You don't throw away a strategy that has you at 38 per cent in the polls

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People have notes for Pierre Poilievre and his Conservative election campaign. So many notes.

None say anything like “stay the course, big fella!”

“You’ve got to get on the f-cking ballot question or you are going to lose,” Kory Teneycke, the Ontario conservative strategist bluntly said at an Empire Club event last week. (Teneycke is a veteran of the old Reform Party politics, like Poilievre’s campaign manager Jenni Byrne.)

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“Poilievre must wrap himself in the mantle of Captain Canada; the leader who will embody and assert our sovereignty and our rise to greatness,” Peter White, former principal secretary to Brian Mulroney, wrote this week in an opinion piece.

He “must … pivot from gladiator to statesman” — not by “surrendering his convictions” but by “elevating them.”

“Criticize the Liberal Party not merely for its failings, but for its smallness of vision,” White advised. (Are only large visions acceptable? Many Canadians would settle for affordable housing and safer streets.)

© National Post