Talk of Conservative ‘infighting’ misses the bigger story: the party is messily reinventing itself

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Boessenkool said it’s forced him to ponder whether any of the lessons the party learned in the Harper government can even be applied to the current environment.

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“I’ve had to think hard about how I participate in Conservative politics now, because the Harper formula isn’t the right formula right now,” he said.

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Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner speaks during question period in the House of Commons on June 18, 2026. Photo by Hyungcheol Park/Postmedia. Photo by HYUNGCHEOL PARK /Postmedia

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The arguments within the conservative movement have also taken place online and in public, with even elected officials weighing in. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, in a long social media post last week, blamed the ongoing grief from the 2025 federal election for some of the infighting in her party.

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“Judging from the tone of the public discourse that has been taking place between some luminaries of Canada’s political right since the Liberals solidified their majority, not everyone is moving through the stages of grief of this loss on the same timeline,” she wrote.

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Rempel Garner doesn’t get into specifics, but there have been several public conflagrations among Tories since last year’s election.

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The first was the bunfight that erupted between Poilievre’s team and older-school Conservatives as the party failed to stop the Liberals under Carney from marching to a fourth term. Teneycke, a longtime adviser to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, publicly criticized Poilievre’s campaign during the election. That was followed by MP Jamil Jivani, a young Ontario firebrand, insulting Teneycke and Ford, accusing them of hyping up Carney’s Liberals.

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A new round erupted after the B.C. Conservative leadership race earlier this year, which saw Teneycke managing the bid of losing candidate Caroline Elliott, with Poilievre joking that the winner had beaten “liberal lobbyists from out east,” which most people took to mean Teneycke. A few days later, Elliott urged everyone to settle down and asked Poilievre to “unite” Canadian conservatives.

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Rempel Garner wrote that she understood the frayed nerves among Conservatives, but said it was extremely counter-productive for the party’s ultimate goal of winning elections.

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“And so, the wrong path for our movement to take after this loss is descending into yet another round of prolonged, grief-driven, frustrated and puerile inward tent pissing,” she wrote.

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Part of the problem for the party is that social media has all the squabbles happening in full view, where historically they might have played out in backrooms and Ottawa bars.

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Ben Woodfinden, Poilievre’s former director of communications, lamented what he described as a poorly timed post on X despairing about the “intellectual poverty” he sees in “all sorts of conservative camps and factions right now.” He regrets it, he wrote in a subsequent online post, “because it ended up being used across media as an example of online conservative infighting.”

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But Woodfinden went on to complain about another consequence of duelling in public on social media, which he called the “online-ification of conservative politics.” Not only can everyone now see the party’s fights, but they have taken on a more personal and heated tone, reflecting the online coliseum in which they are being fought.

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“Everyone knows social media rewards the dumb fight, the public airing of grievance, the dunk that clears a thousand likes,” he wrote. “This world sorts for engagement, not ideas.”

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Woodfinden described some of the extreme voices on the online right as “a cancer on the project of winning.”

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