Canada’s Conservative Party is no stranger to leadership turmoil. Over the past four decades, the party and its predecessor Progressive Conservative and Reform-Canadian Alliance parties have experienced a steady cadence of internal fractures, palace coups and rivalries that have shaped and often destabilized the country’s political landscape.

Yet what is most surprising about Pierre Poilievre’s current leadership crisis isn’t that it’s unravelling before our own eyes. The factors catalyzing it have been obvious for months: sagging public-opinion polling, worsening personal favourability numbers relative to Prime Minister Carney and the extraordinary spectacle of three Conservative MPs abandoning the party, including two who recently crossed the floor to join Carney’s Liberals.

What is surprising — and what stands out as a genuine historical anomaly in Canadian federal politics — is that this unfolding crisis is occurring without any clear successor waiting in the wings. Unlike past eras of Conservative or Liberal infighting, there is no heir apparent building momentum in the background; no ambitious lieutenant ready to capitalize on Poilievre’s faltering leadership.

In the modern Conservative Party, leaders have rarely governed without rivals circling. Andrew Scheer faced persistent sniping from Erin O’Toole; O’Toole, in turn, was continually undermined........

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