A HOUSE BUILT ON SAND
BY SCOTT HAYWARD

 

 

Everyone then who hears these words of Mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

 

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

 

And everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

 

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

 

These are the famous words from the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew that almost everyone will recognize whether they be a practising Christian or otherwise. Many of you reading this blogpost grew up with these words as part of your catechetical life, mainly to build the foundation of your life on solid rock and not on shifting sands.

 

The same can be applied to political parties.

 

The foundation of a political party is the bedrock from which it goes out to the electorate to present its agenda for the people it seeks to govern. It can and should present this agenda from the roots of its lifeblood; that is to say, the electoral platform of every political party during a general election should be representative of its members, donors, volunteers, and voting universe.

 

Every political party should seek to present this electoral platform to the electorate in a positive light and take the time to persuade and prosecute the case to certain sections of the electorate as to why should adopt the positions of the political party and vote for said political party.

 

THE SAND

 

 

Firstly, why build a house on sand?

 

While sand initially, is much easier to excavate and build a foundation into than hewing a foundation into rock, it obviously shifts, particularly in inclement weather.

 

Looking back to the middle of 2023, one could see the beginnings of the Conservative Party of Canada under Pierre Poilievre building the foundations of the next general federal election campaign into sand and not taking the time and effort to hew it into a foundation built upon solid rock.

 

Many issues that Conservative Members of Parliament had championed such as the abundant abuses of the already-liberal provisions surrounding assisted suicide, the corruption-prone government programs of the then-Liberal government under Justin Trudeau, and even to a certain extent the almost-structural presence of high inflation gave way to essentially only two talking points by the time the calendar flipped to 2024: (i) Trudeau bad and (ii) axe the tax.

 

 

This change in communications from the leader and the party occurred in July 2023 when after the overnight interest rate for the Bank of Canada rose to 5%, resulting in the year-long stalemate between the Liberals and Conservatives vanish as Liberal supporters switched over to the Conservatives.

 

In these two veins of communication were all the rightful anger of the Canadian electorate (particularly in vote-rich places such as MetroVan and the GTA) funnelled.

 

Whether stated implicitly or explicitly, the value proposition of the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre for over eighteen months prior to the election earlier this year was “get rid of Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and all of your problems will be solved”.

 

The implication in this value proposition was that Pierre Poilievre would be the replacement to Justin Trudeau and that he would be the one to axe the tax.

 

Shortly after Donald Trump was re-elected as president of the United States with a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress in November 2023, he began to refer to Trudeau as governor and stated multiple times of his desire for Canada to be annexed to the United States.

 

 

Things for Trudeau went from bad to worse, when after immense pressure from within his caucus, the frustrating boiled over after he tried to replace Chrystia Freeland and other cabinet ministers in mid-December 2024 with people outside the caucus (rumours at the time included people such as Mark Carney and Rachel Notley). In response to this mounting internal pressure, Justin Trudeau had an epiphany on the Feast of the Epiphany and announced his resignation on January 6, 2025; a dramatic end for the former drama teacher.

 

Thus, a leadership vacuum opened on the national stage when the country was worried about the existential future of the Dominion that had economically integrated herself so successfully with the Americans in the wake of the initial Free Trade Agreement signed by Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan in 1988.

 

For one whole week there was a vacuum with no communications from a prime minister who was leaving with horrific polling numbers and equally little from all his rumoured successors.

 

Could there be a more perfect opportunity for a prime minister-in-waiting to come forward to provide a mature and calming message to the Canadian electorate?

 

There was a prime minister-in-waiting that did take the opportunity to come forward and provide that much-needed signal and message that Canadians desired to hear in the wake of the threats of tariffs, annexation, and economic warfare from the White House.

 

Unfortunately for Pierre Poilievre, the axe the tax and Trudeau bad messages that he put out multiple times a day during that week was not going to fit the bill, which was obvious even to the casual observer of politics, let alone the leader of a major national political party.

 

No, it was Mark Carney who came forth and delivered a charming, calm, and mature interview on the Daily Show, albeit with a friendly interviewer in Jon Stewart.

 

 

That week was pivotal, for Canadians saw one man satisfied with his political party’s foundations lying in sand as the storm was coming in and another hewing his historically beleaguered party’s foundations into solid rock.

 

Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada delivered to Canadians what they wanted for the last 18 months: get rid of Justin Trudeau.

 

And then came the rains that washed away the foundation of sand upon which Pierre Poilievre built the house that was the Conservative election campaign…

 

THE STORM

 

One of the necessary traits of a good politician is being able to respond to issues and events as they rise, even if they are not your preferential issues. This seems to be a lesson that still must be learned by the Conservative Party of Canada. Reviewing the party’s campaign and platform, one would think that it was written six months prior for a political party and leader that entered the writ period with a 25-point lead.

 

However, the reality of the situation was that the 25-point lead built by the Conservatives under Poilievre since mid-2023 upon the shifting sands of Trudeau bad and axe the tax were completely swept away in the storm of the rhetoric from President Donald Trump.

 

Pierre Poilievre is a fascinating character in the political scene in Canada. Born in 1979 he was adopted and raised in Calgary. During the heady days of the Reform Party and movement in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Poilievre had his political upbringing rooted in the likes of Preston Manning, Ralph Klein, and Baroness Thatcher.

 

It was therefore baffling to watch a man who is so rooted in economic conservatism present an electoral platform on the eve of the election that also proposed perpetual deficits, just smaller ones than those proposed by the Liberals.

 

To add insult to injury, not only did Poilievre call assisted suicide a right and promised multiple times that he would ensure that abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy would not be regulated in Canada (while remaining silent when specifically asked about free votes for his caucus), he also abandoned his (frankly correct) position from a few weeks earlier when he called the Liberal deficits inflationary and adopted the exact same position, just slightly less worse.

 

 

Slightly less worse seems to be a theme of the Conservative Party of Canada under multiple leaders stretching back more than a decade and the electoral results reflect that strategy.

 

Considering the numerous party policies adopted by the membership at multiple conventions touching on all things economic, social, and cultural from a holistic conservative perspective, it really is a shame that the same, recycled full-time staffers and consultants are utilized by each successive leader of the party to keep delivering loss after loss after loss for the party faithful.

 

The professional full-time party staffers and consultants keep building the Conservative electoral house on a foundation of sand, not rock.

 

Enter Mark Carney.

 

Debonair.

 

Charming.

 

Even humble, at times.

 

Not Justin Trudeau.

 

And more importantly, not Pierre Poilievre.

 

One of the many things that escaped Poilievre and his team leading up to and during the election was that Carney was perceived by many in the electorate to be an agent of change. While Poilievre also represented change, Carney represented better change to many who had previously constituted the 25-point polling lead for the Conservatives.

 

Pipelines, elimination of the carbon tax, a decided move away from woke-ist ideology and policies, a reduction of the tax rate for the lowest tax bracket, significant investments in the Canadian Armed Forces, and a returned focus to Canada’s unique symbology, both historic and living.

 

These were not the platform planks of the Conservatives under Poilievre, but rather the Liberals under Carney to anyone paying attention and willing to look past Carbon Tax Carney and just-like Justin mantras. Carney offered change without Poilievre, which proved to be a winning formula.

 

So, when the storms of annexation, economic warfare, and 51^st state were raging south of the border, which produced at least the perception of existential threats in the minds of great swathes of the electorate, whether justified or not, the central banker of two G7 nations and not the 20-year-plus lifetime politician was able to withstand the storm:

And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

 

A SURPRISING CALM IN THE STORM

It would be unjust to not point out at least one success that the Conservatives were able to accomplish under Poilievre.

 

For many years, beginning with Erin O’Toole as leader, the Conservative Party of Canada has made direct overtures to those belonging to private sector unions. Many of these working-class Canadians are plumbers, electricians, teamsters, dock workers, steel millers, pipe fitters, etc… Many are reliant on large industrial projects to sustain their livelihood and those of their families; many of these large industrial projects have been opposed for several years now by the NDP, who they traditionally voted for by virtue of their union membership.

 

Often forgotten is the fact that the NDP is a partnership between the predecessor party of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Canadian Labour Congress (the other CLC). CLC is an umbrella organization of several unions in Canada, many of them private sector unions, and those CLC-affiliated unions often have ex-officio status for various NDP party votes, such their policy conventions.

 

A common thought that has been prevalent in Canadian federal politics since the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 is that the party can only win with a strong NDP to split the vote with the Liberals.

 

However, of the 17 seats the NDP lost from 2021 to 2025 (as per the transposed results from the 44^th general federal election to the 2023 representation order), only 7 were won by the Liberals and 10 were won by the Conservatives. Most of these former NDP seats picked up by the Conservatives were in rural British Columbia and industrial towns with a large private-sector union presence (i.e. Elmwood—Transcona, Windsor West, and North Island—Powell River).

 

In the NDP-held ridings in this election, the collapse of the NDP had benefitted the Conservatives more than it benefitted the Liberals.

 

 

AN UNSURPRISING CALM IN THE STORM

 

One thing (perhaps the only thing) that remained unchanged in this election was the success that pro-life Conservative Party of Canada candidates had over their pro-abortion counterparts.

 

Firstly, it should be noted that for a third consecutive general federal election since RightNow was founded, the number of pro-lifers elected to the House of Commons has increased:

 

 

Conversely, this is the lowest number of pro-abortion Conservative Party of Canada candidates to win ridings since RightNow was founded in 2016. This is also reflected in the pro-life proportion of the Conservative Caucus over the last number of years:

 

 

Also, once again, we see that being a pro-life Conservative Party of Canada candidate comes with approximately an additional 5,000 votes for winning candidates and almost an additional 4,000 votes for losing candidates:

 

It should also be noted that the most famous pro-abortion Conservative candidate to lose his riding was Pierre Poilievre, who lost the riding he represented for over 20 years by a margin of 4,315 votes, right around the average identified. Even for the leader of the party there was a pro-abortion discount at the polls.

 

THE SHIFTING SANDS

 

Prima facie, on almost every possible metric this past general federal election was one of the best for the Conservative Party of Canada in almost 40 years. The party earned its highest share of the popular vote (41.3%) since the 1988 election (43.0%), its highest number of seats (143) since the 2011 election (166), and the highest number of votes ever cast for a conservative party (8.1-million; the last record was set in 2019 with 6.2-million votes under Andrew Scheer).

 

However, on every single record, the Liberals under Mark Carney did better.

 

The Liberals won 43.8% of the popular vote (their highest since the party under Pierre Trudeau won 44.3% of the popular vote), 170 seats (as of the writing of this blogpost—the most since the 2015 election where the party won 184 seats under Justin Trudeau), and the highest number of votes ever cast for the party (8.5-million; the last record being set in 2015 with 6.9-million votes under Justin Trudeau).

However, the Liberal victories don’t end there.

 

While the Conservatives increased the number of votes earned in 337 of the 343 ridings, the Liberals increased the number votes earned in 339 of the 343 ridings.

 

In fact, the Liberals increased the number of votes more than the Conservatives increased their number of votes in 62% of all ridings across Canada. When it comes to the increase in the share of the popular vote, the Liberals also beat the Conservatives in 60% of the ridings.

 

On average, the Liberals increased their votes by just under 2,500 more than the Conservatives in the ridings the Conservatives won in 2021. That number decreases to just under 1,400 votes for the ridings the Liberals won in 2021, but the Liberals still increased their vote more than the Conservatives.

 

The Liberals increased their vote total more than the Conservatives in 65% of seats won by the Conservatives in 2021. That number decreases to 56% of seats the Liberals won in 2021.

 

The only metric where the Conservatives beat the Liberals is in the 18 Liberal ridings that the Liberal Party won in 2021 that were lost in 2025. In those 18 ridings, the Conservatives increased their vote number by around 5,600 more than the Liberals.

 

For the 11 ridings the Conservatives won in 2021 that were lost in 2025, the Liberals increased their vote total by an average of more than 8,700 compared to the Conservatives.

 

Many political commentators have noted that there was a seismic shift in voting intentions amongst certain demographics of voters. For example, private-sector union voters and younger voters overall tended toward the Conservatives according to most polls while both women and men over the age of 55 tended toward the Liberals according to the same polls.

 

 

However, there is also a sub-regional shift that can be seen in rural, exurban Ontario. There are 27 rural, exurban ridings in southern in Ontario and the Conservatives won every single one of those seats in the last general federal election by an average margin of 20%.

 

That margin has been almost halved to 12% in 2025.

 

Only four of those ridings saw an increased margin for the Conservatives and lost one of those ridings (Bay of Quinte) to the Liberals.

 

Almost half of those riding (12) were won by the Conservatives by a margin of 10% or less and include the following:

 

An issue that plagued the Conservatives under the leadership of Poilievre was the numerous and blatant abuse of nomination rules in a variety of ridings across the country. The most obvious example was what happened to Gerrit Van Dorland in Oxford for the 2023 by-election. However, these issues manifested themselves in a total of 21 ridings where a pro-life nomination contestant was spuriously disqualified or the nomination was dragged into the writ period and another nomination contestant appointed without input from party members.

 

RightNow worked with National Councillors to propose that the party utilize the technology deployed for virtual nomination meetings leading up to the 2021 general federal election due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time. Unfortunately, the party was intent on making appointments in these ridings whose nominations were dragged into the writ period.

 

Of these 21 ridings, the Conservatives only won 8.

 

The Liberals increased their share of the popular vote by 6% over the Conservatives’ increase in these 21 ridings. That is double the 3% average for all 343 ridings across Canada. Clearly, there was a discount in these ridings for the party engaging in nomination rigging. Eliminating the nomination rigging discount, the Conservatives could have won at least three more of these ridings.

 

 

BUILDING A NEW FOUNDATION ON ROCK

 

The addiction the Conservative Party developed under Poilievre to reducing every public discussion down to Trudeau bad and axe the tax clearly did not work when Mark Carney became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

 

It is unlikely to work in the next general federal election, either.

 

Therefore, now is the time for the party to make the effort of building a foundation upon rock and not sand.

 

 

For example, the party is currently holding the attention of younger voters predominantly due to a housing crisis across the country. Are these younger voters actually conservative or do they hold liberal views and values, but are currently upset at the previous Liberal government’s incompetence?

 

If it is the latter and not the former, the Conservative Party has an opportunity to convert these younger, liberal voters into conservative voters. However, that will require the party to (a) adopt distinctly and holistically conservative policies and (b) to make the case for said policies to this segment of the electorate.

 

From a pro-life perspective, the party needs to release the excessive stranglehold that the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO) and that the party insiders and gatekeepers at party headquarters have on its candidates and Members of Parliament.

 

More importantly, pro-life Members of Parliament need to offer to work with the OLO and leader on better talking points on abortion than we will not pass legislation. Poilievre refused to commit to the long-standing tradition of both predecessor parties and the clause in the Conservative Party’s current policy handbook of allowing for free votes for the Conservative Caucus on matter of conscience, specifically on abortion and assisted suicide.

 

Pro-life Members of Parliament need to attend the annual Marches for Life, speak at said marches, speak at local fundraising events for crisis pregnancy centres, speak publicly when the issue comes up in the media or in parliament, and push back against the current and future leaders of the party if they adopt solely pro-abortion talking points.

 

 

 

Should the leader and the OLO come down hard on pro-life Members of Parliament for doing any of these basic functions of an elected official in an advanced and mature democracy, they should immediately hang up the phone and move on with their day, knowing that the leader and the party needs them more than vise versa.

 

As Liana Gordan writes in the National Post, "A truly common-sense conservative movement would call out contradictions, scientifically erroneous definitions and injustices wherever they occur. Until the Conservatives sort out a hierarchy of rights in their proper order, they will remain part of a movement that stagnates on cultural and political change".