Is the Conservatives' purpose to pose good ideas for the Liberals?

National Post, 5 February 2026

PM Carney praises Stephen Harper and his policies at portrait hanging this week

Pierre Poilievre’s convention success here last week and the Stephen Harper celebrations in Ottawa this week pose an old-as-Laurier question for Canada’s Conservatives: What is the party for?

Poilievre’s triumph in Calgary came after the bitter disappointment of losing the federal election and his own seat last April. He thus returned (retreated?) to Alberta to run in a byelection and consolidate his leadership.

Yet consider this: What Poilievre was trying to do had never been done. In the history of Canada, with the sole exception of the highly unusual King-Byng affair of 1926, whenever the Liberals have won three consecutive elections, they have never lost the fourth. Ever.

The Liberals have won a fourth consecutive election five times (1908, 1949, 1972, 2004 and 2025). Twice they went on to win a fifth (1953, 1974). Blame Poilievre for this or that, but concede that no one has ever done what he was attempting to do. When Liberals get three, they always get four. Always.

In the election of 2006 — the 20th anniversary of which was marked by Harper’s portrait unveiling in Parliament on Tuesday — the Conservative leader achieved what only Sir Robert Borden had ever done before, namely deny the Liberals a fifth consecutive victory.

John Diefenbaker and Joe Clark only managed to deny the Liberals a sixth consecutive win.

What do those historic patterns mean? It means Poilievre has an excellent shot at becoming, like Borden and Harper, prime minister in the next election. Should he lose again, he should definitely stick around, as the Conservative leader will certainly prevail in the election after that. The Liberals have never gotten six in a row.

Since the death of Sir John A. Macdonald, Conservatives have faced an uphill electoral climb. It determines who has power, but does it matter as much in policy?

My colleague John Ivison noted about Poilievre’s convention speech regarding President Donald Trump: “He intends to follow in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s footsteps to the point where their positions are indistinguishable.”

Poilievre might bristle at that, but he made the same point in the reverse direction on Friday night.

“We won the debate in the last election on every single one of the big issues. On carbon taxes, inflation, housing, resources, crime, drugs,” he said. “First (the Liberals) said, ‘Conservatives have no policies. It’s just slogans.’ Then they said, ‘Conservative policies are very scary.’ And then they said, ‘We agree with all the Conservative policies.’”

“The best part of being Conservatives is that eventually everyone admits that we were right all along,” he said.

Brian Mulroney may well made that point about Jean Chrétien, who prominently feted Harper this week, appearing beside him on both Monday and Tuesday. In Chrétien’s first term, he embraced the GST and NAFTA, the signature Mulroney policies he campaigned against, and made his peace with the principles of the Meech Lake Accord. He did what even Mulroney did not do — balance the federal budget, with previously-thought-impossible cuts in federal spending.

At the hanging on Tuesday, Harper noted that his portrait has him holding a balanced budget. In a gracious speech the current prime minister praised Harper precisely as a fiscal conservative.

“He came to Ottawa as a balanced-budget conservative. He believed rightly that governments should live within their means,” Carney said. “Yet when the financial crisis struck, he did not let ideology prevent him from doing what was necessary, running deficits for five years to support the Canadian economy through the worst global downturn in generations.”

The largely Conservative crowd erupted in applause at the first line, to which Carney light-heartedly replied, “I got to a comma, not a period.”

“That was not a betrayal of his principles,” Carney continued. “It was an expression of a deeper principle: that the purpose of sound fiscal management is to serve Canadians, not the other way around. Mr. Harper understood that you build up strength in good times to have the capacity to act in bad times.”

What Carney said about Harper he wishes one day others to say about him. Harper could have said it about Paul Martin, perhaps even Chrétien about Mulroney. What in the 1980s was a conservative position — think of Preston Manning’s Reform Party — is now a consensus.

Poilievre said, “everyone admits that we were right.” Fiscal discipline is the bipartisan consensus in principle while accommodating deficits in practice. Carney suggested that he is doing what Harper did. Harper might disagree, but is it a difference in degree or in kind?

One measure of political success is rivals adopting your policies. That is why Poilievre speaks of his 2025 defeat — an election that historically he was never going to win — as a victory.

Is that the purpose of a conservative political party in Canada, to provide good ideas for the Liberals?

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