Poilievre’s huge convention margin belies how small the Conservatives have become
He said the word "hope" 16 times during his convention speech, but not before attacking Mark Carney for 13 minutes first.
A version of this article previously appeared at National Observer.
In January, an overwhelming 87% of the Conservative Party’s delegates voted to reaffirm Pierre Poilievre’s leadership. The show of force was designed to show off party unity and Poilievre’s unassailable position leading it. But it also belies an underlying truth about Poilievre’s tenure as party leader: he has unified the party by narrowing its appeal and mobilized the rest of the country against it.
Poilievre has a narrow path to walk if he hopes to win the next election. Canada is an unusually large and diverse country. By necessity, Canadian prime ministers are leaders of big tent parties — coalitions of disparate and often competing interests held together by cultivating personal relationships, winning over regional power brokers and tailoring political appeals to different audiences. Seventeen candidates entered the race to replace Stephen Harper as Conservative leader, from Michael Chong to Maxime Bernier. Harper had built a brand that everyone could identify with: even Kevin O’Leary, hawking his single-serve wine, wanted to be a Conservative.
Winning big by making the party small
Quaint times. Today, the party faithful are administered loyalty oaths and dissenters are cast far away. An 87% positive vote speaks not only to Poilievre’s support amongst his base, but also the degree to which he has successfully eviscerated entire segments of the Conservatives’ traditional coalition. Poilievre has won big by making the Conservative Party appealing to a smaller audience than it ever has before.
It’s true that in 2025, Poilievre won a record number and share of votes: more than eight million, accounting for 41 per cent of the popular vote (he said this a lot in response to questions about his leadership). It’s true but irrelevant: in the Canadian system running up the score where the party has already won is a wasted vote, and by that metric, Poilievre is the most wasteful leader in the history of the modern Conservative Party. In 2025, Poilievre’s uncommonly narrow geographic and ideological appeal made it impossible to hold Carney to a minority government: each point of the Conservative vote share was worth 3.5 seats, while each point of the Liberal vote gave them 4 seats (owing to the Liberals’ relatively dispersed bases of support across the country).
Another argument is that Poilievre lost in 2025 because NDP support collapsed and consolidated behind the Liberals. But he is just as much the cause of two-party polarization as he is the victim of it. NDPers aren’t voting Liberal because they think Carney is a master negotiator; they just really don’t like Pierre Poilievre.
At the time of the Conservative convention, the Angus Reid institute released a poll showing Poilievre at an eye-popping -86 amongst NDP voters. His situation is compounded by the relative approachability and likeability of Mark Carney, of whom 67% of NDPers (and even 26%) of Conservatives approve. So long as Poilievre is leader, NDPers can be counted on to turn out and vote Liberal, while one in four Conservatives might be more inclined to stay home, safe in the knowledge that Mark Carney is an OK guy.
Pierre Poilievre’s “hopeful” phase two?
Recognizing that Poilievre’s leadership is unifying a majority against the Conservative Party, Poilievre’s defenders have argued that the January convention marked a turning point; having secured his leadership, he will be more conciliatory, optimistic, and prime ministerial. They pointed to his uncanny, AI-like recorded statement praising Carney’s Davos speech, and briefed that the convention would bring a “message of hope.” At the convention, staffers distributed signs saying “choose hope.”
But his convention speech was not all that hopeful. Much has been written about how the speech used the word “hope” 16 times, but Mr. Poilievre went a full 13 minutes before saying it.1 Before a single “hope,” he relived his greatest hits — crime-ridden Canada, money-printing deficits, Emergencies Act (here he paused for laughter) — and eight mentions of Mark Carney. By the time we got to hope and optimism, most Canadians had already tuned out.
Even partisans concede hope could have come sooner. Poilievre “has demonstrated the ability to change his nuance and tone, he did that I think almost perfectly tonight… I think the last section was frankly inspiring; the parts about Canadian identity, as a Canadian nationalist, that got me on my feet,” Jason Kenney said. “The speech got off to a slow start but he really ramped it up.”
Using text-based sentiment analysis, we find that Poilievre’s Jan. 31 convention speech in Calgary was “hopeful” only 55% of the time.2 The “hope” sentiment was strongest when Poilievre talked about his Alberta roots; a low-tax, low-regulation Conservative vision; the results of the 2025 election; Alberta’s Sovereignty Act; and the conclusion, which told Kirk’s story of success and resilience. Scoring low on “hope” sentiment were parts of the speech on Canada’s broken social contract, the economy, taxes, and Carney’s leadership; Kirk’s inspirational story was preceded by a strongly negative segment on drugs and crime.
There is also something fundamentally gaslight-y about Poilievre’s “hope” message, at least as it was delivered in Calgary. Two of the five positive segments— the 2025 election result and the Sovereignty Act— were topics on which he could have taken a less celebratory tone. A third segment on the Conservative economic vision for Canada scored highly on “hope” sentiment but was still peppered with comments about Liberal, government, and Liberal government failure. A fourth was about Poilievre’s Alberta roots (he is not from Alberta).
The only hopeful segment left in the speech is about Kirk, not Pierre Poilievre.
Project 2025 with a Canadian accent
The public has five, maybe ten minutes for an opposition leader; definitely less on weekends. Who are the people that heard Kirk’s story? Insight can be gleaned from the Conservative Party’s new policies, voted on by the same delegates that gave 87% support to Mr. Poilievre. As popular as the leader are a “stand your ground” law legalizing lethal gun violence against home intruders (91% support), the abolition of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) (90% support), and de-funding the CBC (77% support). Modestly less popular is the re-introduction of conversion therapy, which 52% of delegates supported but failed to become part of the official Conservative platform because it failed to achieve the support of a majority of provinces.3
Is this a hopeful vision for the party and country? Under Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party has become Project 2025 with a Canadian accent. It is unified, sure, but it has also never been smaller, more derivative, or more unpleasant. Arguably, the most interesting segment score during Poilievre’s convention speech was an 82-second passage on separatism in Alberta and Quebec. Most Canadian opposition leaders would probably take a very harsh tone on this issue, but Poilievre’s segment on the issue is scored a 42/100.
Why would Poilievre take such a moderate tone on national unity? At the time of the convention, Poilievre had a one-point favourability advantage over Mr. Carney — 47 to 46 — in Alberta. He had raised his supporters on such high-calorie, low-nutrition politics that he risked losing them to full-fat separatist or far-right parties.
These supporters are now the modern Conservative Party. By voting overwhelmingly to renew Poilievre’s leadership, they reveal how small the Conservative tent has become and start the clock on the party’s fifth consecutive election loss.
Poilievre threw a big celebration, not knowing it was a wake.
To be fair, he used the word “hopeful” at 2:19; the next “hope” is at 13:09.
Sentiment analysis is a computational text analysis method that measures the emotional tone of language by identifying words associated with positive, negative, or any other emotional affect. Poilievre’s speech was segmented by topic and timestamp, and each segment was scored for “hope” on a 0–100 scale using a dictionary-based sentiment classifier.
According to Conservative Party rules, policy changes require a “double majority” (of delegates and of provinces, with the territories counting as one “province”). A majority of Manitoba, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and the Territories voted against the change.