Canadian Conservatives think they’re smarter than Canadians. They aren’t.

With everything else that is going on in the world – Iran reportedly slaughtering 30,000 of its own citizens, the names of dozens of Trump administration figures showing up in the latest dump of sordid Epstein files, Canada beset by Arctic temperatures in a winter without end – Pierre Poilievre’s fate doesn’t seem terribly relevant. Honestly, who cares?

Card-carrying Conservatives obviously did. Several thousand participated in this weekend’s review of Poilievre’s leadership. An impressive 87 per cent of them voted to keep him around. Polls, too, show a majority of the Conservative base remain unabashed fans.

But Canadians, in substantial numbers, just aren’t. Conservatives adore Pierre Poilievre – and Canadian voters remain deeply unimpressed.

That truth hasn’t been changed by the leadership review conducted at the Tory convention in Calgary. One Liaison Strategies poll released this week showed Poilievre underwater everywhere in Canada. (Except in Alberta, that is, where the convention coincidentally took place.)

While the Conservatives were still gathering, Abacus’ David Coletto wrote that “Prime Minister Mark Carney’s personal standing has reached its highest level yet, with a net favourable rating of +23 and net positive approval across every region…Carney is at his strongest point yet, the government is gaining broader cross partisan approval, and the Liberals are now ahead nationally.”

If an election were to be held now, seat models project Carney would win 50 more seats than Poilievre, giving him a huge Parliamentary majority. Leger, which polls for Postmedia, found that 78 per cent of self-identifying Conservatives want Poilievre to remain as their leader.

Meanwhile, more than 70 per cent Liberal and New Democrat voters, Leger also found, want Poilievre gone.

Tory partisans will shrug about all this, which approximates what they’ve been doing for months. They will say, and have, that they don’t ever expect Grits or Dippers to like their leader. Fair enough.

But it’s reckless to be indifferent to political reality – which is that Canadian Conservative partisans are still dramatically out of step with the average Canadian voter. There is no enthusiasm for the Conservative leader outside of the Conservative base, and Conservatives don’t seem to care.

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