Pierre Poilievre is setting himself up to fail

“The greatest happiness,” Genghis Khan famously said, “is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, [and] to see those who love him shrouded in tears.” That’s something Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre must be feeling deeply right now. With a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls and the Liberal government collapsing before his very eyes, he’s on the verge of getting everything he’s ever wanted in politics — and then some. 

But there’s another piece of Khan’s wisdom that Poilievre may be about to learn.  "Conquering the world on horseback is easy,” he said. “It is dismounting and governing that is hard." That’s especially true when you’ve spent the last two years, as Poilievre has, raising the expectations of your closest supporters. It’s one thing to promise that you’ll axe the tax, fix the budget, build the homes and stop the crime. It’s quite another to actually do it. 

Poilievre’s first act as prime minister will likely be, as he’s promised thousands of times by now, to “axe the tax.” But eliminating the carbon tax and rebate won’t magically make people’s groceries cheaper, if only because it didn’t cause them to go up in the first place. As a new paper by University of Calgary economists Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter makes clear, the carbon tax has had a negligible impact on inflation. “Contrary to common perceptions,” they write, “we show that these policies (and all other indirect taxes embedded within items consumers purchase) contributed only about a 0.5 per cent overall increase in consumer prices since 2019 — accounting for a small fraction of the more than 19 per cent increase in such prices over that period.”

Instead, as the most recent iteration of Canada’s Food Price Report makes clear, the bigger drivers of rising food prices in 2025 are expected to be climate change (hello, olive oil prices!) and the prospect of a trade war between Canada and the United States. In a particularly cruel irony, the households most negatively impacted by rising food prices will also lose the most from the elimination of the carbon tax and rebate. This is the risk in pretending, as Poilievre has for years now, that the carbon tax is the root cause of all Canada’s problems. When those problems persist or even worsen after the carbon tax has been eliminated, people will naturally go looking for a different cause — and perhaps start considering Poilievre for the role of whipping boy. 

The same holds true for Poilievre’s pledge to “build the homes,” a promise that has helped him attract more support from younger voters than any Conservative in his lifetime. Poilievre correctly identified the role that so-called “gatekeepers” at the local level were playing in obstructing the development of new housing supply, and the impact that was having on rents and home prices. 

What he has missed — or, at least, declines to talk about — is the disproportionate role conservative-leaning politicians are playing in that. In Calgary, for example, almost all of the political resistance to the city’s recent blanket up-zoning has come from either conservative-leaning councilors or members of Poilievre’s own Conservative caucus like Calgary Centre MP Greg McLean. In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government has been the biggest enemy of the pro-housing policies espoused by Poilievre. At some point, and probably pretty soon, he’s going to have to pick a side here. 

And then there’s the oil and gas industry, where Poilievre is promising to unleash a flood of new investment in pipelines, LNG terminals, and other energy infrastructure. He’ll repeal Bill C-69, which clarified (and strengthened) the environmental review process for major projects, and Bill-48, which banned tankers off the north coast of British Columbia. And then he and his allies in Alberta will have to watch as they lose their single greatest asset in their crusade to crush climate policy: the ability to blame Justin Trudeau.

For almost a decade now, they’ve pretended that global trends that drove down investment in the U.S. oil and gas industry, to almost the same extent as in Canada, are entirely the doing of the Liberal government. Now, they’ll be forced to contend with reality. Demand for oil and gas will peak within the next decade while the cost of renewable energy and electric vehicles will keep getting cheaper. And while blaming Trudeau will still be a popular sport in Alberta long after Poilievre leaves office — some pundits here still can’t let Pierre go, after all — it won’t work nearly as well outside the province. 

On top of all that, Poilievre will also have to contend with an American president who’s openly hostile to Canada’s economic interests. According to Politico, incoming vice president JD Vance reportedly said, in a confused reference to Poilievre, “it’s not entirely clear it’s better for us to have Mitt Romney with a French accent as prime minister.” So much for Vance’s friend and CPC MP Jamil Jivani playing a moderating influence on the new administration. 

None of this will change the outcome of the next federal election, or the inevitability of a Conservative majority government. But the seeds of future discontent with it are already being sown by Poilievre himself, and they will almost certainly take root in his own political fields.