Last weekend, the Conservative Party of Canada anointed longtime Ottawa-area MP Pierre Poilievre as its new leader — the fourth since 2015.

Recent Tory leadership races have unfolded along the same bland and predictable lines. In an effort to game the party’s ranked balloting system, Poilievre’s somewhat hapless predecessors Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole both pitched themselves to parts of its coalition with boutique policy offerings that were quietly dropped (or at least muted) as soon as the votes had been counted. In general elections, Conservative leaders have tended to pivot to a more boring and transactional message aimed at suburban swing voters. Overtly right-wing campaigning, it’s been generally understood, is too much of an electoral risk, and there’s no good reason to try it when good old-fashioned triangulation is an option instead.

As a strategy, it hasn’t quite worked — or, at any rate, it hasn’t been sufficiently effective to win government. Under their last two leaders, the Conservatives actually surpassed the Liberals in the popular vote, but they fell well short in seats as discontent simmered within the party ranks. The Tory membership, being sharply to the right of the Canadian electorate, represents a conundrum for any aspiring Conservative prime minister — one that was evidently too daunting for relatively traditional politicians like Scheer and O’Toole to overcome.