Never make predictions, especially about the future.

So said baseball great (and quipster) Casey Stengel, and he was of course right. The prediction business is high-risk and low-reward.

The punditocracy loves making predictions, however, especially at year’s end. So who am I to buck a trend?

Here’s five of mine for 2025.

Justin Trudeau is going to leave.I’ve got several lunches riding on this one, so I’d better be right. My reasons? For starters, he’s been behind Pierre Poilievre’s Tories by double digits for more than a year. Nothing he’s tried has reversed his downward spiral.

Another reason: along with public opinion, he’s lost the support of most of the Liberal caucus, a sizeable chunk of cabinet, and every party in the House of Commons. Theirs is simply no viable path back to victory. So, sometime soon, he will say he’s written to the president of the Liberal Party to say that he plans to step down when a new leader is picked, give us all a Trudeau-esque wave, and then jet off to do some international sight-seeing. All at taxpayer expense, naturally.

Like Stephen Harper did in similar circumstances in 2008, the Grits will prorogue to avoid getting defeated in a confidence vote. That’ll give them some breathing room. Trudeau’s announced departure will boost their numbers, as will a leadership race. And then, with a shiny new leader at the fore, the Libs will get even more popular – because every new leader gets a bit of a honeymoon. But who will that leader be?

The new Liberal leader will be an outsider. That is, someone who isn’t in Trudeau’s cabinet, all of whom are too close to the blast radius. Outsiders always tend to do better in leadership races, particularly if a party has been in power for too long. Voters are looking for fresh faces, and so are party members. The Grit tradition of alternation between French and English leaders narrows the field even more.

That all leaves just three options. One is Christina Freeland, who executed a brilliant pirouette out of Trudeau’s circle, and has effectively become the leader of the opposition from within Trudeau’s caucus. Another is Mark Carney, who has been a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – and therefore a good guy to have around when facing the economic existential threat of Trump tariffs. The third choice is Christy Clark.

The Liberals want a female leader to offset Poilievre’s angry guy: Clark, a happy warrior, offers that. They’ll want someone who knows how to govern: Clark, a former Premier, offers that. They’ll want someone who has never been part of the Trudeau oxymoronic brain trust: only Clark offers that.

Christy Clark is the only viable alternative to Pierre Poilievre. Big question: does she speak French well enough?

Pierre Poilievre will win. Doug Ford will win. Notwithstanding everything above, the federal Conservatives are still going to win a majority. It won’t be nearly as big as it would be, were an election to be held today. But Poilievre is still going to win. He may not be the cuddliest guy to ever offer himself to the people, but the people aren’t looking for cuddly, these days. They’re mad as Hell at all incumbents, and they’ve had time to get used to the idea of Poilievre as prime minister. He’ll win.

So will Doug Ford. As my colleague Brian Lilley has reported, a debate is raging within Ford’s team about when to seek re-election – this Spring, or later. Either way, Ford will still win. Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie remains an unknown quantity, and the Ontario NDP (like their federal cousins) seem to be more preoccupied with Gaza than Guelph. Ford is routinely underestimated by his opponents, he’s coated in several layers of Teflon, and he’s morphed into the anti-Trump Captain Canada. He’ll win, too. Big.

The world will continue to orbit to the Right. A variety of factors are at play: an increasingly-dangerous world, which progressives seem unable to understand or fix. Anger towards political elites, who always tend to be pointy-headed political progressives. Frustration about the cost of living and porous borders, which have always been winning themes for conservatives.

For the next year, the Right will continue to dominate – and then, by 2026, the Left will come roaring back. Politics is pendulum, always swinging between Left and Right.

Which is always predictable, too!