HALIFAX—Whatever you may think about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s chances of becoming prime minister—the proverbial snowball in hell comes to mind—he keeps trying to find a way to stay in the game against Mark Carney.

It is no easy task. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s lead over Poilievre in the polls keeps growing, recently hitting 13 points. If that spread were to hold in an election, it would be a debacle for the Conservatives.

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Rumours persist that more Conservative MPs may be planning to join the handful of former colleagues who’ve already defected to the Liberals. 

And now with last week’s floor-crossing of NDP MP Lori Idlout, there is a real possibility that Carney may soon be leading a majority government. If the Liberals were to win all the pending byelections next month, Poilievre’s Conservatives could be looking at years—not months—before the next election.

Despite all that, Poilievre continues to work at reinventing himself. The goal is to improve his party’s current dismal levels—just 35 per cent, according to a recent Leger poll—of support amongst Canadians.

The Conservative leader’s first attempt to improve his image was to drop the “junkyard dog” approach he took to leading the official opposition.

For quite some time, Poilievre was what the late federal cabinet minister John Crosbie once called “a niggling nabob of negativity.” He was the master of the nasty jibe, king of the personal low-blow. That approach had some success when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau led the Liberals. 

But when Carney—with his illustrious career in banking—replaced the unpopular Trudeau, Poilievre’s slurs and slanders began to miss the mark. 

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