Conservatives Are Failing at the One Job That Matters

The party can’t hold Carney to account while it’s busy feuding with itself

In 2003, Peter MacKay stood next to Stephen Harper and said the point of merging two conservative parties—the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance—was simple: stop splitting the vote that kept handing the Liberals majority governments. “Our swords will henceforth be pointed at the Liberals,” Harper said at the press conference, “not at each other.”

Two weeks ago, opposition leader Pierre Poilievre used a Calgary Stampede barbecue to publicly attack the campaign team of a provincial Conservative leadership candidate he had just watched lose. Three of the people on that team used to work for him. His former director of communications. The director before her. His own national campaign spokesperson from his 2022 leadership race. The swords are pointed at each other again.

Look at the numbers. Prime Minister Mark Carney holds 174 seats in a 343-seat House of Commons. He crossed into majority territory in April by sweeping three by-elections and absorbing four floor crossers, all from the Conservative benches. He does not need the Conservatives for confidence votes, supply votes, or committee majorities. He can govern until 2029 without asking them for anything.

The Conservative caucus sits at 139. Five members of Parliament gone since last year’s election. Four to the Liberals. One to the Senate, appointed by the prime minister the Conservatives are supposed to be holding to account.

Here’s other numbers. On July 9, Elections Canada published the Conservative Party’s financial audit: $99 million spent in 2025, $84.6 million in revenue. A deficit of more than $14 million. Of the $99 million, $39.4 million went to advertising.

The Liberals? They spent $21.6 million on advertising. The Liberals won.

More money. More ads. More losses. A caucus bleeding to the other side, and a majority government with nothing to fear.

The strategy that produced this result was not designed in Canada. It runs on a simple engine: outrage in, money out. Find the voter who feels squeezed, young, frustrated, priced out of a house and a future, and hand them an enemy. Gatekeepers. Elites. The media. The institutions. Point them at all of them, in combat-style messaging built for a phone screen, and the clicks become donations, and the donations become the next round of outrage. Fear is the fuel. Grievance is the product. The fundraising number is the only scoreboard that matters.

That grievance machine raised nearly $100 million. It is not a Canadian political tradition. It is the American right, imported wholesale and applied here. And it does not win Canadian elections. The engine that runs on outrage produces outrage, then mistakes it for support. It fills a room, a comment section, a donor list. It does not fill the seats in the House that decide who governs. A strategy optimized to make the base angry is not optimized to make the country trust you, and those are the only votes that count on election night.

The electorate appears to want something more substantive from their elected officials than grievance, fear mongering, and culture wars. That is clearly reflected in polls from the United States. Donald Trump’s net approval sits at minus twenty-six in the Economist/YouGov poll published this month. Tied for the lowest figure his presidency has ever recorded. A separate Focaldata poll put it at minus twenty-three, also an all-time low for that pollster. Disapproval has risen for four consecutive months. Among independent voters, who decide midterm elections, approval sits in the mid-thirties. That is below the level that preceded the Democrats’ forty-one-seat wave in 2018.

A majority of Americans now say Trump has not delivered on his economic promises. A majority call the Iran strikes a failure. Independent disapproval of his handling of the economy has risen thirteen points in a year. Of immigration, seventeen points.

The grievance model is collapsing in the United States. And the anti-establishment energy it was built to capture has not returned to some comfortable moderate centre. Some say it moved left. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, was elected mayor of New York City in November 2025 and sworn in on January 1, 2026. In June, three progressive congressional candidates he endorsed swept their primaries. One unseated a ten-year incumbent. Another knocked out the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

The discontent is real. The direction it is moving is not right-populist anymore.

For an idea of where Conservatives can go next, there’s the Maritime model. Robert Stanfield took over the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party in 1948 at a time when it held zero seats in the legislature. Eight years of rebuilding. Knocking on doors. Listening to what Nova Scotians needed. In 1956, he led the party to a majority government. Then another. Then another. Then another. He was the first Conservative premier to have four consecutive majority governments.

He did not attack institutions. He built them. Hospital insurance. Provincial universities with consistent funding for the first time. Industrial Estates Limited, a crown corporation that brought Michelin to Nova Scotia. A road system rebuilt from the ground up. He took the per capita debt from $600 in 1956 to a balanced budget by the mid-1960s. He governed the whole province. Not just his base. The province.

That was a philosophy, not an accident. Historians called Stanfield, a Red Tory, a “pink” Tory, a compassionate conservative with a genuine concern for the disadvantaged. He put it plainly himself in 1976: increasing the size of the economy matters, but it is not in itself a sufficient goal for a civilized society. His conservatism was built on balance and equilibrium, not on narrow ideologies of the right or the left. Change in order to conserve. Serve the whole country, then ask it for power.

In 1967, he moved to federal politics and came within two seats of defeating Pierre Trudeau. He lost. He ran again. He lost again. He defended official bilingualism when sixteen of his own MPs broke rank and voted against him, because he believed it held the country together and that mattered more than placating his caucus. When he died in 2003, the eulogies called him the best prime minister Canada never had. Not because his supporters loved him—they did—but because the whole country trusted him.

That is the word missing from every description of Pierre Poilievre: Trust.

Another model here, schooled in the same Stanfield tradition, would be Peter MacKay. Born in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, MacKay, in 2003, led a Progressive Conservative Party that was proud, principled, and losing. The right had split its vote across two parties since 1993. Three straight Liberal majorities were the result. Everyone could see the arithmetic. Almost nobody was willing to pay the price of fixing it.

MacKay paid it. He gave up his own party. He gave up the “Progressive Conservative” name his party had carried for generations. He gave up his own claim to lead the merged party, which went to Harper five months later. He merged with the Canadian Alliance because a united conservative party could win and a divided one could not.

That is the Stanfield instinct applied to structure. Build the thing that can actually govern. Accept the personal cost of building it. Aim the party outward, at the Liberals, and keep it aimed there.

The party MacKay built won in 2006 and governed for nearly a decade. The condition of that victory was the discipline in Harper’s sentence about keeping swords pointed at the opponent, not at each other. The moment that discipline breaks, the electoral arithmetic that MacKay solved comes back.

Canadians did not reject conservatism in 2025. They rejected a performance of American anger delivered by a leader who sounded, to a lot of voters, like Trump talking points read aloud. The distinction is everything. There is a large, durable Conservative vote in this country. There is no national appetite for the imported version of the grievance that fuels it.

What the country keeps asking for, election after election, is competence and service. A government that can build a house, lower a grocery bill, negotiate a trade file with Washington, and defend a coastline. A party that treats the people as citizens to be served rather than a base to be enraged. Stanfield understood that eighty years ago. Serve the whole country with competence, and the trust that wins elections follows.

Service is the entire Maritime tradition in one word. Stanfield rebuilt a party from zero seats by listening to what people needed and then delivering it. MacKay saved the Conservative Party from permanent irrelevance by putting the country’s need for a real opposition ahead of his own title. Both men understood that a conservative party earns power by being useful to Canadians.

Mark Carney is governing with purpose. Whether you agree with where he’s taking the country or not, he is plainly taking it somewhere. That is exactly why the opposition has to work. He projects competence and steadiness in a hard year. He is delivering, and Canadians can see it. If the answer for the Conservatives is to be more like Stanfield, competent and serious and trusted, are we not just asking for a second Liberal Party?

No. Getting the job done is not the same as being checked while you do it. A country can be well governed and still need someone whose full-time job is to test whether it could be governed better. Those are two different functions. Carney fills the first. Right now, nobody fills the second. The difference between the two parties is not temperament. Both can be competent. The difference is the direction.

Carney governs from the centre. He is a central banker by training and by instinct: assemble the expertise in Ottawa, bring the major players to one table, broker the deal, and steer the country from the top down. It has worked for him. A steady hand at the centre is a real thing to offer a country in these turbulent years, and he offers it.

The Maritime Tory tradition works the other way. It governs from the community up. Robert Stanfield did not wait for Ottawa to rescue Nova Scotia. He built Industrial Estates Limited to attract industry into the province directly. He put the first consistent funding into Nova Scotia’s universities himself. He delivered hospital insurance and rebuilt the roads, and he did it because he trusted the province to know what the province needed better than a distant capital ever would.

That is a genuine choice, and it is the reason two competent parties are not just versions of the same thing. One believes the centre should decide, and the regions should trust it. The other believes the regions decide best, and the centre should serve them. A country deserves to hear both arguments made well and then to choose. A country that only hears one argument, because the party responsible for the other is busy fighting itself, is not choosing.

Stanfield gave the party the warning it needed in February 1976: “Why do we spoil a good case by exaggeration? Why do we try to polarize a society that is already taut with tension and confrontation?” Fifty years later, his own party is still spoiling a good case. It is time it stopped.

A functional opposition is an important service to Canada rather than a nuisance to Carney. A majority government with no one testing it does not stay sharp. It gets comfortable. Comfort is where good governments can quietly stop asking whether their decisions are truly in the best interest of Canada, of Canadians. The opposition’s job is to keep testing the government, to aim the sword.

There are conservatives who could do the real work sitting in the caucus. Michael Chong, serious enough to prosecute a budget argument without a slogan. Arpan Khanna, able to explain a policy rather than perform. Shuv Majumdar, on the important Canada–US file.

But those three are not enough. What Canadians need is Conservative Party infrastructure and leadership that builds on what MacKay and Harper made and that governs with the ethics and the vision Stanfield modelled: competence in service of the whole country.

Then aim the sword back where MacKay put it and keep it there.