Pierre Poilievre is back in Canada’s parliament. After winning a by-election on Monday, the Tory will resume his post as Leader of the Opposition against Mark’s Carney Liberals. He will face one more test at a January 2026 party leadership review but is expected to win it just as handily.

Following a shock ouster from his longtime Ottawa-area riding (which he held for 20 years) at the 28 April general election, Poilievre settled on a new constituency on the other side of the country, picked to ensure minimal resistance. Battle River-Crowfoot is a sprawling rural Alberta seat that is probably the safest for a Conservative in all of Canada, having returned the last Tory candidate with 83% of the vote. Poilievre won by a similar margin. But even as it’s considered a non-story by most Canadians, the implications of Poilievre’s victory are worth considering.

From 2022 onward, Poilievre led Canada’s Conservatives with an extraordinary polling advantage, earning praise from figures such as Elon Musk, as well as from journalists struck by his appeal to young voters. But Trudeau’s handover to Mark Carney, against the backdrop of Trump’s turbulent second term, exposed the fragility of Poilievre’s lead, grounded less in his own appeal than in Trudeau’s unpopularity. The erosion of his youth support made that clear.

Poilievre has shown little flexibility. He has consistently avoided strong criticism of Trump — something his chief Tory rival, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, has been only too happy to do. At the same time, Poilievre has tried to replicate the purely oppositional approach that served him well under Trudeau. In doing so, he swapped the carbon tax, which Carney himself repealed, for an obscure EV mandate that most Canadians have never heard of, making it the centrepiece of a sloganeering campaign. It is unlikely to resonate, especially as the ongoing trade war with Washington — about which he has seemingly little to say — continues to dominate the agenda.

But perhaps most striking is Poilievre’s inability to question his priors. He remains firmly rooted in the market-fundamentalist milieu of the 1990s, a worldview shaped in his youth. Unlike the New Right elsewhere, this approach refuses to entertain serious industrial policy, even as the post-globalised era makes a compelling case for it. Instead, he remains fixated on tax cuts and deregulation, treating them as panaceas. The possibility that Canada’s decades-old productivity crisis may arise from a timid, risk-averse investment culture in the private sector rather than just Ottawa regulation is something Poilievre cannot admit, as it falls outside his ideological safe space.

The most significant impact of an extended Poilievre era on the Canadian Right may be its chilling effect on the next generation of Conservative leaders, represented by the likes of MP Jamil Jivani, JD Vance’s Yale classmate, who is far more aligned with post-neoliberal currents (and conspicuously excluded from Poilievre’s shadow cabinet).

As populist intellectual Oren Cass remarked after a visit to Canada earlier this year, “the Conservative Party there is far behind the Republican Party in its realignment … on the basics of political economy, [Poilievre] hasn’t moved far.” Going forward, Poilievre’s Tories are likely to cling to their old Trudeau-era playbook, passively waiting for the reigning Liberal government to bleed popularity while galvanising their own base with appeals to anti-elite sentiment, avoiding internal divisions over Trump, and focusing frustrations on one or two myopically chosen policy targets.

Indeed, while he may have proved his resiliency within the Tory base, he is adamant that his party should remain wedded to last century’s orthodoxies, limping along as a Thatcherite holdover as the rest of the world moves on to fresher and more vital models of governance.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Senior Editor at American Affairs.

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