ADAMS: One year, six events, and the same lesson: the Conservative Party doesn’t want adults
A year ago, I walked into a Pierre Poilievre rally at an Oshawa airport hangar expecting political theatre and walked out with an appetite for Arby's and a headache. What I didn't expect was to spend the next year documenting not a political movement, but a psychological operation.
I've now attended six major Conservative events: two Poilievre rallies, three Restore the North events, and the 2026 Calgary Conservative Convention. I've stood in lines, worn the merch, asked the questions, been mocked, been welcomed, been edited out of Instagram clips, and been stared at like I owed a stranger an explanation for my existence.
And here's what a year inside this movement has taught me: the Conservative Party of Canada is no longer in the business of winning elections. It's in the business of manufacturing victims and managing their dysregulation.
Let me explain how it works.
At the 2026 convention in Calgary, speaker after speaker offered their diagnosis for why the party lost an eminently winnable election. The answers were a symphony of external blame: the Liberals cheated, the CBC was biased, Mark Carney lied, the media divided us.
Notice what was missing. Not a single speaker stood up and said, "Perhaps we lost because one of our delegates has demanded to know a random person's gender outside a single-person washroom." Not one suggested that maybe, just maybe, a movement that contains people who believe Buddhist statues are "demonic"—Harrison Faulkner's word, delivered to me with complete sincerity—might struggle to appeal to a multicultural country. No one mentioned the woman at Canada Christian College who mistook a Korean War memorial tank for evidence of UN invasion, while Jamil Jivani stood mute. No one brought up the man who announced that CO₂ at 50,000 parts per million "doesn't cause ANYTHING," a claim so scientifically illiterate it would embarrass a grade-schooler.
The party's unpopularity is never its own fault. It is always, conveniently, the Liberals dividing them.
This is the first mechanism of the movement that started in 2022: perpetual victimhood. When you convince people that every setback is the work of a malevolent external force, you create a base that is incapable of self-reflection. Six-year-olds blame others for their feelings. Adults examine their own behaviour. The Conservative movement has bet its future on the former.
But victimhood alone isn't enough. You also need to validate every grievance, no matter how unhinged. At Canada Christian College, Jivani nodded along as a woman declared progressivism a "disease" and another ranted about Agenda 2030. At the convention, a delegate laughed and demanded I account for my chromosomes after I used an all-gender washroom. At every event, the message is consistent: your most toxic impulse is not a problem to be managed. It is a righteous observation that the "radical left" (aka, over 50% of the country) is too cowardly to hear.
This is the second mechanism: emotional deregulation as a feature, not a bug. An adult who cannot tolerate opposing views, who loses their mind at the sight of a protest sign, who needs the Conservative government to sift their child's curriculum because they can't be trusted to do it themselves—that person is not a citizen. They are raw material. And the party moulds that material by telling them their rage is virtue.
The Conservative Party is not indiscriminate. It curates. The anti-abortion activist who screamed "murder" at Jamil Jivani in Calgary was publicly shamed for his "weirdo energy" and ejected from the narrative, simply because his absolutism threatened the coalition. Meanwhile, he went on to calmly weave anti-trans rhetoric into a speech about helping young men, and the room applauded. The difference is instructive: one form of extremism fractures the tent; the other unites it against a vulnerable target. The fringe is not being expelled. It is being sorted.
At every one of these events, I met decent people. I spoke to a mother with a brain injury who just wanted her daughter to have a functional classroom. I talked to fellow Zoomers, terrified about rent and wages, desperate for anyone to acknowledge their economic realities.
These concerns are legitimate. They deserve serious policy responses. But here's the trap: inside this movement, the mother's plea and the man's chromosome audit of a stranger are treated as equally valid forms of political expression. The party offers the same validation to both because doing so keeps everyone in the same angry, dependent loop.
The cost of this strategy is not theoretical. Three percent of the population has managed to hijack an entire mainstream political party and our discourse at large because we have been too polite to name what is happening. We treat people who think John A. Macdonald statue debates are still newsworthy as legitimate interlocutors. We accept the premise (and by trying to meet them halfway, lend credibility to the idea) that questioning anti-trans laws makes you a "groomer." We have allowed grifters to frame their emotional incontinence as courage.
The Conservative Party wants you to be emotionally dysregulated. It wants you to be convinced that you cannot think for yourself, that the party must manage your child's education, that your local government is too stupid to elect its own chair, and that you can't smoke a boogie on your own porch without police intervention. It wants you to believe you are simultaneously a victim and a warrior, too fragile to handle dissent but tough enough to "own the libs."
I've spent a year watching this movement operate. It is not chaotic. It is not accidental. It is a deliberate cultivation of childish nonsense, and the only way to break it is to refuse the role it has written for you.
The first step is saying it out loud.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times. Read our Content Policy here.
References
Adams, W. (2025, April 13). ADAMS: I went to a Poilievre rally. Here's what really stood out. The Provincial Times. https://provincialtimes.ca/adams-i-went-to-a-poilievre-rally/
Adams, W. (2025, October 24). ADAMS: Inside Jamil Jivani's Restore the North. The Provincial Times. https://provincialtimes.ca/adams-what-restore-the-north-means-to-me/
Adams, W. (2025, November 2). ADAMS: Zoomers showed up for Poilievre, he brought nothing but slogans. The Provincial Times. https://provincialtimes.ca/adams-zoomers-showed-up-for-poilievre-he-brought-nothing-but-slogans/
Adams, W. (2025, November 24). ADAMS: Inside the Restore the North event at Canada Christian College. The Provincial Times. https://provincialtimes.ca/adams-inside-the-restore-the-north-event-at-canada-christian-college/
Adams, W. (2026, January 29). ADAMS: Inside the Restore the North event at University of Calgary. The Provincial Times. https://provincialtimes.ca/adams-inside-the-restore-the-north-event-at-university-of-calgary/
Adams, W. (2026, February 13). ADAMS: I went to the Conservative Convention. Here's what really stood out. The Provincial Times. https://provincialtimes.ca/adams-i-went-to-the-conservative-convention-heres-what-really-stood-out/
