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Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre speaks at a news conference in Calgary, on Wednesday. On Nov. 4, 2025, MP Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Pierre Poilievre was asked Wednesday if he had reflected on his leadership style “moving forward.” The answer was simple: “No.”
True to his word, Mr. Poilievre did what he does. He attacked.
He attacked Prime Minister Mark Carney, which is part of his job. And he attacked the MP who crossed the floor last week from his Conservatives to the Liberals, Chris d’Entremont, which looked like the sourest of sour grapes. Then he attacked CTV and CBC and the news organizations who dared to ask about MPs quitting his caucus.
Never explain, never reconsider. Attack.
What about Mr. d’Entremont’s complaint that the Conservative caucus often felt more like a frat house than a serious party?
“Are you with the CBC by the way? Mr. Poilievre asked. He tried to ask the reporter questions.
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No matter. The leader has spoken: There is no need to change. Or even think about it. No one should ask about it, there’s nothing to see here, and any suggestion there might be is angrily rebuffed.
Is that a good strategy to buck up the Conservatives and bolster his leadership? Mr. Poilievre promised to keep on fighting the Liberal agenda. Most current members of the party joined to vote for Mr. Poilievre as leader, so perhaps the make-no-apologies, fire-all-cannons response is a way to unite his troops in battle.
But strategy or not, it’s what he does. And will keep doing.
Mr. Poilievre’s criticism of Mr. d’Entremont came in the form of reading quotes of the Nova Scotia MP criticizing Mr. Carney and the Liberals – and that’s fair game, even if the quotes were full of the carbon-copy phrases that the Conservative Party’s communications office gives MPs to say. Certainly, floor-crossers can be hoisted on their own past partisan statements.
But Mr. d’Entremont’s accusations about the party’s negativity and the frat-house culture, possibly a reference to the caucus leadership’s clubhouse love of gotchas and wild blasts, might hit a little closer to home, even for some of Mr. Poilievre’s own MPs.
Mr. Poilievre’s response to any question about caucus departures was to repeat the same quotes, or to tell a CTV reporter that his network should be covering Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s critique of last week’s federal budget. Incidentally, CTV had already aired a story about that.
In the same news conference, Mr. Poilievre made the wild-eyed claim that a leaked government report had said that “Liberal policies have us on track so that Canadians will have to forage and hunt for food because they can’t afford groceries.”
In truth, that’s not what the report said. It was not a prediction, but one of the admittedly weird, what-if, “future lives” thought-experiment reports occasionally published by a small government group – in this case, imagining what 2040 could be like if Canada’s declining social mobility gets far worse.
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But hey, why not claim a secret government report says the Hunger Games are on their way? Unless, of course, some of your own caucus were already perturbed when you told YouTubers that former prime minister Justin Trudeau would be locked up if the RCMP didn’t cover for him. Maybe all that stuff is better left in the frat house.
Of course, Mr. Poilievre is supposed to criticize Mr. Carney’s government. You also have to expect partisans to criticize floor-crossers. The Conservatives called Mr. d’Entremont a liar – even though they accepted Liberal defectors in the past.
But Mr. d’Entremont was well-liked by fellow Conservative MPs. He told the CBC that what “sealed the deal” on his floor-crossing was when Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer and the party’s whip, Chris Warkentin – two senior caucus officers close to Mr. Poilievre – barged into his office and started yelling at him.
If there are other Conservative MPs irritated by the way the caucus leadership has treated them, then sending a message that the leader has no regrets might not be the best way to prevent more defections.
The Decibel: Two Conservative MPs are gone. Where does the party go from here?
Whatever. It’s full speed ahead.
With that, Mr. Poilievre has also left himself little choice but to demand that every single one of his MPs show up for next week’s confidence vote on the budget – to declare, on the record, they are against Mr. Carney’s Liberal agenda and are with the Conservatives. And leave it to other parties to avoid an election.
There can be no reflection. When in trouble, the response must be a redoubling. That’s what Mr. Poilievre does.
