KINSELLA: The Conservatives are the real losers in 2025

In Canadian politics, Pierre Poilievre should be — but actually isn’t — the biggest loser of the year.

And, yes, 2025 saw the Conservative Leader blow a massive lead in the polls, lose an election that had been in the bag, and fritter away his own Ottawa-area seat.

By any objective standard, that should qualify Poilievre as the political loser of the year.

But the biggest losers — the ones who will continue to be losers after Poilievre is gone, which is a foregone conclusion — are those who make up the Conservative Party of Canada. They are the real losers.

The Conservatives’ 2025 election loss — to a man who had never held elected office before, to a party that had been mired in misconduct and misfires — was not entirely Pierre Poilievre’s fault. Because Poilievre is the current Conservative Party of Canada in human form: too angry, a bit paranoid, often Trumpian. They are him, and he is them.

Consider the available evidence. For months — and long before Justin Trudeau’s departure, and Mark Carney’s debut — polls had been consistently showing that voters were decidedly unenthusiastic about Poilievre. His petulance, his arrogance, his bumper-sticker policy-making was hurting him with key constituencies — women, seniors, Quebecers.

A year ago, as 2024 was coming to a close, multiple polls showed the Conservative Party had a huge lead over Trudeau’s Liberals. But, in every one of those polls, Poilievre was lagging behind his party.

In December 2024, the Reid Institute found that every party leader was more unpopular than popular — with Poilievre being seen favourably by 37% of respondents, and unfavourably by 55%. That is a huge gap in an era where people vote for leaders as much as parties.

Leger, one of the most reliable federal pollsters, found the same sort of trend. In December 2024, only 22% of Quebec respondents thought Poilievre would make the best prime minister. Likewise for women and urban voters — only 24 and 27%, respectively, saw the Tory leader as the best choice. Those constituencies, as everyone knows, make up the vast majority of voters. Ignore them at your peril.

With virtually every pollster, too, similar results were seen: even when Justin Trudeau was plumbing the depths of unpopularity, even when his Liberals were nearly 30 points behind, a majority of voters were expressing serious misgivings about Pierre Poilievre.

The response of the Conservative Party? Nothing. They changed nothing. They didn’t heed the warning signs.

The things that partisan Conservatives loved about their leader were the very things that a majority of voters intensely disliked. Poilievre radiated impatience and insolence — which was what his party’s core wanted, but not most voters. He seemed too Trumpy, to too many. He was always auditioning for the job he already had: leader of the Opposition.

After a politician reaches the age of 39 (Poilievre is 46), how they are is how they are. They are not going to change. They are not going to reinvent themselves. Demanding that Poilievre change his ways — as many of us in the media did — was a waste of time. You can’t teach an old pol new tricks.

But grassroots Conservatives didn’t want Poilievre to change — at all. They liked him just the way he was. They lapped up the grievance politics that Poilievre churned out.

And when it was pointed out to them that most Canadians didn’t like Poilievre’s style? They’d call the critics “Libtards” and “virtue-signallers” and “Laurentian elites.” Not a great vote-getting strategy.

And that, in the end, is why card-carrying Conservatives were the real losers in 2025. Pierre Poilievre, in fairness, was simply being who he is. In his own way, he was being honest.

The Conservative hardcore, meanwhile, did not push for changes at the top. They instead doubled down on their greatest weakness.

Even now, even as their Parliamentary caucus is falling apart, Conservatives continue to whistle past the proverbial graveyard. By every account, they are going to comfortably endorse Poilievre at next month’s leadership review in Calgary.

That, then, is why the Conservative Party’s base is the bigger loser — bigger, even, than Poilievre himself: they lost, and they continue to lose.

They have effectively become the NDP of the Right: they now believe it is principled to lose elections.

Liberals don’t.