OTTAWA—Here’s news: it’s understood that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has adopted a different approach, and Conservative MPs are now free to meet with whomever they choose, and to travel outside their ridings for meetings.

This must be bracing for federally elected Conservatives, who seemed like an endangered species in the two-and-a-half years between Poilievre’s elevation to party boss and the April election.

The about-face on muzzling his MPs has to be seen in the context of the widely discussed possibility that Poilievre might be rethinking his tactics in hopes of widening his party’s voter base before Canadians next go to the polls.

Still, he faces a leadership review this winter from the members of the party that he has over the years helped morph into something closer to the People’s Party of Canada than the conservative organizations of old. So we shouldn’t assume that the Poilievre who has sought to capitalize on the MAGA-style, right-wing upsurge in western democracies will suddenly begin prioritizing moderate, incremental, and fact-based politics.

Will it be very long, for instance, before we start hearing more complaints from the Conservative standard-bearer about such issues as the previous Liberal government’s ban on plastic straws?

Poilievre has exhibited no reluctance over the past year in trying to capitalize on this absurd culture-war wedge issue cherished by the likes of United States President Donald Trump, who officially reinstituted plastic straws after returning to the White House. (The Trudeau government’s prohibition on plastic straws—part of a 2022 program to eliminate some single-use plastics—is still before the courts.) “This isn’t about science, it’s about symbolism,” Poilievre said during the recent election campaign as he vowed to end the ban here. “They [the Liberals] are not about saving the planet, they’re about punishing all of us to make themselves feel good.”

Or will we be hearing again about the social media conspiracy alleging that globalists like Prime Minister Mark Carney are part of an elitist plot to make everyone exist on a diet of insects? “Justin Trudeau bet $9 million of your money on edible BUGS! He wants Canadians to own nothing, be happy and eat crickets,” the party said in a fundraising email in November 2024. It came after the Liberal government provided funds to a company that farms crickets for pet food. The Conservative hysterics echoed standard online innuendo about the evil World Economic Forum, which the party’s current leader has regularly vilified.

Whatever tone he might adopt as the Commons continues, Poilievre—who since 2022 has exploited an angry populist rage-fest to generate a powerful anti-Trudeau coalition—isn’t straying from his post-truth diatribes against the Liberals. He is still highlighting a hard-edged agenda larded with twisted or false information and divisive dog-whistles. And all of Canada’s problems—from housing prices to crime—continue to be simplistically blamed on the Liberal leader (substitute Carney for Trudeau here) as if there were no other levels of government or any economic market forces at play in this country.

Indeed, Poilievre seems quite at home with the idea that nobody really cares about accurate, reliable information in an era of performative, emotion-fueled politics. He said during the election, for instance, that Carney would bring back the consumer carbon tax if the Liberals were re-elected. As that didn’t happen, the Conservative leader is now saying the fact that Carney hasn’t dropped Trudeau’s emissions cap regulations amounts to a new carbon tax.

On energy, he continues to say the Liberals have deprived Canadians of their rightful natural resource riches, claiming misleadingly that Trudeau was solely responsible for the demise of the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipeline proposals.

With regard to the Conservatives’ argument that the new Liberal government has presided over a declining economy and an exit of business investment, Poilievre never bothers to mention that Carney is dealing with an economy battered by a once-in-75-years tariff attack by the Americans.

The Conservative leader is also tapping into—and likely further inflaming—Canadians’ growing antipathy toward immigrants, saying the Temporary Foreign Workers Program is depriving youth of jobs and should be axed. Poilievre asserted that the number of people coming into Canada under the program was running wild in 2025. But it turns out this claim was based on a misinterpretation of stats showing the opposite.

Watching Poilievre over the summer, he seemed—as many have mentioned—to appear more than anything like someone who has been unable to process a major unfortunate event in their life, i.e., what happened on April 28.

Following the Trump model, he had managed as leader to construct a winning formula based on grievance trolling, sloganeering, and, above all, demonizing Trudeau. But Carney’s arrival short-circuited that strategy. So a great deal has changed in federal politics in a few months, but Poilievre? Not so much. As ever, he appears to be litigating a kind of upmarket, long-running version of the inchoate hate and frustration exhibited by the trucker convoy that took over Ottawa way back in 2022.

Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times.

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