Pierre Poilievre, it鈥檚 safe to say, is not likely to be a normal Conservative Party leader.

Yes, there鈥檚 still an outside, tiny, minuscule chance that Jean Charest will manage to scrape up enough of an 鈥渁nybody but Pierre鈥� vote in the leadership race to succeed Erin O鈥橳oole. But the odds are that Poilievre is about to become the face of Canadian conservatism for the next several years.

So the question becomes, will Poilievre be a serious threat to the Liberals in 2025, three years from now?

Pulling back and being objective, I think Poilievre has one big advantage that has only been discussed a little bit.

He鈥檚 an appealing candidate for people who don鈥檛 ever vote.

Previous Conservative leaders, like Andrew Scheer or Stephen Harper, and previous Liberal PMs like Jean Chretien and Trudeau senior, have attempted to craft a popular image and set of policies, designed to appeal to the broad middle swathe of Canadian voters.

Think of a regular Canadian voter. They come in a variety of forms. Some are firm partisans, and the NDP/Liberals/Conservatives/Greens/etc. can count on their votes year after year. Others are more mildly ideological, and may skip from party to party, depending on policies and their impression of the leaders.

But they all have one thing in common 鈥� they think voting is worth doing.

The largest untapped resource in the electorate is the folks who don鈥檛 bother to show up to the polls at all.

Many non-voters have a baseline belief that politicians are all crooks, they鈥檙e all the same, and therefore voting never changes anything.

Those are the folks Poilievre is courting.

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Poilievre鈥檚 policies, such as they are, have been aimed at people who have very little connection to mainstream conservatism (or mainstream anything else).

He鈥檚 pushed Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and he鈥檚 declared a crusade against any and all vaccine mandates.

Neither of those are major concerns of mainstream, middle-class Canadians, which is why no other political leader is talking about them much right now.

But they鈥檙e things that get a lot of people angry, and a lot of those people are not regular voters.

Poilievre鈥檚 plan seems to be to create a coalition between those who reflexively vote Conservative, and a bunch of newcomers, including conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, cryptobros, and whatever other outsider groups he can add by 2025.

But that鈥檚 Poilievre鈥檚 big problem.

For the next three years, he has to keep those people all facing the same way, all fired up, and ready to vote. Despite the fact that the key thing we know about them is that they usually don鈥檛 do that!

Bitcoin鈥檚 price tanked this year, and vaccine mandates and even masking rules are all but gone, with better vaccines expected as soon as this fall.

For Poilievre to win and become PM, he鈥檚 going to have to keep a lot of very peculiar plates spinning all the way to 2025. I doubt he can manage that trick.