— Feature, Musings —04.05.2025 09:18 PM
My latest: rallies, polls, debates and more
Pierre Poilievre is winning with his rallies. Mark Carney is winning with the pollsters.
What’s really happening?
Well, Greg Lyle is an old friend. He has a poll out with his Innovative Research Group. Full disclosure: Greg and I helped start a certain consulting firm that shall not be named.
He left before I did to start his own very successful polling firm. (More disclosure: I left when I found out that some there were secretly helping out Big tobacco.)
Anyhow. Greg has a poll out and it shows the Tories ahead by one (1) point. This will be a cause for great celebration among some Conservatives, but it shouldn’t be. They were a point ahead on election day in 2019 and 2021, as well. And they lost those.
Well-attended rallies notwithstanding, Team Blue just are not where they need to be. The debates have therefore become very important indeed.
Now, those of us in the media like to go on and on about the tremendous, life-altering importance of so-called “defining moments” in debates. But, honestly, those don’t happen very often at all.
I’ve gotten Prime Ministers and Premiers ready for debates, many times. The strategic objective is always simple. It’s two things: have your issues dominate, and look and sound like a leader.
In the Liberal leadership debates, Mark Carney was clobbered both times by Karina Gould, an articulate MP half his age. He had never run for high public office before, or participated in a debate like that, and it showed. He was the proverbial fish out of water.
Being the boring and pedantic technocrat has worked for him when the contrast is with Donald Trump, however. Trump is like a Tasmanian devil on Benzedrine. In that frame, Carney just needs to look like an adult who has a basic understanding of economics and logic.
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I’m surprised how many people haven’t been talking about what the data shows is the real issue of this campaign:
The NDP is MIA and is could lose every seat they have in BC, AB and ON;
the BQ is flirting with their 2011 near-death experience;
and the Greens are on life support themselves, with Liz May trailing the Grits in a riding they haven’t represented in-part since 1974.
The benches have been cleared and there are only two sides left this election.
This is why the Tories can feel like the polls are deceiving because they’ve only been this popular once before since the 80s, in the aforementioned 2011 Iggy disaster.
My sense is that the polls are right: the Liberals are about to sweep to a Doug Ford-like majority with approx. 44% of the vote, while the CPC has a respectable 2nd night in many Ontario ridings which usually crown the government.
Debates no longer matter.
Less people watch.
More people only want to know who won.
And so it comes down to which party can spin the debate the best.
Advantage once again to the Libs.
Their messaging has been pretty darn good
Douglas,
The debates usually confirm biased experiences, so both of us agree on that. Pierre has to try for a Mulroney moment, and he can only do that by buying the Forbes report and dropping that bomb mid-debate. It’s so fucking frustrating: it’s like Pierre can no longer read or understand the English language…Jesus Mercy, almost all of the sand has already flowed out of the hourglass.
Going to be quite the divided country with Boomers putting the Liberals back in power to enact destructive policies that primarily don’t impact their generation, while Millennials and Gen-Z break solidly Conservative and will be punished for their anti-Liberal disobedience. Maybe a climate lockdown in our near future?
Pedant,
The closer we get to the election, the less inclined I am to concede the election to the Liberals as I objectively did up until now. But now my partisan base nature and instinct for triumph instead of mere political survival has strongly kicked in much to my surprise: Pierre has to do whatever it takes to win and I mean whatever it takes as long as it’s legal and almost instantly capable of deflating the Liberals in the polls. Both of us know that policy announcements won’t win us this election. We need the goods on Carney and we need them YESTERDAY.
I’m quickly converting to accelerationism.
Bring on the global warming lockdowns, the mass unvetted migration (as top Carney advisor Mark Wiseman dreams of), more multibillion dollar social programs for layabout non-taxpayers while taxpayers are means-tested out of participating, further erosion in GDP per capita. The lost decade becomes a lost decade and a half. Work punished, money-laundering rewarded.
Productive workers under 50 with marketable skills need to prepare alternate passports and other routes out of the country if need be. The fruits of their hard work will be squarely in Carney’s crosshairs. He wants to redistribute it all to his voter base of seniors and layabouts, the privileged classes in Liberal Canada.
Lol Millennials and Gen-Z aren’t going to “break solidly Conservative” what planet are you on?
They have been screwed and many blame the Liberals.
Let’s just say the future for a good number of Liberal voters in the coming years is cheap poorly run LTCs or MAID.
Generational revenge will be as sweet as it is cold.
Derek,
Two qualifiers: first, they have to vote, and second, I think it’s safe to say that at least a plurality of them will be voting CPC but not necessarily a majority.
The planet on which poll crosstabs are consulted?
This surge in Liberal support is driven by 65+ voters. Aside from a few outliers, Conservative support is holding amongst younger cohorts, particularly 30-44.
It is the only chance they have.
Could see it coming for Poilievre, right from the get go, the way he attacked Charest showed me all I had to see to get what that wing-nit is about – reality, the truth evidence based policy – all out the window – he rants and raves about conspiracy and he encouraged and celebrated the convoy, he’s an idiot and he’s unfit to be our leader –
Oh please. Because of your PDS , folks like you and Miles Lunn will very likely be right about the fact he will lose but as far as your political analysis goes, you will be right for the same reason a broken clock is. Correct twice a day. Trump was a black swan event that your peeps HOPED for and gamed out. And now you and the NDP are throwing your support behind a guy whose BFFs are a bunch of billionaires like Musk. You can’t make this shit up.
And if he is such an idiot, why did your boy basically steal all his ideas(a problem with him it would appear but I digress). It is just too easy with you people.
Again, I am going to console myself with the continuing wealth shift of the last ten years that will continue to come my way.
Great for the charities that will get my my money but not so great for anyone under 40.
This is about the greed of well off baby boomers vs anyone under 40. And greed is going to win out, it would appear. I wouldn’t be breaking my arm patting myself on the back over that sort of success but that’s just me.
Martin,
The Liberals, tout court, richly deserve to be in the penalty box known as the opposition benches. It’s beyond comprehension watching voters seemingly prepared to reward Carney for almost a decade of Liberal incompetence, reckless spending and deliberate mismanagement of the ship of state. Voters are gambling on an untested and clueless individual who supposedly is more capable than our leader to negotiate an end to the Trump tariffs. That conclusion is way beyond absurd. So, you don’t like Pierre. Big deal. Almost no one liked Harper, but they still voted him in three times. It’s intellectually bankrupt and not even remotely credible.
French-language debate: Jonathan Pedneault, co-Leader of the Greens, will go hard at Poilièvre over pipelines in Quebec.
So even if Carney has a poor showing, Pedneault will inflict some harm on the Conservative leader and Carney will not look so bad
As long as uppity women don’t ask him hard questions Carney should be Ok.
And what’s funny is, as haughty and unapproachable as Carney is, Poilievre is EVEN MORE unlikeable. One is patrician in his condescending behaviour while the other is sneering and snivelling in his own condescending behaviour.
Derek,
That’s why they’re called politicians.
Warren,
Ipsos: Liberals +12;
Mainstreet: Liberals +2;
Nanos: Liberals +6.
Warren,
From Global News:
Ipsos poll:
“NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh saw the biggest boost in support, jumping four points to 12 per cent. Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet also saw a boost of two points to five per cent, while Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault held steady at three per cent.”
This poll is hopefully a Liberal highwater mark. So, the CPC isn’t dead yet.
On the bright side, after the NDP gets destroyed with under 10 seats (possibly under 5), we can be reasonably assured there won’t be another NDP-Liberal coalition in any of our lifetimes. The NDP will certainly rebuild with a stronger leader and provide a real alternative for economic leftists supporting the Liberals. The stench of the Singh era and toxic CASA will linger for many decades. We’ll all be dead by the time the party again attempts such a stunt.
Pedant,
The only golden rule in politics is to never say never. And trying to time it out is at best a fool’s errand. 2015 was proof enough of that.
I told one of training partners who was an anarchist and gloating about the NDP win in Ontario in 1990 that the bright side was the fact they would fuck it up so bad, we would not hear from them ever again. 35 years and counting. Not quite forever but close.
Martin,
But Rae is still around. The Bouchard of English Canada. I wonder if they compare notes? LOL.
The NDP-Liberal coalition of 1972 proved so disastrous for NDP fortunes it wasn’t until exactly 50 years later that they tried it again. And, just as in the 1970s, it will be electorally ruinous for the NDP three weeks from now. If you vote NDP but get Liberal free rein thanks to NDP support, why not just vote directly for the Liberals?
Our kids and grandkids will debate the merits of the next NDP-Lib coalition in the 2070s.
Pedant,
Maybe our Lord will wipe out politically The Gaza-loving guys and gals. We can only hope.