Open this photo in gallery: Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre during a campaign stop at LiUNA Local 837 E.H. Mancinelli Training Centre in Grimsby, ON on April 11.Tara Walton/The Canadian Press There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer sees Bachman-Turner Overdrive perform at the state fair in Springfield. The classic Canadian rockers open by promising that they’ll get to everyone’s old favourites, but first they want to dip into their new album. “TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS,” Homer demands. The band assures him they’ll get to their biggest hit soon, but Homer is having none of it. “No talkin’, no new crap!” he bellows. “Takin’ Care of Business, now!” When lead singer Randy Bachman obeys him and begins the song, Homer yells impatiently one last time: “Get to the workin’ overtime part!” Sometimes, your biggest hits become a trap. And sometimes, you are your own Homer Simpson, screaming inside your head that your classic hits are all people want to hear. This little pop culture parable is, of course, about Pierre Poilievre’s week on the campaign trail. It was a purgatory week in the race: The middle stretch and the only week in which no big outside force – the campaign launch or final sprint, the debates, Donald Trump’s Liberation (From Sanity) Day – imposed itself. This was when the Conservative Leader could craft precisely the campaign he wanted and attempt to shift momentum in his favour, before the plaster set. What he decided to do instead was stick with the election campaign he was promised six months ago. He made policy announcements about speeding up resource development projects, closing offshore tax loopholes, three-strikes-and-you’re-out criminal justice reform and lowering the cost of new homes. But that wasn’t where the energy was. It was in Mr. Poilievre calling Liberal Leader Mark Carney “a political grifter” whose resume amounts to “trophy titles” and “inflated hype.“ It was in him enumerating all the ways the Liberals have tanked Canada over the past decade, crediting them with a level of industrious destructiveness tornadoes could only dream of. “The Liberals are trying to pull a fast one,” he told an Edmonton rally. “They have a very simple strategy in this election, and here’s what it is: Make you forget about the last 10 years. Everything they do will be about bringing collective amnesia of all the damage they’ve done.” To the limited extent that he acknowledged that Mr. Trump is a big problem, he positioned that as being the fault of the Liberals, too. Does Danielle Smith know we can all see and hear her? “We need to reverse the disastrous Liberal economic policies of the last 10 years that made us so dependent on the Americans in the first place,” he said in Brampton. In the face of unfriendly polls and friendly fire critiquing his campaign, Mr. Poilievre’s response was to retreat to his comfort zone: big rallies where everyone already agrees with everything he’s ever said, rhyming slogans, snide nicknames for enemies, the zero-sum prosecutorial politics at which he is an Olympic-calibre athlete. The calls of alarm and frustration are coming from inside the big blue house. Kory Teneycke, the Conservative strategist who engineered Doug Ford’s three consecutive wins in Ontario, has been loudly critiquing the intransigent Tory campaign. He’s on a podcast called Curse of Politics, which lives up to its name, so I can’t quote Mr. Teneycke’s full comments in this genteel newspaper, but this week he accused Mr. Poilievre and company of “campaign malpractice” for presiding over a collapse of such historic proportions that it will be studied for decades to come. Fellow Tories have treated Mr. Teneycke as a hero, not a Cassandra in a designer turtleneck. At this week’s Canada Strong and Free Network conference – an annual Conservative gathering – people gleefully traded a photo of a campaign button with the name of Mr. Poilievre’s chief adviser, Jenni Byrne, crossed out and replaced by Mr. Teneycke’s. It makes sense that Mr. Poilievre and his advisers would be basting in bewilderment, angry at the universe right now. They’ve been chomping through their bits for two years to fight this election campaign. This was supposed to be a change election with a vengeance, a Conservative cakewalk, a sad, poorly-attended Liberal Party of Canada funeral. And now look. The polls; the news cycle; the open warfare amid panic and recriminations; Mr. Carney making reassuring purring noises from behind his tasteful wooden prime ministerial lectern every time the tariff emergency fires back up – all of this must feel like a personal attack to Mr. Poilievre. So it’s easy to understand on a human level why the Conservative leader is indulging himself – we’ve all thrown on jogging pants and eaten an irresponsible amount of pizza after a bad week – but it’s political self-immolation. The moment has changed profoundly, and he will not. For starters, someone in Mr. Poilievre’s campaign needs to stand beside him at every event with a speaker and play that wistful Sarah McLachlan song from the humane society commercials each time he mentions Justin Trudeau until he stops fighting a ghost. The tall man is gone; write his name on a piece of paper, tuck it into a balloon and let him go. Canadians are cancelling U.S. travel plans and becoming experts in country of origin labels, and yet Mr. Poilievre continually paints Mr. Carney and the “lost Liberal decade” he mentioned about 162 times this week as nastier villains than Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, he is interrupting his own press conferences with excruciatingly awkward how-do-ya-like-them-apples demands for reporters to admire his rally crowds, sounding very much like the mango madman. When you notice the audience has stopped clapping along, you have two choices. You can decide the problem is them and play the same song louder, waiting for them to smarten up. Or you can contemplate that it might be you and change the tune. No one can hold a crowd forever, even with their greatest hits.