How much more Liberal raiding and spending and winning can Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre survive?

Three byelection losses Monday night are a further humiliation. Prime Minister Mark Carney took quick advantage.

The Liberal majority — 174 seats — wasn’t 12 hours old when the PM dropped the price of gasoline by 10 cents a litre.

He also said Asia wants Canadian energy and “we’re not just advancing specific projects, but we’re setting up the framework for major, major investment in Alberta and across the country for decades to come.”

At that same moment, Premier Danielle Smith’s government was rolling out a bill that orders Alberta regulators to go through a project’s approval process within 120 days.

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Alberta doesn’t see this as a challenge to Ottawa. The Liberals no longer claim power to approve Alberta projects.

While suspicion never dies in an Alberta premier’s office, the province is in deep collaboration with the old enemy. Smith still supports Poilievre but their interests have diverged.

The byelections solidified Carney’s hold on this country. His government is likely safe for three more years.

The Conservatives have breathing room to figure out leadership, but it’s hard-won. The four floor-crossers helped end the threat of a snap election.

The Liberals are still angling in the caucus, says one angry Conservative player.

Designated Liberal top-hats do the courting. Carney surely wants at least two more defectors to raise his seat total to 176, a more comfortable majority that protects against unforeseen losses.

Poilievre is flailing. That leads to mistakes.

Carney and his two top economic ministers — Tim Hodgson and François-Philippe Champagne — laughed out loud when a reporter asked what the PM thought of Poilievre saying he’s bad at economics.

“Wow,” said Carney, the former central bank boss for Canada and then England.

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Then the three of them got the giggles.

Poilievre had told a podcaster, “There’s one thing that’s worse than being uneducated and that’s being badly educated. And Mr. Carney is very badly educated on economics.”

He added: “It’s hard to understand how a guy who claims to be so smart has been so wrong for so long.”

Carney has two degrees from Harvard and a doctorate from Oxford, all in economics.

Poilievre is a proud University of Calgary grad in international relations — and good for him.

But, really, no politician with his mind in gear throws a slow pitch like that.

The Conservatives were never going to win any of the three byelections.

Defeat was so certain that they didn’t put much campaign money into any of them.

But the plunge in Conservative support is ominous for Poilievre.

In Toronto’s University-Rosedale, arguably the heart of the entire Liberal empire, Carney’s candidate won 64 per cent of the vote.

Next came the NDP with 18.9 per cent, double the party’s support in 2025.

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The Conservative was third with a dismal 12.4 per cent, 10 points lower than in 2025.

As if to show how grim this is, one Poilievre loyalist said it’s encouraging that the NDP did better because Liberal-NDP splits are good for Conservatives.

In suburban Scarborough Southwest, the Liberal candidate won nearly 70 per cent of the vote.

The Conservative got 18.4 per cent, 12 points below the 2025 general election.

Terrebonne was a close race for the Liberals, but they topped the Bloc Quebecois by a few hundred votes.

The Conservative candidate pulled exactly 3.3 per cent.

Conservatives take heart in one recent national poll, from Abacus, that shows them only seven points behind the Liberals. Several others find Liberal leads in the teens.

This is truly a grim moment for the Conservatives. They risk collapsing back into their Saskatchewan-Alberta base.

But their leader, it appears, has every intention of staying on for three more years.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald

X and Bluesky: @DonBraid

© Calgary Herald