First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
After months of record-breaking unpopularity, U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade fights with Canada appear to have suddenly given the Liberals a fighting chance of re-election.
While the Conservatives remain on track to win a majority in the next election, multiple polls are showing the Liberals rebounding to levels not seen since the summer of 2023.
Only a month ago, electoral projections were showing the Conservatives likely to win a historic landslide with the Bloc Québécois in opposition and the Liberal Party bumped to a distant fourth place.
Now, if an election was held tomorrow, the likely result would be a conventional Conservative majority with the Liberals in opposition.
In the last week, four consecutive polls have shown the Liberals capturing around 30 per cent of the popular vote.
These are still comparatively dismal numbers for the Liberals, but it was as recently as Dec. 30 that an Angus Reid Institute poll pegged the Liberals with a rock-bottom 16 per cent — the lowest result for the Liberals in the entire history of Canadian polling.
By contrast, a Feb. 6 poll by Pallas Data put the Liberals at 33.7 per cent against 39.6 per cent for the Conservatives. When projected out by election modeller Raymond Liu, the Pallas numbers still yielded a Conservative majority of 173 seats, but with vast sections of Greater Toronto and Atlantic Canada still in Liberal hands.
What’s changed in the last two months is that Canada has been brought to the edge of a ruinous trade war with the United States — a dispute that also hastened the early January departure announcement from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and triggered a search for his replacement.
On Feb. 3, only hours before Canada was set to be slapped with blanket tariffs on U.S. exports, Trump granted a 30-day reprieve saying he was “very pleased” with Trudeau’s promise of enhanced border security.
The dispute prompted a patriotic backlash from the Canadian public that appears to have benefitted the incumbent Trudeau government.
One particularly illuminating Abacus Data survey found that 84 per cent of respondents were planning some kind of boycott against the United States, be it the cancellation of a U.S. vacation or an active attempt to prioritize Canadian-made groceries.
The dispute has also forced the Liberals into an about-face on any number of issues that have previously been monopolized by the Conservatives. Of late, this has even included Industry Ministry François-Philippe Champagne saying that Canada needs to consider building oil export pipelines to the East Coast.
“Things have changed,” Champagne told CTV on Sunday.
The entire field of Liberal leadership candidates have also pledged increased military spending, although they differ on how quickly it should be ramped up.
Meanwhile, as the Liberal leadership race increasingly consolidates around frontrunner Mark Carney, polls may also be reflecting just how much the Liberals’ lagging performance was based on voters’ personal distaste of Trudeau.
For more than a year, polls have consistently shown that public antipathy was much deeper for Trudeau than for the Liberal Party he headed.
As early as December 2023, journalists were telling this directly to the prime minister. “They don’t like you,” was how Global News’ Mercedes Stephenson phrased it in a year-end interview.
A Jan. 31 Nanos poll pegging the Liberals at 26.2 per cent credited the gain to Trudeau’s promised departure as prime minister next month. “Liberal fortunes are improving in the post-Trudeau era,” said data scientist Nik Nanos in an accompanying note.
A Feb. 6 Ipsos poll pegging the Liberals at 28 per cent similarly cited the leadership race. “Liberal Party support has increased as the party advances in selecting a new leader,” read an analysis which nevertheless noted that the Conservatives remained “well-positioned for a decisive victory.”
A Feb. 7 Nanos poll even found respondents saying that they would prefer a prime minister Mark Carney to negotiate with the Trump administration, rather than a prime minister Pierre Poilievre. Forty per cent of respondents picked the Liberal frontrunner, against 26 per cent who picked the Conservative leader.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has kept his distance from the new U.S. administration.
In fact, almost all of Poilievre’s public statements regarding the new president have been critical. On Jan. 7, Poilievre spoke out against Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada, writing in a widely circulated social media post, “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period. We are a great and independent country.”
In the days before U.S. tariffs were set to be levied, Poilievre publicly supported a Liberal policy of “dollar for dollar” retaliatory tariffs, calling Trump’s actions “massive, unjust and unjustified.”
At the same time, the Conservatives have adopted new messaging that is effectively a mirror image of positions touted by the new U.S. government.
The most obvious of which is the Conservatives’ use of the slogan Canada First, a variant of Trump’s repeated pledge to put “America first.”
On Monday, Poilievre stood behind a lectern reading “Canada First” and promised the establishment of Canada’s first Arctic military base if he should become the country’s next prime minister. On the subject of Arctic sovereignty, Poilievre said “we cannot count on the Americans to do it for us anymore.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Canada may have dodged tariff Armageddon with the United States, but as this newsletter gets sent out the U.S. has slapped 25 per cent tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum – the latter of which is a particularly significant Canadian export to the U.S. This happened before, in 2018 when Trump did it to pressure Canada into renegotiating NAFTA.
U.S. President Donald Trump is no longer the only populist foreign politician musing about the seizure of Canadian territory. On Monday, far-left French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon issued a social media post bemoaning the 1763 loss of New France to the British, adding “si Trump annexe le Canada cela ne peut inclure le Québec” (“if Trumps annexes Canada it can’t include Quebec”). Mélenchon is probably best known for a 2022 run for the French presidency that put him within 0.8 per cent of a final run-off against the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron. Instead, the final runoff was contested by far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who lost prodigiously to Macron.
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