Has support for Pierre Poilievre already peaked?

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Justin Trudeau earned the right to a victory lap after the Liberals coasted to an easy by-election win in Mississauga-Lakeshore on Monday. But the Prime Minister’s triumphalist tone in the wake of a low-turnout vote in a Grit-friendly riding was a bit over the top.

Contrition was certainly nowhere on Mr. Trudeau’s mind when Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre confronted him with yet another Ethics Commissioner report this week that found that Liberal Trade Minister Mary Ng had contravened the Conflict of Interest Act. Instead of vowing to hold her accountable for violating the law by “participating” in the awarding of two untendered consulting contracts to a friend – preferably by demanding her resignation – Mr. Trudeau responded to Mr. Poilievre with an ode to his own greatness.

“The residents of Mississauga-Lakeshore had a choice. They could choose between the Conservative Party politics of division and reckless proposals that included recommending you opt out of inflation by investing in crypto, or our government’s approach of being there for Canadians every step of the way and putting more money back in their pockets,” Mr. Trudeau said at Question Period on Tuesday. “The people of Mississauga-Lakeshore have spoken, and they elected a Liberal member of Parliament.”

Within hours of Liberal Charles Sousa’s 14 percentage-point win over Tory challenger Ron Chhinzer, the Liberals had already sent out a fundraising e-mail in Mr. Sousa’s name. Many Liberals were expecting a much tighter race. To wit, the parade of Liberal cabinet ministers who campaigned with Mr. Sousa. Mr. Trudeau himself visited the riding.

Mr. Poilievre, who did not campaign with Mr. Chhinzer, sought to lower expectations in advance of the vote, insisting Mississauga-Lakeshore was “a difficult riding” for the Tories. But it is not unwinnable. And the drop in the Tory vote to 37.3 per cent from 38.7 per cent in the 2021 election, amid a six-point surge in Liberal support to 51.2 per cent, left plenty of Conservatives asking whether Mr. Poilievre has already peaked.

There are indeed few signs that he is catching on with voters beyond his base. And it is not clear even his base is as into him as it was a few months ago.

Where, for instance, were all those highly energized new Tories that Mr. Poilievre signed up during the Conservative leadership race? Mr. Poilievre won 63 per cent of the vote on the first (and only) ballot in Mississauga-Lakeshore, compared to only 19 per cent for his rival Jean Charest, even though the riding overall leans to the centre.

Maybe some of the 300,000-odd instant Tories Mr. Poilievre signed up are too busy these days counting their bitcoin losses, or following the latest updates on Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency wunderkind who was accused on Tuesday of devising “a scheme and artifice to defraud” customers of the crypto exchange he led. How many will have moved on to much cooler hobbies than smoking shisha pipes with Mr. Poilievre by the next federal election?

There was a tinge of I-told-you-so frustration in the reaction of some Tories to the by-election results. Former Charest campaign co-chair Tasha Kheiriddin noted that, even though support for the People’s Party of Canada collapsed, the Tories did not improve their score. “Because the party’s message turned off more centrist ‘progressive conservative’ voters,” she wrote. “These voters didn’t switch teams – they simply stayed home.”

What’s more, the Liberals were successful in capturing many progressive voters who might have supported the New Democratic Party in previous elections, in part because of Mr. Sousa’s deliberate courting of left-of-centre voters. As finance minister in Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario Liberal government, Mr. Sousa tabled several big-spending budgets that contributed to the party’s collapse in 2018. But Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals knew what they were doing in recruiting Mr. Sousa to run for them in the same riding he held provincially, but lost in 2018. He showed that the centre-progressive Liberal coalition can still win in suburbia.

No wonder NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is suddenly threatening to tear up the supply-and-confidence agreement between his party and the Liberals before its 2025 expiry date. The Mississauga-Lakeshore results showed that progressive voters do not give the NDP credit for the “gains” made since Mr. Singh agreed to back Mr. Trudeau’s minority Liberal government in the House of Commons.

The NDP collapse in the riding was even worse news for the Tories, whose hopes of winning the suburbs ride mostly on splitting the NDP and Liberal vote.

It is true that voters’ appetite for change might trump everything else in the next federal election, especially if the economy continues to go south. Still, voters in Mississauga-Lakeshore had a chance to buy the shiny object in the window in Mr. Poilievre’s first by-election as leader. And most of them said “nah.”