Is Poilievre the next target for raging conservatives?

Federal Conservative leadership candidates were curiously silent on social media in the immediate aftermath of Jason Kenney’s surprise downfall in Alberta.

No thanks or goodbyes, no public comment on the Alberta premier who was once seen as a leading light for modern-day conservatism in Canada.

Pierre Poilievre and Patrick Brown, who served in federal government with Kenney during the Stephen Harper years, took shots against each other instead. Former Quebec premier Jean Charest, who knows a thing or two about leading and losing in provincial politics, had nothing to say about Kenney either.

Maybe these would-be leaders were worried about offending one side or the other in the province that is also the heartland for the party. The 51-49 per cent vote in the Kenney leadership review is a vivid, perfect picture of the sharply divided landscape on the right in Alberta — if not Canada at large.

Or maybe, more correctly, conservative leadership aspirants are seeing what happened to Kenney as a warning.

It is indeed worth some reflection. For all of the efforts conservatives are making to harness the rampant rage out there toward Justin Trudeau — embodied in the convoy protests — it’s conservative leaders who keep falling. It was federal leader Erin O’Toole a few months ago; Jason Kenney this week. Trudeau is still standing, by the way.

Who will this raging political movement come for next? Poilievre, who has courted this populist rage most assiduously, should take note.

Probably the best post-Kenney commentary came from Sean Speer, former senior economic adviser to Harper, now an editor at large with The Hub. Speer looked at what happened to Kenney on Wednesday night, sat down at the keyboard, and produced what he titled as a lament for the current state of conservatism.

“There’s a small yet spirited minority of grassroot conservatives who’ve come to define their politics in solely oppositional terms,” Speer wrote. “The result is a siege mentality that’s more reactionary than it is conservative. These people aren’t interested in incremental policy reforms. They’re looking for a fight. They want to toss a hand grenade into the cathedral of our mainstream institutions.”

I’ve been saying something like this since the convoy protests were raging in Ottawa this winter.

If it was Poilievre, not Trudeau as prime minister, it would be the Ottawa MP’s name flying on all those “F--Trudeau” flags.

The target of this free-ranging anger isn’t partisan; it’s institutional. The angriest, darkest strain of those protests is nihilist, not at all conservative.

Another insight from Speer: “The forces that have led to Kenney’s departure aren’t interested in or capable of making conservatism relevant to ordinary working people. They have nothing of an affirmative agenda. They are agents of outrage and that’s it.”

Poilievre is no doubt enjoying being the current darling of the outraged set. But if he does win, sooner or later he’s going to fall afoul of them. It’s inevitable. You can’t lead a party — or a country — by constantly stoking rage, unless you’re Donald Trump. And we saw how that worked out.

Harper constantly cast his government as an outsider to the Ottawa establishment, even though it was the Ottawa establishment for nearly a decade. But eventually that routine got tired, too. Harper also had ministers like Kenney around him, who presented a more open, welcoming face to conservatism during the years in power.

Many in Ottawa wondered what happened to that guy. What would have happened if Kenney had chosen to stick around federal politics after Harper was defeated in 2015, instead of fleeing to the province whose crazy politics led to his own spectacular downfall? Kenney might have had better luck running against Trudeau than either O’Toole or Andrew Scheer. Or maybe not; maybe he was always going to be a better deputy than a leader.

As I was waiting for the results of the Kenney leadership vote on Wednesday night, I had a nagging suspicion he was on his way out.

It was the leaked CBC report of late March, in which Kenney was caught on tape denouncing the “lunatics” infiltrating his party and causing unrest. In the tape recording, which some suspected was leaked by Kenney himself or his supporters, the premier said: “What’s the easiest path for me? Just to take a walk. I don’t need this job. I could go to the private sector, have my evenings, weekends off.”

Kenney now has exactly that outcome.

That’s the funny thing about the politics of outrage in conservative Canada right now. The “freedom” that Poilievre continues to talk about keeps emerging as free-roving outrage with unpredictable consequences. Poilievre is currently a captive of it, and Kenney was won his freedom from it.