Categories for Musings

If the polls are accurate, this has never really happened before.

The Conservative Party of Canada has dropped nearly 30 percentage points in six weeks. 

Now, in 1984, there was a 30-point shift that ended up favouring Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. Sure. But that happened over a longer period of time.  Same with 1993, when my former boss Jean Chretien wiped out the Tories. Thirty points, give or take, but the shift occurred over a number of months, not weeks.

Thirty points in just six weeks! How did that happen?

As the Conservative Party’s nervous-nellie caucus gathers for a meeting in Ottawa this week – and as thousands of Tory MPs, staffers and their families congregate in Ottawa’s Rogers Centre on Saturday – more than a few of them have to be asking themselves that question: what happened? What went wrong? Can we get back to where we were?

All fair questions. From being 30 points ahead of the Liberal Party at the start of the year – to now, with several pollsters suggesting the Tories and Grits are nearly tied. Or that the latter are actually ahead of the former. Ouch.

How they lost their lead is simple. As this writer opined in these pages months ago, Trump’s victory in November was always going to hurt the Tories. And it has. Canadians mostly hate Trump, and they quietly suspect Poilievre dresses up in his Donald costume at night, when no one is around.

Once Trump was re-installed in power, things got worse. In the intervening days – when Trump has threatened and belittled Canada, over and over, saying he wants to make us the 51st state – Pierre Poilievre’s predicament has become dire. See polls, above.

There are three reasons for this.  It is an open question whether Poilievre possesses the will, or the insight, to repair the damage.

One: he needs to stop aping Trump’s policies.  For example, this week the Toronto Star topped a report with this headline: “PIERRE POILIEVRE PROMISES ‘MASSIVE’ FOREIGN AID CUTS.” In any other week, at any other time, Poilievre throwing a bone to his migrant-hating red-meat base would be grist for the mill. 

But doing it now, in the selfsame week that Trump and his evil Elflord Elon Musk have shut down USAID, America’s vaunted agency for international development and foreign aid? That’s deeply stupid, Team Tory. It doesn’t exactly advance the narrative that you’re not Trumpy, now, does it?

Two: Poilievre needs a MAGA-enema. In every Conservative caucus, at any given time, you always have a Randy White or a Myron Thompson. Remember them? Smart Tories sure do. The loose lips of White and Thompson and their troglodyte ilk sank Stephen Harper’s Conservatives when it counted – during elections. So Harper flushed them at his earliest opportunity.

Poilievre needs to do likewise. Polls show up to half of partisan Conservatives really like Trump. If that’s even partially true, that means that there are probably even more closeted MAGA types in Poilievre’s circle (Google “Pierre Poilievre staff MAGA hat” to see what I mean). So, Poilievre needs to march them out to the town square and – with a gleeful CBC and the aforementioned Star in attendance – terminate the Vichy MAGA-Canucks, with extreme prejudice. Like, yesterday.

[To read more, go here]

Comments (54)

Comments (29)

Now we know why the Tories wanted an election right away.

At the start of 2025, when Justin Trudeau was still in charge, pollster Angus Reid reported that the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives were at 45 per cent support nationally. The Trudeau Liberals were down to an extraordinary 16 per cent.

Back then, other pollsters showed nearly the same thing. Nanos put the Tory lead at 23 per cent. Research Co. said it was 26 per cent. And then, in the first week of January, Trudeau announced that he was quitting at the start of March. The polls didn’t meaningfully change. Not right away, anyway.

For those of us who used to work for Jean Chretien, it all seemed familiar. Kim Campbell won her party’s leadership in June 1993, succeeding the very unpopular Brian Mulroney. For months, we Liberals had been ahead, sometimes – like Poilievre – by as much as 30 percentage points.

As soon as the Tories selected Campbell, however, the bottom start to fall out. Under Campbell, the Progressive Conservatives (as they were then known) surged ahead. By the time the Canada Day weekend rolled around, Campbell had become one of the most popular Prime Ministers in history.

So what happened? A few things – because, in politics, you never win or lose because of just one thing. Chretien ran a superior campaign in the Fall of 1993. Campbell was inexperienced and undisciplined. The Tory campaign ran an ad mocking Chretien’s facial paralysis.

Mostly, however, Campbell and her party lost because they’d been in power for almost a decade. People wanted change.

It’s dangerous, then, to suggest – as some Liberals are now quietly doing – that they could now somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Under Mark Carney, they whisper amongst themselves, perhaps a fourth consecutive Liberal win is possible.

Their reason for making such bold claims is, again, the polls.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (8)

A reprieve. Or is it?

The 30-delay notwithstanding, this much we know: Canadians, who apologize when someone else steps on their foot, are still very, very angry. When we boo the American anthem at NBA and NHL games – instead of helping out with the singing, in those occasional microphone-failure moments – well, that’s Canadian-style angry. World War II take-no-German prisoners angry.

And Trump? “Anger” doesn’t quite capture it. Free advice from a former adviser to a Prime Minister, Secret Service: even after the eleventh-hour change of course, don’t bring him to the G7 at Kananaskis in June. Just don’t. You’ll be contending with a lot more than the grizzly bear threat. Believe it.

The stuff I’ve heard from otherwise mild-mannered Canadians about what they’d like to see done to Trump? Stay away, Yanks. It actually isn’t safe.

Meanwhile, despite Trump’s momentary change of heart, Canadians won’t soon forget the feelings of anger and betrayal. We are angry at Americans themselves, too – and not just the death-cult MAGA Republicans. When even arch-Leftist Senator Bernie Sanders is saying he favors an American takeover of Canada, you know we don’t have friends down there anymore. Even the Canadian comedians we mail South by the truckload are silent when their homeland is under attack.

We might delay the tariffs for 30 days or more. But it’s clear Trump views tariffs as a tool to get his way. He’ll be back.

Meanwhile, we Canadians will never fully trust him or his government ever again. As one pal said to me this weekend: this isn’t a friendship anymore. It’s an abusive relationship. “And we’d be crazy to go crawling back to our abuser,” said he.

Trump is a thug, but it’s foolhardy to believe he’s now going to abruptly change his strategy – because threatening punishing tariffs works.

So, in the meantime, what do we do? Where do we stand? Five points.

1. We still need to continue to expand trade with other countries and the European Union. We can never again let one customer control so much of what we sell. We need to end inter-provincial trade barriers, too. Also: build pipelines. Now.

2. Taking a Buy Canadian approach is still smart. It energized people across the country, and it made them feel they were helping a greater cause. It made them feel less powerless.

3. Stopping fentanyl is always worthwhile – but we only account for .2% of what the Americans caught at the border. As such, this was always about something else. It was always about the main thing Trump has been saying every single day for weeks: annexation. Don’t forget that.

4. We’ve seen the true colors of the US – we can’t let our guard down ever again. We need to remember the past few days, and get ready for the next round.

5. Trudeau did a good job. Good way to end his tenure. He can retire knowing he helped the country in a moment of crisis.

There’s only thing Donald Trump understands or appreciates: money. Going after Trump, the politician, is entertaining but it won’t move the political needle. Going after Trump’s decisions – particularly the economic ones – will move the needle. That’ll change his behavior.

Nationally, provincially, municipally, we need to do what Trump could never do: get people together. We need to assemble every living Canadian Prime Minister and Opposition leader to speak with one voice and rally the country for the uncertainty that lies ahead.

And we don’t need an election in the middle of this crisis, folks. Sorry. That’ll just showcase our divisions to the Americans. If anything, we need the opposite: we should consider an all-party coalition government, ideally led by Poilievre, who has the best plan and a seat in the House of Commons. Because, really, none of our leaders disagree on the fundamentals about what needs to be done. That’ll showcase unity. Do that instead.

What works with bullies, everyone knows, is pushing back. We need to be ready to push back.

Because Trump isn’t done with us yet.

Not by a long shot.

Comments (10)