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 the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives were at 45% support nationally. The Trudeau Liberals were down to an extraordinary 16%.
Back then, other pollsters showed nearly the same thing. Nanos put the Tory lead at 23%. Research Co. said it was 26%. And then, in the first week of January, Trudeau announced 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.
Since the race to replace Trudeau officially kicked off at the end of January, the (effectively) leaderless Liberal Party of Canada has been narrowing the once-massive Conservative lead. Just about every new poll shows it – particularly in vote-rich Ontario, where the Grits have been ahead for weeks. The nearly-30-point Poilievre lead is now a memory. How come?
The reasons are threefold.
One, only a fool (or a hardcore Tory partisan) would have believed that they dominated in the polls because Canadians all loved Poilievre. Instead, it was because they had grown to hate Trudeau. With him going and almost gone, a lot of voter anger is gone, too.
Two, the Liberal leadership race has generated some surprisingly respectable contestants – Carney, Chrystina Freeland, Karina Gould, Frank Baylis. For a party as unpopular as the Liberals once were, attracting big names is an achievement. Their race has erased media coverage of Poilievre and his party, too.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
But the third reason for the shift – the main reason – has nothing to do with Poilievre, Carney, Freeland or anyone else in Canada. It’s because of an American: Donald Trump.
You don’t need to analyze the polls to know it’s true – you just need to head down to your local Tim’s to take the pulse of the nation.
Since the newly-returned U.S. President has started attacking Canada – saying he wants to make us the 51st state, saying we offer nothing of value to America, saying he wants to use force against us, saying he wants to slap crippling tariffs on our goods (and still might) – Canadians have revealed a deep and visceral loathing of Trump.
No American leader is as hated as Trump is now, among Canadians.
And that, mostly, is why Poilievre and his party should stop assuming a huge victory is in the bag. It isn’t, now. Not by a long shot.
One poll released Friday morning should make blue Tory blood run cold: Nanos, which just a few weeks ago had Poilievre pegged at a 23-point lead, now shows a significant majority of Canadians prefer the future Liberal leader to lead the fight against Trump. Nearly 40% of them believe Carney is better to deal with Trump – ahead of Poilievre by a whopping 14 points.
The Globe and Mail and Nanos speculated Carney’s lead was because “he was in charge of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and headed the Bank of England” thereafter. But that’s not it.
The main reason why Poilievre’s lead is slipping away is this: Canadians know that not every Canadian Conservative is a Trump fan. But they suspect, correctly, that every Canadian Trump fan is a Conservative.
Donald Trump has become an existential threat to Canada, folks.
And Canadians want to be led by someone who will fight him – not someone who they believe secretly wants to join him.