Two years ago, the dream of becoming prime minister asked only one thing of Pierre Poilievre: patience. The poll leads were wide, Justin Trudeau's Liberal government was tired, and the job seemed to be his to wait for. Today the same dream asks something much harder. It asks him to believe in it every morning, at full strength, while fewer of the people around him can see it.
He is probably not letting himself feel doubt right now. He is probably feeling how much energy it takes to keep it out.
This past April, on the morning the Liberals reached their majority, I wrote about what I called 'the weight of almost'. My argument was that Poilievre was grieving more than an election. He had spent years living inside the role of prime minister before it was his. When that future closed, it closed through floor crossings and conversations he was not part of, not through a contest he could prepare for. I concluded by asking whether the armour of certainty that carried him so far would come down long enough for a reckoning. Seven months later, the armour is still up. What has changed is how much it is being asked to carry.
As before, this is not a column about politics. Whether Poilievre should stay or go is a discussion that belongs to him, his caucus and his members. I am interested in something else: what it is like, from the inside, to keep holding a dream even as the evidence that it will ever come to fruition thins.
When I read Poilievre's comments last Friday, it struck me how much psychology was packed into a very short exchange. CTV News asked him directly about the Brantford-Brant South byelection on December 7. He did not talk about the riding, or about himself. “We're going to fight for the people,” he said. “I'm going to continue to fight for the people of Canada to save them money.” Shortly after, his director of communications sent a statement saying Poilievre “will be staying on and continuing to fight for Canadians.”
Two things stand out. The first is that when he was asked about his own future, he answered with his purpose. That is less evasion than instinct. People under sustained pressure tend to reach for the part of their identity that still feels solid, and for Poilievre that has always been the fight itself. The second is that his office felt the need to close the door in writing, a month before a single byelection vote is cast. You only shut a door that firmly when you know people are watching it. Psychologists have studied this pattern since Leon Festinger's work in the 1950s. When evidence starts to turn against a deeply held belief, committed people often express it more firmly, not less. It is one of the most human responses there is.
Look at what has happened since April, and the reason for the firmness becomes clear. Three of his most senior aides have left in under a year: his director of communications, his longtime chief of staff and, most recently, his deputy chief of staff. Eight MPs have left his caucus since the 2025 election, four of them for the government benches and one for the Senate. In the third quarter, the Liberals outraised the Conservatives by almost $1 million, erasing a fundraising advantage that once seemed permanent. In September, Spark Insights measured approval of the Carney government at 70 per cent, the highest in its tracking. It also found that 38 per cent of people who voted Conservative in 2025 approve of the Liberal government.
That last number is the one I suspect matters most to him privately. It is hard to argue with your opponents. It is much harder to argue with your own voters.
Researchers have a name for one common response to this kind of pressure: threat rigidity. When leaders feel threatened, they tend to tighten control, rely on a smaller circle and narrow the information they take in. The Brantford nomination fits the pattern. Instead of holding an open contest, Poilievre appointed the city's outgoing mayor, and the two former MPs for the area walked out of the event. It is an understandable choice for a leader who needs a win and wants certainty about who carries his banner. It is also how circles get smaller.
This is the part I find most interesting, because it is exactly what I research.
My doctoral work looks at psychological empowerment, using a model developed by University of Michigan professor Gretchen Spreitzer. It breaks the feeling of being empowered at work into four parts:
Meaning: why this matters to me.
Competence: I can do this well.
Self-determination: I choose how I do it.
Impact: I influence what happens.
I study these feelings among founders, the people who built a company and still lead it, because their sense of empowerment is bound so tightly to the thing they created. Politics is not my sample, but the mechanics travel.
Run Poilievre through those four and a clear picture emerges. Meaning is fully intact; you could hear it in Friday's answer. Competence is intact too. Whatever you think of his politics, he remains one of the most formidable debaters in the House. Self-determination is intact. He still chooses the candidates, the message and the fight. Impact is what is slipping. Nearly every data point of the past year has tested his sense that his effort moves outcomes.
One idea I am exploring in my research is that the feeling of choosing your own path only turns into results when you hold the authority that feeling assumes. A related idea is what I think of as founder standing. It is the informal authority a founder keeps even after losing formal control, and it can reopen decisions but rarely change them. I can think of no better description of leading the Opposition against a majority government. Every day in Question Period, Poilievre can reopen the government's decisions. He cannot change them. Across the aisle sits a prime minister whose pollster says his mandate is stronger today than it was on election night. Two people in the same room, with opposite experiences of the same work.
When three parts of empowerment hold and one gives way, people tend to lean harder on the parts they still control. That is what I hear in the word fight: self-determination doing the work impact used to do. It is less a strategy than a way of staying whole.
So what is he probably feeling right now?
I suspect the hardest thing is not the polls. It is the loyalty of the people leaving. Aaron Wudrick's farewell letter to colleagues said he remains “fully confident that this goal remains achievable in the next election.” Departing Chief of Staff Ian Todd wrote in May that he looked forward to the day Poilievre serves as prime minister. Neither left angry. Anger you can argue with. Faith that walks out the door is harder to bear, because it quietly suggests the problem may not be belief.
I suspect he also knows the numbers better than anyone writing about them. The real exhaustion is probably not uncertainty. It is having to perform certainty, every day, for the many people who still need him to, while carrying the arithmetic on his own.
I have sat with founders in versions of this moment, when the shareholders begin to waver and the people who built the thing alongside them start to drift. I never start by asking whether they should stay. I ask what is best for the company. In my experience, founders attach their deepest sense of meaning to what they built rather than to their title, and that question lets them think clearly about both. I ask, honestly, how much fight they have left, not as a test of will but as a practical question about fuel in the tank. Then I ask them to set their own conditions in advance. If these things happen by this date, we stay and go harder. If those happen first, we talk about what comes next.
That last step matters more than it sounds. Research on escalation of commitment shows that one of the few reliable defences against throwing good effort after bad is deciding ahead of time what would change your mind. Fighting on with no conditions hands the decision to events. Fighting on with conditions you chose yourself gives you back the one decision that is still entirely yours. In empowerment terms, it is the difference between self-determination as a reflex and self-determination as a choice. The conditions could just as easily point toward staying. The point is that they are his.
None of this means Poilievre is wrong to keep going. Leaders have come back from further down than this, and resilience is not a flaw. But there may be no harder fight than one for a door you suspect has already closed, and no lonelier one than a fight you are not sure the people beside you still believe in.
In April I asked what part of this story was his to own. This November the question is a little different, and gentler. It is not whether he will keep fighting. He has told us he will. It is whether he knows, in the quiet moments, exactly what he is fighting for.
Adam Miron holds an MBA, an MSc in Business and Organizational Psychology and an honorary doctorate (LL.D.), and is a doctoral researcher in leadership studying psychological empowerment among founders. He advises founders and leadership teams through Founded Partners.