April 28, 2025.
Not long ago, I shared my thinking on the political lay of the land federally, and in my view, it was pretty bleak.
The wolves outside were huffing and puffing, puffing and huffing, and there was a very real prospect that they were going to blow the entire bloody house down.
Trump in the White House again, and a massive Conservative majority government led by Pierre Poilievre up north, where we are.
Poll after poll after poll as much as confirmed the scenario, until the polls started to change, and not even incrementally really, but dramatically. But those changes in polling results are something I’ve seen plenty of times before, so I wasn’t ready to go out and buy party balloons and streamers.
And then poll after poll after poll started to come together to form what appeared to be a verifiable trend, that the Liberals were closing ground on the Conservatives, in many cases bouncing back from a 20+ point deficit to within 6-7 points of the leading Tories.
Still, I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to polling and stated voter intentions. I’ve been involved in more than one election where I had the better candidate, the better campaign, the better communications, hell, the better everything, and still lost.
I’d be walking along the street with my candidate and we’d be stopped every few steps by someone wanting to talk to him, much back-slapping and hand-shaking and laughing out loud, or lol if you’re too young to remember the long form. Cars would slow as they drove past and yell out the name, waving. People wouldn’t even ask for selfies. Horns would honk.
In short, things would be looking wildly good, until we got hammered on election day, every single time.
The experience raised a question. And taught a lesson.
First, where the hell did all those back-slapping, selfie-seeking happy-faced bastards go when it was time to mark their x on a ballot? I can do math, and I can read and interpret the results. And I can safely conclude that these folks made a big show over my guy, and then went and voted for the other candidate anyways. And so I learned that what’s said on Main Street isn’t necessarily the same thing that’s said inside that little voting space where it’s just you, a pencil, and a sheet of paper. In other words, people can be downright strange that way
Look south of the border.
Trump had just destroyed Biden at the first presidential debate, or more to the point, Biden just couldn’t cope with the onslaught. Despair swept across liberal America. But then they found a saviour, when Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris picked up the torch. The polls immediately went the other way, and now MAGA trembled as their fortunes seemed to dissolve right in front of their eyes.
Harris gained on Trump, then was tied with him, then pulled ahead. This is called momentum, and it’s a tough thing to stall once it gets going, and it was going gangbusters for Kamala, who looked to be a lock as the next president.
The the election came and Trump buried her.
Brian Mulroney’s Tories had back-to-back majorities from 1984 to 1992, but if there was ever a modern Canadian politician disliked as much as Justin Trudeau — or Pierre for that matter — it was Conservative prime minister Mulroney. As the election approached, Mulroney wisely bailed, and in the aftermath, his justice minister Kim Campbell succeeded him after her victory in the subsequent leadership race.
Immediately the polls changed, and up shot the Tories under Campbell, who at the time was Canada’s first and only female prime minister. It was a terrific honeymoon for the new leader, who seemingly managed to single-handedly turn things around for the moribund Conservatives, even pulling ahead of Jean Chretien’s Liberals just before the election.
She was crushed and the party went from having over 170 seats in the House of Commons to retaining only two of them.
Two.
So, with all this as context, I don’t want to lose my mind about polls showing the Liberals making a dramatic popularity comeback vis-a-vis the Conservatives under Poilievre. Recent polls from the full spectrum of pollsters have the Liberals closing the gap.
But no more.
Now those polls are showing the Liberals pulling ahead.
Three things, or people rather, have made all the difference. Each of Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau, and Mark Carney have had an extraordinary impact on Poilievre’s fortunes, all in the last several weeks. Donald Trump was inaugurated into office as President of the United States. Justin Trudeau stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party, and by extension, as prime minister. Mark Carney is now the leader of the Liberals, and de-facto prime minister until the next federal election comes along, where people will then decide if they want him to remain in the job or give it to Poilievre instead.
First, Trump attacked Canada with imposing tariffs, actual and threatened, while at the same time publicly mused that Canada should be a “51st state” in the American union. Given Poilievre’s power base is made up of a significant percentage of red-hat sympathizers, that put him in an uncomfortable position. He has to be seen as taking a hard line against Trump in the face of the president’s hostile anti-Canada rhetoric, but at the same time has to temper his reaction so as not to enrage his hard-right base. Plus, Many Canadians associate Poilievre with Trump, as if he were a Trump-Lite version of the real thing, a poor man’s version of The Donald. It’s an association the federal Liberals are keen to to keep alive, and to nurture along, as you’ll see in their upcoming election advertising.
Second, his chief domestic protagonist, Justin Trudeau, took a long walk, read the tea leaves, and decided that his much-hoped-for contest against Poilievre wasn’t going to happen, mostly due to an ever-increasing revolt among Liberal MPs worried about hanging on to their seats in the next election. So In a single day, the target of virtually all Poilievre’s rhymes and slogans was gone, vanished, a target no longer.
Then Mark Carney showed up. He won the Liberal leadership hands-down, and took on the role of prime minister, although not yet elected himself. A former Bank of Canada governor, appointed by Conservative Stephen Harper, he also had a stint as the governor for the Bank of England, the only foreigner to have ever done so. He worked with Harper closely during the great financial crisis in 2008, and was instrumental in Canada being able to weather that economic storm better than any other of their fellow G7 members. In short, Carney has credentials, he has experience, he’s not a wooden stick in front of a camera, nor is his French accent so thick that it puts-off English-Canadians, mostly because he’s English-speaking as a first language and, if he has a French accent, it’s one that makes him difficult to understand in French Canada, not the other way around. In other words, he’s somewhat formidable as an opponent.
Predictably, the slogan machine kicked up a gear to label him as Carbon Tax Carney, even though he’s committed to getting rid of the less-than-loved consumer tax on carbon. In the same ad, the Conservatives keep Trudeau in their narrative, claiming that Carney is “Just Like Justin,” because they want people to believe that and because it’s got the double “just” in there to appeal to those people who really go for that whole ja-ja sound pattern in the same short truncated sentence.
Poilievre’s in a bit of a tough spot to say the least. His biggest problem, though, and one not yet mentioned, is that he is Poilievre, meaning that he has Canada’s least appealing personality, mostly because he’s an angry, bitter, resentful, petulant, and self-important dude, one with an arrogance not earned by any legitimate measuring strip. When you’re Pierre Poilievre, and you’re trapped in Pierre Poilievre’s body, the opportunities for bitterness abound.
I often wonder if the Conservatives’ previous popularity was more the result of Trudeau/Liberal unpopularity rather than anything Poilievre did or said himself. I sort of got the impression that Canadians were willing to vote Tory notwithstanding Poilievre, a kind of hold your nose while you vote situation.
There’s never been a poll that I was aware of that gave Poilievre winning marks for personality, or as a person you’d want to have a salad with, or have steering the ship of state, much less in the turbulent waters that ship currently finds itself in. In other words, Canadians were willing to support the Tories despite Poilievre, which is hardly a ringing endorsement for a guy who wants to be prime minister.
But that was before, and this is now, and now is looking badder and badder, and worse and worse, for the apple-chomping Leader of the Opposition. And it’s not like the press, or media generally is going to give him the easiest of times after having him slag them and piss on their shoes for the past couple of years. That Ill-disguised contempt of his for everything and everyone other than himself looks like it might be coming back to bite him, but I guess he feels he’s invincible, another aspect of that arrogance and the huge ego he hides behind.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I started out, just two months ago, predicting a massive Conservative majority victory and the decimation of the Liberal Party. Then, I reluctantly accepted the idea that the Liberals might rebound, or the Tories regress to the point where the Conservatives won, but with only a minority government, something that raises all sorts of constitutional issues, such as the Governor-General asking another party (the Liberals) to form a government if the Tories couldn’t gain the confidence of the House of Commons. We have to remember that the NDP and Bloc Québécois are both left-leaning parties, and not at all fans of the Conservatives, and more significantly, of Poilievre himself.
But what about the new polls? What about this trend that the new numbers seem to be presenting to us? What about that stuff?
Have we arrived at a time when the Liberals, themselves, may be able to win, albeit with a minority? And what about the craziest scenario, that the Liberals manage to out-campaign the Conservatives and form a majority government of their own?
That’s almost too much to contemplate. But scrape away everything and we find ourselves in a situation where our closest friend, ally, and trading partner is now openly hostile to us. And then the question to Canadians becomes as simple as this:
Who do you want leading the country in the face of Donald Trump and all the threats he seems to pose?
Mark Carney? Or Pierre Poilievre?
If I’m a conservative volunteer, an organizer, a door-knocker, phone-call maker, or slogan generator, my morale is not all that good anymore and it seems to sink more each passing day.
So back to April 28, 2025.
That’s the date for the next federal election, and I guess we’ll find out then.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 