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OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s message to fellow Tories at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference on Thursday was to keep fighting.
The annual event in Ottawa is billed as the country’s largest gathering of the conservative movement, and this year’s theme is “a winning vision.”
Poilievre gave the keynote address on the conference’s first full day in front of a crowd of about 500 people who greeted him with polite applause, and gave a standing ovation after his 20-minute speech.
The conservative movement in Canada has had a challenging year. Federally, the Conservatives lost an election they had seemed all but certain to win just six months before the votes were cast last April.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s PCs are losing support in the polls after a series of scandals including the purchase and near-immediate sale of a private jet for the premier’s travel.
Poilievre did not directly speak about the next election or articulate how the party would turn around its fortunes to win that election after four consecutive losses to the Liberals since 2015.
Instead, he said the Conservatives are already winning in matters of policy.
“We have won every single debate, on every single public policy issue in the last decade: On inflation, carbon taxes, housing, drugs, crime, resource development, we’ve been proven right,” he said, drawing some applause.
He added that Conservatives won the debate “so thoroughly that Liberals have stopped debating us altogether and started plagiarizing.”
But Poilievre argued Prime Minister Mark Carney is failing to follow through, and as a result Canadians are less happy and the country less prosperous.
“Something bad is happening out there, and it’s getting worse,” he said.
Poilievre characterized the material difference between the Carney Liberals and the Trudeau Liberals as “an illusion” evidenced by high government spending and deficits, and the lack of progress on the major projects Carney pledged would be built at speeds not seen in generations.
Poilievre said the opposition has to fight for the people who voted Conservative in the last election — in record numbers, he reminded the crowd. The conservative movement, he said, must decide what kind of country it wants to fight for.
“Do we want state-controlled crony capitalism or do we want free enterprise capitalism?” he asked.
He argued that special interest groups have outsized power under Liberal rule, and their reliance on lobbying and government handouts means they’re focused on maintaining the status quo.
“And that’s exactly why they want to stop and change me,” he said.
Since losing the election last April, Poilievre has faced criticism from within the conservative movement, and even within the Conservative caucus, that he failed to adapt when a new Liberal leader and a new U.S. president changed the central question of the campaign.
Pundits and party insiders have privately and publicly urged him to change his message and tone for over a year.
While the Conservative leader did adjust in recent months, with two international trips and a softer tone in some long-form independent media interviews, he has never fully committed to changing the playbook that saw him push Justin Trudeau from office and had the party on the cusp of winning a massive majority government in late 2024.
On Thursday, he stuck with some of his greatest hits.
“The illusion was that Mark Carney was not as woke as Justin Trudeau, and certainly he is not quite as nauseating,” Poilievre said, earning a laugh from the crowd.
The room was also filled for an evening discussion about “fortress North America” with Conservative MP Shuvaloy Majumdar and former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo, who was also the director of the CIA, offered a warning for the Liberal government and its efforts to rebuild Canada’s relationship with China, which had been under strain since 2017.
“It’s misguided, it’s very short-sighted,” Pompeo said.
He argued China’s Communist Party does not share values with Western countries.
Canada, he said, should “move past the irritation” with U.S. President Donald Trump and remember which countries do share its values.
Pompeo also said there are “no angels” in trade negotiations, and noted the initial Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement talks that he was involved in were hard-fought.
“In spite of the noise — and I get it, I worked for President Trump, so I get it. I would wake up every morning, check my phone, make sure I had a job, and then go into the office,” he said.
Pompeo said he’d urge Canadians and Americans to watch “the through-lines that have existed over decades” in the relationship.
“Canada is important to the United States, we are incredibly important to Canada,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 7, 2026.
Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press
