Talk of Conservative 'infighting' misses the bigger story: the party is messily reinventing itself

OTTAWA — Some Harper-era Conservatives might watch The Odyssey blockbuster this summer and find themselves sympathizing with the tale of a battle-weary warrior returning to a home that is no longer familiar to him.

It’s been accepted wisdom since he became party leader that Pierre Poilievre has reshaped the Conservatives into a very different coalition from the one his predecessors led. What’s more often missed, amid all the media feasting on squabbling this summer among various party factions, is that the Conservative party is undergoing the messy process of reinventing itself.

The quarrelling hasn’t quite reached Trojan War levels, but it’s been flaring up in a way that has attracted exasperating headlines for the party, the most recent being a veiled and public dig by Poilievre at the party’s Calgary Stampede event against Ontario conservative powerbroker Kory Teneycke.

What’s happening isn’t a sign of a threat to the party’s leadership or even a product of some built-in propensity for intellectual combat among conservatives, says Ken Boessenkool, who has worked on policy and strategy for former prime minister Stephen Harper, along with a host of other conservative leaders. It’s a symptom of the violently shifting ground beneath his party’s intellectual movement and voter base.

“The shifting coalition, by definition, is going to require a shift in the ideas that we’re fighting about. So, it’s entirely unsurprising that we’re having these fights,” said Boessenkool.

Under Poilievre, no longer is this the party of older men; it has been remade into a party of younger, more working-class Canadians.

“Older men tend to be more established and want to fix things,” he said. “Younger men are angry and want to break things. So, we’re going from ‘fix things’ to ‘break things’ in a massive part of our coalition.”

Angus Reid Institute polling last spring in the weeks after Mark Carney became Liberal leader on March 9, 2025, shows just how rapidly that change has happened. A poll on March 17, 2025 showed men over 55 preferring Conservatives by eight percentage points. Two weeks later, on March 31, the institute’s polling showed the same demographic preferring Carney’s Liberals by four points.

Yet, even without those men, Poilievre’s Conservatives racked up the most votes in their history in the April election.

“You can’t recognize that if you’re a Stephen Harper person like me. I don’t recognize the coalition that Pierre Poilievre has built,” Boessenkool said.

With a populist message about driving out “gatekeepers” standing in the way of affordable housing, jobs and prosperity, Poilievre yanked the Conservative party in a new direction, pulling in younger voters who want to disrupt the status quo rather than preserve it. It’s a shift that most right-leaning parties across the western world have experienced in the last decade, in some form or another.

Not only are the ideas fuelling the conservative movement changing, but the way they are communicated has also shifted dramatically. Poilievre has not only harnessed influencers to spread his message but also used their tactics.