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.
