When Kory Teneycke went on a podcast and dismantled Pierre Poilievre’s political operation more effectively than any Liberal commentator has managed in four years, the left applauded. It was sharp, it was funny, and it was accurate. It was also delivered by a man who runs a government relations firm, managed three winning campaigns for Doug Ford, and has every professional incentive to keep the federal Conservative leadership weak and the provincial one strong. The praise was real. So were the vested interests behind it.
Vested interests are the oldest story in politics. What is new is the configuration. Canadian politics right now is full of forces that are somewhat inexplicable while being completely visible. The operators are on podcasts. The pollsters are on television. The lobbies publish their platforms on public websites. The money announces itself. And still the outcomes make no conventional sense, because the game being played is rarely the game being described.
A leader who survives by accomplishing nothing
Start at the federal level with the longevity of Pierre Poilievre, which is inexplicable given his standing with voters and entirely explicable given who benefits from it. The rest of the political ecosystem has no incentive to disrupt him. The longer Poilievre leads the Conservative Party, the longer the Conservatives remain a non-factor. He has no discernible position beyond criticism. His legislative record since becoming an MP is close to empty. His method is to pick a target of the day, the week, or the month, swing at it, and miss with everyone except the constituency he already holds. His own side’s most credentialed operator called his 2025 campaign malpractice, publicly, mid-campaign, and paid no professional price for it. That tells you where the real alignments sit.
The pattern repeats down the ladder
The same architecture filters down to the provincial and municipal levels. Doug Ford has turned distraction into a governing philosophy: pick a fight, cut a ribbon, change the channel. In Toronto, Brad Bradford placed eighth in the last mayoral race, behind Chloe Brown, (disclosure: I worked on Brown’s campaign). He has since travelled from seeming progressive to hard-right, well-funded candidate, again without any discernible political position doing the moving. The position is downstream of the funding. The funding is downstream of the operators.
October’s ballots run the full repertoire
The municipal races heading into October are the pattern in miniature. In Pickering, Lisa Robinson is running for mayor after two years of integrity commissioner sanctions, more than a year of suspended pay, published comments disparaging Black History Month and LGBTQ+ advocacy, and a council forced to meet online because of threats from her supporters. Her campaign centres on defunding a hotel housing asylum seekers, and her friendliest coverage comes from the same right-wing media ecosystem that absorbed the convoy. In Toronto the choreography ran the other way. John Tory considered a comeback after being courted by business figures, then stepped aside. Michael Ford weighed a run, took a photographed coffee with Bradford across the street from City Hall, then stepped aside too. The centre-right lane was cleared, by hand, for Brad Bradford of all people. His vacated council seat in Beaches-East York now features a longtime television journalist, Natalie Johnson, running almost entirely on traffic, in a city confronting a housing emergency, a shelter crisis, and the compounding arithmetic of decades of near-zero property tax increases running alongside a police budget that grows every year. In the same riding this week, John Tory Jr. abandoned his bid for the federal Liberal nomination. One east-end postal code, three levels of government, and the full repertoire on display: dynastic succession, lane management, single-issue distraction.
Around all of it swirl the new advocacy vehicles. A Better City Toronto borrowed the organizational form of groups like More Neighbours and Progress Toronto and turned it rightward, campaigning against the property tax increase, against bike lanes, and now running attack ads against the mayor, with funding and provenance that remain largely opaque. Where are these people coming from? On the evidence, they come from the operator class, the lobbies, and the movement infrastructure the convoy left behind.
Second acts crowd the Mississauga ballot
Mississauga completes the picture. Bonnie Crombie, who left the mayor’s chair mid-term to lead the Ontario Liberals, lost her own seat, and stepped down after a weak leadership review, registered this week to take her old job back, opening with a shot at incumbent Carolyn Parrish over her comments on police. Parrish is herself a former federal Liberal MP running a second political life at city hall, and the challengers behind them include Dipika Damerla, a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister. Crombie’s entry lands against the backdrop of Parrish’s public war with entrepreneur Mohamad Fakih, whose company held the naming rights to the city’s largest venue for eight years and who has donated millions to Mississauga over that period. (Disclosure: I run some of Fakih’s charitable initiatives). Fakih is now suing the mayor and the city for defamation, and the city has countersued. Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives has no purchase here. Canadian politics is almost entirely second acts, third acts, and encores, the same names cycling between levels of government and back again, and you genuinely need a scorecard to keep up. The scorecard is the point. A system this recursive rewards the people who already hold the map.
The operator class
Behind the candidates sit the operators and the pollster-commentators: Teneycke, Nick Kouvalis, David Coletto, Frank Graves. They carry far more weight than most Canadians would guess, and they are rarely objective. They run firms with clients. They manage campaigns while appearing as neutral analysts. They shape the narrative window inside which their clients then operate. The Canadian political commentary ecosystem is small enough that the people describing the game and the people playing it are frequently the same people, sometimes in the same week.
Behind the operators sit the lobbies and the pro-business groups. Build Canada, the entrepreneur-backed policy movement, has its imprint on Eric Lombardi’s Ontario Liberal leadership bid. Lombardi chaired Build Toronto, the movement’s first municipal chapter, before entering the race, and he reads as more conservative than Liberal on most axes, which has fed speculation about what his candidacy is actually for. Bradford, meanwhile, has been a vocal supporter of pro-Israel advocacy groups, and the online commentators boosting him draw heavily from the technology industry and startup culture. Everyone can see all of this. It is disclosed, posted, published. It changes nothing about how the coverage frames these candidacies.
Then there is the American layer, most visible in Alberta, where Danielle Smith maintains a set of relationships, alliances, and loyalties with American conservative media and political networks that would have ended a premier’s career a generation ago. Those networks extend into the recent BC Conservative leadership race, narrowly won by Kerry-Lynne Findlay over Caroline Elliott, 51 to 49 on the fourth ballot, a result that has produced open hostility between the camps on social media ever since. A provincial leadership race in British Columbia now runs on the emotional fuel and factional grammar of American movement politics.
The attention basement
The bottom of the diagram is where the whole cycle drains. Call it the attention basement. The internet commentators live down there, fed a steady diet of poll clips, borrowed talking points, and factional grievance, which they metabolize into engagement with minimal accountability and maximum incentive to inflame.
They sort cleanly into two categories. There are the genuine ones, people with ethics who do the unpaid work of civic attention because they believe someone should, who read the staff reports, sit through the meetings, and advocate in the interest of others. And there are the rest, who work in the interest of themselves or of power, and who have discovered that a serious-sounding handle is cheaper than a serious record. IntegrityTO, the account Daniel Tate operates, dresses a constituency of one in the costume of an institution and attacks every progressive policy that moves. Very little in the basement is organic. The positions arrive pre-chewed from the operator class, the talking points are laundered through the poll releases, the outrage runs on a schedule, and the commentators sincerely believe they thought of it all themselves, which is the most efficient feature of the entire arrangement.
The test for sorting the basement is simple and it never fails. If you are not speaking truth to power, you work for power. Some of them draw a salary for it. Most do it for free, which power appreciates even more.
The convoy is the origin point
Here is the argument: most of this traces back to the convoy.
The 2022 convoy either created or exposed, and certainly exacerbated, a set of divisions in Canadian society that our political system has been metabolizing ever since. Vaccination became identity. Public health became tyranny. The jail sentences eventually handed to convoy leaders became martyrdom material, and figures from that movement now hold prominent roles in the Rebel Media ecosystem, converting grievance into permanent content. The convoy proved three things to the operator class at once. First, that a durable, monetizable, emotionally committed constituency existed outside the traditional party structures. Second, that this constituency could be reached, organized, and funded through channels the legacy parties did not control. Third, that serving this constituency was a career, whether or not it ever won anything.
Poilievre’s leadership is the institutional capture of that discovery. He won the Conservative leadership by embracing the convoy, and he has governed the party ever since as if the convoy constituency were the country. It is large enough to guarantee his survival and small enough to guarantee his defeat. That is the trap, and it is also the business model. Every operator, pollster, and commentator in the ecosystem now works with, around, or against that constituency. The BC race was fought over it. Smith’s Alberta courts it. Ford triangulates against it while borrowing its techniques. The federal Liberals, for their part, have faced no serious opposition since the Harper years precisely because the convoy realignment locked the Conservative movement into a base that cannot grow.
And Harper himself has moved on to the next phase. The former prime minister now chairs a venture capital firm investing in Israeli security and surveillance technology, some of it deployed in Gaza. The man who built the modern Conservative Party has migrated from managing the state to funding the tools that states use against populations. The through line from the Harper PMO to the current moment runs through the same small network of operators, several of whom appear elsewhere in this piece.
Government dissolves into politics
The consequences of all this are not abstract. Provincial conservative governments have spent a decade hollowing out the programs that hold Canadian life together, from social services to the cutting of firefighting capacity ahead of record wildfire seasons. In Ontario, the current MPP expense scandal, in which a cabinet minister billed taxpayers thousands for downtown Toronto hotel rooms while living in the city, would have ended a minister’s career in any other government at any other point in Canadian history. The Ford government’s response has been a hiring freeze, a promise to repay, and an assurance that it is looking into it. The scandal will pass because the machinery that would once have made it fatal has been repurposed for other work.
The whole arrangement resembles the Backrooms, the piece of internet folklore now headed for film, in which a person slips through a gap in reality into an endless maze of empty yellow rooms, fluorescent-lit, humid, familiar, and wrong. The rooms look like offices. They connect to nothing. Every hallway opens onto another hallway, every door leads to more of the same, and something is hunting you the whole time. Canadian politics has become that space. Everything is lit. Everything is visible. The corridors go nowhere, exit is not on offer, and the things waiting deeper in are terrifying.
What we see is not what is happening. What is happening is the dilution of the work of government, at every level, into politics: infighting, backroom dealing, narrative management, and worse. The operators prosper. The pollsters prosper. The lobbies get their candidates. The commentators get their content. And the Canadian population absorbs the cost, in emergency rooms and rent cheques and evacuation orders, while seeing very little in the way of solutions on offer from anyone, because solutions are the one product this system no longer manufactures.
Jen Evans is Principal of Pattern Pulse AI and co-founder of Tech Reset Canada.
