The Conservatives need to ask: Why do we want to win – as Conservatives?

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Now is the summer of our discontent. It has been a dismal few weeks for the federal Conservatives. Party members have seemed more concerned with settling internal scores, their leader foremost among them, rather than fighting the Liberals.

Even as Donald Trump has been hitting Canadian industries with tariffs and threatening to annex the country, conservative MPs and “influencers” have been popping up to take the President’s side. Others pursue crank causes like vaccine denial.

The party itself cannot agree on a coherent vision of what it stands for. Some want it to continue to argue for lower taxes, smaller government and freer markets. Others dismiss these bread-and-butter concerns as outdated and irrelevant, arguing instead for a robust role for government in stamping conservative cultural values (assuming conservatives could agree on what those are) on the population.

And through it all the party continues to decline in public support. Polls now have the Conservatives at about 35 per cent on average, down from 40 per cent at the start of the year and nine points behind the Liberals. Their leader, Pierre Poilievre, trails the Liberal Leader, Mark Carney, by 36 points in one poll, 18 points in another.

And, looming at the end of the month, the prospect of three federal by-elections, one of them, Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, a closely fought Conservative seat (the incumbent, Richard Martel, was recently appointed to the Senate, the fifth Conservative MP to have left the parliamentary caucus in the last nine months, though unlike the other four, Mr. Martel will sit as a Conservative). Should they lose that seat, the cycle of infighting and despair will renew.

Still, it’s not all bad news for Mr. Poilievre. A Nanos poll finds that Canadians can’t see other prospective Conservative leaders doing any better.

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More seriously, the NDP have begun to pick themselves up off the mat. There has been a small but discernible uptick in support for the party since it elected its new leader, Avi Lewis, in the spring. The largest external factor in the Conservatives woes – Mr. Carney’s abrupt shift to the right since he became Prime Minister – has begun to cost the Liberals support on their left.

Still, it’s a trade-off that, on current terms, Mr. Carney should be happy to make. The latest 338Canada.com projection has the Liberals winning close to 200 seats, if an election were held today.

All this has Conservatives in an unusually reflective mood. The reverberations from last year’s shocking election defeat – the party had been leading by more than 20 points in the last polls taken under Mr. Carney’s predecessor – are still being felt. Broadly speaking, the party is divided between those in despair over the loss, and those in denial.

An essay by the Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner has attracted some attention, in which she advises the party to avoid “descending into yet another round of prolonged, grief-driven, frustrated, and puerile inward tent pissing,” which is to say exactly what they have been doing.

Rather, she says, “we must accept that we lost, and continue getting on with the business of winning.” Because, after all, “the entire point of a political movement’s existence is to form government.” And here I must stop the estimable Ms. Rempel Garner, even before she goes on to say the rest of that sentence (“and advance the priorities and interests of the members”).

Lots of political movements have points to their existence other than forming a government. The NDP is one example. So are the Bloc Québécois. So are the Greens. So, arguably, are the Tories, given most of their existence has been spent not forming a government.

Parties can have enormous impact on policy, even if they do not hold office. Would Mr. Carney have made his big right turn were the Conservatives not threatening to destroy the government he inherited? By contrast, what of significance did Stephen Harper’s government contribute to Canadian public policy in nine years in office, other than to prepare the way for Justin Trudeau?

Still, I grant that, on the whole, it is better to be in power than out of it, and that a party like the Conservatives, having tasted power on occasion, is unlikely to be satisfied until it has tasted it again. How, then, can the Conservatives win?

For Ms. Rempel Garner, the answer is obvious: “Political parties win when they are focused on winning.” And here again I must gently demur. Political parties are almost always focused on winning. And yet most of them, in any given election, lose. Let me propose an alternative: Political parties win when they know why they want to win.

The unity, the discipline and other qualities Ms. Rempel Garner urges upon her party are all very well, but they don’t just materialize out of the ether. Parties find the will to win when they have an urgent purpose to achieve by doing so, a purpose so compelling that it leads them to set aside their differences and focus on the common objective.

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For the Liberals, that urgent purpose is obvious: It is to hold power, more or less for its own sake. But again, for the Liberals that is a reasonable prospect. The party can recruit outstanding talent with the promise that they are more likely than not to end up in cabinet. It can discourage dissent with the warning that it is likely to put that prospect in jeopardy.

The Conservatives cannot. Not only can they not hold out the promise of imminent power, either as a lure or a threat, but they have more reasons to be disunited in the first place, being a coalition of outsiders more or less by definition.

So they need something more. Ms. Rempel Garner says “the first step to winning for Canadian conservatives is believing that winning is possible.” I say the first step to winning is to believe that winning is necessary – that the country so desperately needs a change of direction from that offered by the Liberals that the Conservatives must find a way to give it to them.

But notice what that means: not just winning, but a change of direction. When Conservatives ask themselves, as they must, “why do I want to win,” what they are really asking themselves is “why do I want to win as a Conservative?”

If winning were all that matters, after all, they could do as those four MPs did, and join the Liberals. Part of the self-definition of Conservatives, then, inevitably consists in thinking through their differences with the Liberals: Why am I a Conservative, and not a Liberal?

I get that part of the answer will often be: I cast my lot with the Conservatives long ago. If I want to run things, this is my only shot. But part of it, surely is: I want to run things in a different way than they.

What are the foundations of a Conservative alternative? One, to be sure, is to be an alternative: not just to oppose, but to present a government in waiting that Canadians can turn to when needed. In Canada, this has become a matter of some urgency, not just because the Liberals have won the four out of the last four elections, but because they have won 25 out of the last 38. Most of the worst pathologies of our politics stem from that imbalance. Canada needs permanently contestable politics: The health of our democracy depends on it.

Indeed, much policy debate can be framed around this fact. The Liberals are never going to deliver serious tax reform, or cut off the vast archipelago of businesses and interest groups and cultural organizations and media outlets from public subsidy, or open protected industries to foreign competition: Their hold on power depends too much on maintaining these sorts of clientelist relationships.

Neither are they likely to rein in public spending in line with revenues any time soon, or get the provinces off the federal dole, for the same reason. (The Chrétien Liberals did it, but only when we were literally about to run out of buyers for our bonds.)

So the Conservatives have two reasons to differentiate themselves from the Liberals on these points: both because they are necessary in public policy terms, and because they are necessary to dismantling the apparatus of Liberal rule.

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A robustly, self-confidently, identifiably conservative Conservative party is not only the kind of party that can make a useful contribution to Canadian life, but it is probably the only kind that can permanently alter the system of “one-and-a-half party rule” the Liberals have maintained since the time of Laurier.

But here I run the risk of repeating the “pundit’s fallacy” – the idea that the set of policies I might prefer as policy are also inevitably the most politically advantageous. They are not. Many of these will be a hard sell with the general public, and certainly to well-placed pressure groups within their number.

But, well, what’s the point, otherwise? If you are not going to offer an alternative to the Liberals, why be a Conservative at all? Without a solid core of conviction, there is nothing to unify and mobilize Conservatives to fight for.

That doesn’t just mean bellowing slogans at an uncomprehending public, and congratulating yourself for your purity. But neither does it mean, as too many people in politics seem to believe, assembling whatever policies you think might attract a sufficient number of voters to your side, no matter whether they make sense individually or hang together collectively.

The point of a political party is not just to win, but to win over: to persuade people to support you because they believe in the principles you believe in, or at least are willing to let you have a go at them. That requires tenacity – if at first you don’t succeed and all that – and it requires a certain moderation of tone: People will sign on to radical change, sometimes, but they won’t sign on with a bunch of fanatics.

And yes, it will require some moderation of principle, as well: None of us gets everything we want in this life. But that should not be the first choice, nor should it be the last. How much to concede to expediency will depend on how central the policy in question is to your purpose in public life, and on how certain you are that it simply cannot be sold to the public – and not that you haven’t yet thought of a way to sell it to them.

The greatest success, in politics as in business, goes to the entrepreneur: the person who persuades people to want, not what they already know they want, but what it never occurred to them to want until then. Politics, it is often said, is the art of the possible. Not so. It is the art of expanding the possible.