how quickly this kind of support can be reversed at the slightest resistance or mishap. In fact, a similar story could also be told about the Justin Trudeau Liberals themselves as, apart from benefiting from 2015’s anti-Stephen Harper pushback, they have never been able to gain the support of more than a third of voters.

But this has not prevented historical observers from developing structural explanations for why this occurs. George Perlin’s infamous notion of the “Tory Syndrome,” for example, finds reoccurring mention among commentators. Alternatively, in what is certainly the seminal work on the 20th-century Canadian party system, Richard Johnston suggests it is a practical consequence of the very structure of party competition; that is, because the Liberals control the centre of the country’s political life, Conservatives are required to build their support from diverse, and often conflicting, ends of the electoral spectrum. Although the Conservative Party is the de facto repository of anti-Liberal sentiment, it lacks the means to form a sustainable electoral coalition.

In considering how this matters today, however, these accounts not only allude to a problematic level of historical inevitability but also make the mistake of suggesting that the Conservatives are not otherwise competitive between their recurrent victories. Indeed, it seems more likely that, in successfully bringing a new party organization to power, Harper’s enduring legacy has been to dismantle many of the dynamics behind the boom-and-bust cycle of old.

The Liberals clearly no longer dominate the centre but, as the increasingly Left-leaning voice of a beleaguered social elite, rely on an increasingly narrow support base. Likewise, the Conservatives now have a sizable and increasingly consistent level of support in the electorate. Since 2006, it has—with the exception of 2015—received more votes, but not necessarily seats, than all other parties in each electoral contest.

And yet, compared to the highs of Diefenbaker and Mulroney’s tenures, the more gradualist and calculated tactics of the Harper years seem far too limiting for the Poilievre team’s aspirations. For while Harper defied the historical trend and proved to be apt in the maintenance and management of power, it had to come at the eventual expense of transformational policy change and national aspirations.

Embracing these tactics would mean that the sort of messaging that propelled Poilievre to the leadership in the first place would have to be abandoned, as much of it already has, in favour of pragmatic and narrow microtargeting.

Instead, for all its limitations, the Mulroney or Diefenbaker approach has an enduring appeal. It suggests, at the cost of electoral longevity, a more decisive impact; alongside considerable risk of public backlash, the potential to really change the map.

There are not only several areas of Canadian public policy that increasingly seem to require a more assertive government, but the party may have the chance to leverage the as-of-yet unconsolidated realignments among the electorate—between workers and university graduates, for example—to its long-term political advantage. It now has the support. The question is what to do with it.