Margareta Dovgal: The Canadian right's path to institutional power

Conservatives have a supply-side problem in discourse infrastructure, not a demand-side problem in public appetite.

(‘Laying out the Grit Campaign,’ 1891.)

The Canadian right outfundraises and outnumbers its opponents in raw enthusiasm.

Yet it keeps losing elections. Public appetite is not the problem, nor is it an absence of ideas. The problem is a failure to build infrastructure that converts conviction into power.

Let us stop standing in the cold, peering enviously through the glass, and wondering if we can break it. Instead, let us build a fortress and a machine that renders the glass castles of the left irrelevant.

Good ideas in isolation fail to take root. You need sustained, targeted effort to build and maintain the infrastructure across both electoral politics and civic society.

The beating heart of a movement is a community of voices, animated by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing. Its ability to bring people together and mobilise them is the circulatory system.

In another life, I organised for big-L liberalism. I was young, and had my earnest opinions and misplaced hopes. As I aged, I realised that where I really wanted to go was toward a Canada governed by economic pragmatism and social realism.

If you talk to people on the street and at the doors, this is actually where most Canadians have landed. Over several election cycles, Conservatives have beaten the drum and gotten out the vote for a politics that remains conspicuously absent from the halls of power. This is a politics that recognises the failures of the status quo, sees a better path forward, and is prepared to find the people to back it.

Despite the widespread grassroots support, and the overwhelming sense that Canadians want change, we have fallen short of government.

Let us dispense with the fatalism of “voters know best.” Yes, they do. But that does not absolve us of the imperative to try and gain their support through every means necessary.

We need a movement that is equipped to drive forward on the issues of the present, and to convert that into votes across the country. That goes for Conservative heartlands like Portage, Lisgar, Liberal strongholds like Vancouver Centre, or, most critically of all, the dozens of crucial swing ridings that make and shape the direction of government in any election.

With Carney as prime minister, those who listen exclusively to older generations have grown complacent. They wax poetic about his statesmanship. They lean in, rather conspiratorially, to opine, “Poilievre is not it.”

Why are we still bothering to listen? Is it a failure of imagination? Or is it because we have been out-organised, campaign to campaign, to our never-ending chagrin?

From where I stand, we should not be listening to the perspectives of yesterday’s establishment and a generationally sanctioned centrist movement that has decisively failed the needs of Canadians today. That just is not it.

But we are stuck because Liberals keep winning in the only contest that actually matters.

To succeed, those on the right must concern themselves with carving out a rhetorical space in which vibrant, enthusiastic debate can take place. After all, the body politic is a reflection of the discursive agenda we allow and cultivate. Politics, then, is a reflection of the conversations we are brave enough to start, and patient enough to carry through.

A great irony of our predicament is that the most rigorous diagnosis of what ails us came from a Marxist. Antonio Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s, understood that political power is downstream of cultural hegemony.

Whoever controls the institutions of meaning-making controls the boundaries of the politically possible. The left read Gramsci and built accordingly.

The right read Hayek and assumed the market would sort it out. It did not.

The sharpest objection to this sequencing is that Trudeau père did not wait for cultural hegemony. He won office and built it from the top down through the Charter and its institutional progeny. That project took forty years to mature, and we do not have forty years, which is precisely why the groundwork has to start before the win, not after it.

Bringing people together for necessary conversations is the first step. That needs to be backed up by action. Within any effective political machine, you start by identifying prospective volunteers, before getting them out for your cause. Ideally, your corps is battle-ready, skirmish-trained. This never happens by accident, and requires field strategy and abundant opportunities for skills development. Having come from the other side, I am qualified to say that the raw talent and organising instinct are here. On many campaigns, it is there in spades as a systematised practice.

But it is also evident that the whole-of-party machine that the other side has to offer is not there yet on the right. Anyone who has been on a CPC campaign during a federal writ will understand what I am talking about. In a given race, effective field operations can swing you by up to five per cent of the vote.

That is not the end of the world. One argument goes that, theoretically, you can campaign purely on the air war and still win an election.

Incidentally, that was the argument shared with me by the campaign manager for a hugely successful Metro Vancouver municipal campaign in the last local cycle. They raised and spent several million dollars, funnelled it all into radio ads, and barely knocked on any doors. They won big anyway.

How many ridings nationally were decided by less than five per cent of the vote? Sixty, which is certainly enough to form a majority government.

A good local campaign that reaches half or more of eligible voters does not just motivate likely voters to come out. It also signals to the other side’s unmotivated voters that it probably is not worth their time to bother.

This is also Schelling’s deterrence logic applied to inter-party game theory, where a visible, credible ground presence changes the opponent’s calculus before a single ballot is cast. A campaign that has already knocked half the doors in a riding cannot be bluffing. The other side has to decide whether to match that investment or write the seat off. Most would just write it off.

A more compelling argument, in my view, goes beyond the local margin, and emphasises that a strong, well-organised party machinery is a force unto itself.

Organising as a principle is worth investing in. There are some truly exceptional organisers, worth their weight in gold, within the tent. Some of them are embedded at national headquarters or OLO, many tirelessly fighting the good fight in their home communities.

So why, then, does the status quo, as relayed to me by scores of local Conservative organisers at the last convention, appear to fall short?

There is a machinery. It derives its greatest strength from a uniquely committed base that wants nothing more than to change government and return common-sense politics back to office. The fundraising results, which year after year send Liberals into a syncope, validate that our base is highly motivated and established. In 2024 alone, we smashed records with $41.7 million raised, nearly triple the Liberal take. In 2025, we hit $48 million.

The armies of volunteers, young and old, are also incredibly inspiring. For all the yammering about influencers at convention, the real story should be about the several thousand delegates who, like me, paid an arm and a leg, took time off work, and came to vote on policy.

Consider the vast alumni network the party sits on, former staffers, campaign managers, ex-candidates, lobbyists who cut their teeth in Conservative politics. They are not activated in any systematic way during elections. If they are helping at all, it is because someone knows someone through individual relationships, not party infrastructure. The Liberals, by contrast, identify, organise, and deploy their alumni from the centre, with former MPs, lobbyists, financial advisers, and operatives. Most vitally, even when not perfectly executed, there is a refined volunteer recruitment and mobilisation workflow, with copious training resources and practical skill sharing on tap from HQ.

It is coordinated and deliberate, and it is one of the reasons they keep winning

The opportunity here is enormous: better coordination, systematic talent deployment, and institutional memory that actually survives from one campaign cycle to the next. Get those right, and the gap closes fast.

Having been in opposition for a spell and a bit, it is understandable that efforts to reinvigorate systems and processes have been tried, tested, and purged with a succession of party leaders. It is also understandable that the grassroots has grown suspicious of the central party apparatus.

It would not be a party descended from Reform if scepticism of authority was not deep in its DNA. But as I often like to say, everyone loves a competent and benevolent dictator. If the Conservative Party can deliver competent, reliable, well-administered processes from the very top, and take its field operations to the next level, the grassroots will embrace them, utility first and faith to follow. Market logic should and will succeed in this, as with many things.

Douglass North won a Nobel for proving what political philosophers long intuited, that institutions do not derive their legitimacy from the ideas they profess, but from the credibility of their repeated performance. Deliver competently, and trust compounds like capital.

The other side offers a masterclass on how to win, if not how not to govern. We should strip-mine their methods for the machinery required to unite Canadians, organise for victory, and secure the government we actually need.

To be clear, scraping the best of their methods does not mean importing their culture. There is nothing ideologically Liberal about a functioning database or a volunteer activation pipeline that actually works. These are tools, not values, and we can adapt them to fit the character of our movement without leaving cutting-edge practice on the table.

Credit where it is due, the leader’s own convention remarks, on empowering riding associations, holding earlier and open nominations, and listening to the grassroots intelligence that only comes from ears and feet on the ground, suggest the appetite for this kind of reform exists at the top. The question is whether the infrastructure can be built fast enough to match the will that clearly exists.

On discourse

Organising gets people to the door, but discourse is what we say when it opens.

We have been caught flat-footed twice. In 2021, we attempted to say everything to everyone and said nothing of consequence to anyone, sleepwalking into a trap laid by an opportunistic opponent. In 2024, Trump 2.0 crashed headlong into Canada’s agenda and handed a flagging Liberal Party the greatest gift imaginable. The common denominator is the absence of a discursive infrastructure robust enough to absorb hits without collapsing.

Whenever the next election is held, whether Carney feels brave or desperate, and wants a snap, or whether he opts to hold on, do not underestimate the public’s readiness for bold, even transgressive ideas. What they will not forgive is inauthenticity and inconsistency.

Those involved in the risk management exercise that is political staffing are simultaneously the best equipped to drive this, and also the most exposed.

Radical left-captured institutions and media are relentless. Their reach and saturation can make us believe their views reflect what Canadians really think. Look no further than the zeal with which every brave and noble journalism degree holder with a CBC byline fought for the medical sterilisation of gender non-conforming children. If these voices had ever been truly mainstream, rather than astroturfed with great pizazz, the recent collapse in public support, and the rapid disappearance of pronouns from email signatures and social media handles, would not make much sense.

Like Einstein insisting there must be hidden variables to explain why reality refused to conform to his model, leftists rely on the bogeyman of “far right extremism” to explain why their ideas fall flat when their elaborate schemes to force-feed them to people do not work.

In recent years, we have seen a veritable explosion of alternative media vehicles, many of them welcome and needed additions to the right of centre. There is an unfortunate limiting factor that curtails their broader market appeal. I deem this the “Three Axis Problem” of the media right; ideological (based vs. woke), aesthetic (lit vs. cringe), and intelligible (grokable vs. ungrokable).

Many newly founded outlets designed to cater to a chunk of the population that has felt unrepresented offer ‘based’ rhetoric that people can grok. But the cringe verges on excessive, and those who might otherwise share the ideas contained within instead turn their noses up. We need more options for every kind of consumer.

The left eschews ‘based,’ by definition, and depending on the outlet and organisation, they sometimes excel at the combination of intelligibility and aesthetics.

To fully breach containment, the conservative movement needs a fully fledged media and third-party validation ecosystem that is based and lit, while spanning the gamut of grokability. A deliberate division of labour, targeting many possible audiences, gives the operator class the requisite air cover and the substance to boot.

In practice, this requires people with means to fund it, and people with plans to build it. Election financing is tightly constrained, and a motivated capital base should be encouraged to invest in all the underlying civic society infrastructure that enables right-wing discourse to flourish.

Our fundraising dominance today is real but structurally transactional. Twenty-dollar donors respond to urgency, not to long-horizon ecosystem building. The movement will also need to cultivate a different kind of capital, from a different kind of giver, willing to invest in infrastructure that pays out over election cycles rather than news cycles.

The results we can expect are a rapid normalisation of our issues as they reach a populace hungry for reason, meaning, and vision, currently subsisting on a diet of nihilistic slop and doomsaying.

Let us also put to bed, for good, the premise that easily popped trial balloons are any way to test the political viability of an idea.

If you have not deeply cultivated the landscape onto which that idea is released, you will not get results any better than scattering seed on bare rock. Ecologists have a term, succession, for how forests do not grow on granite. Before a single tree can take root, pioneer species (lichens, mosses, the unglamorous organisms nobody notices) have to colonise the surface, break it down, and build the soil that makes complex life possible. Skip that stage, and nothing grows, no matter how good the seed. The media ecosystem, the civic organisations, the pub nights and the publications are the pioneer species of political change. They are not the grand ideas themselves. They are what makes the ground capable of receiving them.

To illustrate the point concretely, take constitutional reform. Most Conservatives I speak with concede that many of our core legal systems are broken. Our judiciary is stuffed with activists. Our constitution has been judicially stretched so far beyond its original democratic mandate that it now functions less as a guarantor of fundamental freedoms than as a vehicle for progressive policy outcomes no legislature ever voted for.

We cannot imagine what a new constitutional frame could look like because the conditions under which it could be properly hashed out have not been created yet. Even the most elaborate arguments for what is broken, and how to fix it, are not very sticky. Released into the wild, they do not yield political results any better than tossing spaghetti at a wall and watching it slide down.

Only by telling the story of what Canada is, and what it can become with a foundation of national pride, can we begin to unpack whether our governing documents are actually fit for our next 150 years.

As Emma Haynes has argued, apathy toward one’s own country corrodes the very basis for wanting to preserve it, and without a foundation of historical knowledge, there is no ground on which to build the case for making it better.

Poilievre himself reached for this instinct at convention, invoking Joseph Howe’s insistence that a wise nation preserves its records, decorates the tombs of its illustrious dead, and fosters national pride by perpetual reference to the sacrifices and glories of the past. The impulse is exactly right. What is needed now is the sustained discursive ecosystem that ensures this is not just a convention applause line, but the foundation of a governing philosophy.

A conservatism solely immersed in the issues of the economy and law and order was a conservatism for a different time. For this era, the adoption of a new formulation of the right is an existential matter. The promise of freedom, as a principle, is the glue, and the vision of a beautiful society is the foundation on which a political reality for Canada can be built.

Every durable political project in history understood this instinctively. The American founders started with a classical republican vision of civic virtue lifted straight from Cicero and Cato. The Bolsheviks, for all their horrors, grasped that you needed constructivist art and revolutionary poetry before you could have a new society. Even de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was an aesthetic project before it was a constitutional one, a deliberate act of national mythmaking designed to make France feel like itself again after the humiliation of Vichy.

The right keeps trying to win on policy platforms without first articulating what the country should feel like. That is the cart before the horse, and it is why we keep losing.

What that society looks like, its culture, its institutions, its relationship between citizen and state, is the question this movement exists to answer.

We have already lost decades to a conservatism that believed good policy would speak for itself, that the institutions would hold, that the culture would take care of its own. It did not; they did not; and it will not. The Canada that many of us grew up believing was permanent turned out to be a set of conditions that required active maintenance, and we let them erode while we argued about tax rates.

We have the contours. The details are what the next decade of work is for.

We will gain no momentum, and hold none, if we keep dipping our toes into appealing ideas, getting cold feet, and running for cover like cowards when the pressure from the behemoth of the institutional left is too much to bear.

A revitalised ecosystem of right-wing civic organisations is also where the talent pipeline gets built. The left excels at creating opportunities to develop and nurture young people, throwing them jobs, internships, and career ladders to climb. We need to ensure that conservative movement work is a viable life path for talented young people, not just a volunteer hobby or quick stint in staffing before corporate life.

Without Diminishment intends to be part of the answer. Not as a party organ, but as an institution that identifies, sharpens, and deploys the people and ideas that the movement cannot afford to leave on the bench. What that looks like in practice is a conversation we are having, and one we invite you into.

The Canadian right has a supply-side problem in discourse infrastructure, not a demand-side problem in public appetite.

None of this absolves us of the harder conversation about whether we are saying the right things to the right people in the right way. Infrastructure is the force multiplier, not the force itself, and a machine that amplifies the wrong message just gets us to the wrong destination faster.

The sceptic’s retort is that Canadians are not desperate enough yet to embrace anything genuinely transformative. But the whole point of building now is that by the time the crisis is undeniable, the movement that already has its architecture in place is the one that gets to define the response.

For all of my jabs at the league of anti-civilisational dimwits who have taken our country on a path to doom, the real antagonist is conservative complacency. We cannot afford to take for granted that strong fundraising results, good candidates, and zesty ideas deployed sparingly, only when the masses are begging for them, will carry us to victory.

We need to construct the very conditions necessary and sufficient for our success.

We must build the ecosystem, deliberately and ambitiously, starting now, within which our movement does not just win an election, but reshapes the country that follows it.

Margareta Dovgal is a senior advisor at Without Diminishment. She is a public policy commentator specializing in energy, climate, and economic development.