Had Donald Trump not weighed in with his threat to annex Canada, and had Justin Trudeau decided to remain and fight this election, the outcome would definitely be quite different.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on April 28, 2025.

OTTAWA—They used to say that six months is a lifetime in politics.

Two months is a lifetime in Canadian politics these days.

Two months ago, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was headed to a majority government.

Liberals had been languishing 20 points behind in the polls, and incumbents were voting with their feet.

Cabinet ministers were leaving politics (for family reasons), and Liberal party organizers were scrambling to simply fill the nominations across the country.

Because it looked as though the Liberals were potentially headed for third-party status, nobody wanted to step up and offer themselves as sacrificial lambs at the altar of a Poilievre government.

Organizers muttered privately that nothing could avert impending disaster, and Members of Parliament should batten down the hatches and just kept working their ridings in the hopes they might survive the oncoming storm.

Then the impossible happened. Less than two months ago, the Liberals elected Mark Carney in a landslide.

Even though Carney had been serving as economic adviser to then-prime minister Justin Trudeau for some time, he was seen as an agent of change, a political newcomer who actually had experience fighting the international shock waves that American President Donald Trump was sending around the world.

He was also fiscally conservative enough to focus his election promises on operational changes. Where the previous prime minister had increased operational spending by nine per cent annually, Carney has committed to a two per cent increase.

Former Conservative deputy leader Lisa Raitt characterized it this way on CTV last week, “They like the Conservative policies, but they want Mark Carney to implement them.” That was her conclusion after canvassing in Ontario and Cape Breton, N.S., where she reinforced the notion that people just don’t like Poilievre.

She is right on that count. The gender and age gap in voting preferences is startling, with women supporting Carney by a margin of 20 per cent. The so-called Boomer generation is also largely supportive of the Liberals.

To counter that message, the Conservatives used the last week of the campaign to run an ad of two older men on a golf course chatting about how they had to get rid of the Liberals. They also trotted out a very sombre ad of former prime minister Stephen Harper intoning on his reasons for supporting Poilievre.

In the first instance, if the Conservatives are trying to appeal to women voters, the last thing they need to see is two men on a golf course. The tone-deaf nature of that ad was equivalent to a late-campaign corporate endorsement for Poilievre led by Fairfax Financial CEO Prem Watsa and entitled, “Friends of Free Enterprise in Canada.” The group ran full-page ads in newspapers across the country the weekend before before the first leaders debate.

Again the message bombed. Among the 33 leaders who signed on, 32 were men. Any woman reading the advertisement would simply ask “if the Tory leader had that little support among women, why would I bother voting for him?”

So Carney moved enough to the right to convince lifelong Tories to vote for him, and his ‘Elbows Up’ approach to Trump convinced many New Democrats to park their vote with the Liberals.

Just this week, I was chatting with a former labour leader and lifelong New Democrat who was celebrating his 100th birthday.

On the call, he confessed to me that he had voted Liberal for the first time in his life, and he convinced a couple of friends to do the same.

So even though Poilievre had enough resources to throw lots of money at late-campaign advertising, even that effort struck the wrong note, and merely reinforced the decision of many people who were leaning towards Carney.

At the end of the day, the Liberals also need to send a thank-you note to Donald Trump, whose insulting behaviour to Trudeau in particular and the country in general prompted a complete redrawing of the Canadian political map.

Had Trump not weighed in with his threat to annex Canada, and had Trudeau decided to remain and fight this election, the outcome would definitely be quite different.

As it is, the Poilievre anti-Trudeau/carbon tax campaign did not survive the test of time. He could not or would not pivot his message, and as a result, he will probably have to pivot right out of politics after this election.

Raitt underscored Poilievre’s personal unpopularity as one of the reasons the party was failing badly.

What a difference two months makes.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

Published first on Monday, January 9, 2017 in The Hill Times.

OTTAWA—Lisa Raitt’s campaign to stop Kevin O’Leary was brilliant.

It vaulted her to the front of the news cycle during a January political lull. It also set her up as a foil to the Trump-like tendencies of some of the Blue Tories who are already in the race or thinking of joining.

It would be folly to assume that Raitt does not want O’Leary in the race.

A good part of her message last week targeted Kellie Leitch, and the controversial proposed citizenship test of Canadian values.

Raitt needs O’Leary in the race to split the Blue Tory vote.

If that sounds complicated, two voting rules guarantee a campaign roller coaster ride in the months leading up to the May vote.

First, the Tories have adopted preferential balloting, which means that voters will actually rank their preferred candidates.

Ironically, that same system was one of the options proposed to replace the first-past-the-post general election vote, without much support from the Conservative Party.

The new system means the winner may not be the first choice of the greatest number of voters, but rather the second choice of the majority.

If this sounds complicated, it is one of the reasons that most people exit the conversation when the subject of electoral reform is broached.

But the peregrinations are compelling for political animals who follow leadership conventions with the same passion the rest of us reserve for hockey championships.

The greater the number of leadership candidates, the more Raitt needs to divide the vote in order to come up the middle. 

In other words, she needs the blunt force trauma that O’Leary’s candidacy would ignite to limit the potential migration of Blue Con votes to Leitch.

During multiple press appearances, Raitt spent more time railing on Leitch than on O’Leary, reinforcing her real intent in launching the Stop O’Leary website.

The site will also permit her supporters to get immediate access to email data of potential Conservative voters who don’t align with the values of O’Leary, and coincidentally, Leitch.

Raitt’s team followed up her press appearances with the purchase of a pop-up ad on social media flagging the Stop O’Leary website on all national news apps.

That data mining will be golden in recruiting more members and mobilizing an anti-O’Leary movement with the hopes of converting it to a pro-Raitt force.

The second element that makes the Raitt strategy so smart is the party’s decision to give equal electoral weight to every riding in the country, regardless of the number of registered Tories entitled to vote.

Raitt is one of only two Conservative candidates with ties to Atlantic Canada. She was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia to a family which shared a passion for business and unions. That could explain her visceral reaction to an O’Leary vow that, if in government, he would outlaw unions.

The other Conservative with Atlantic roots is fellow Ontario contender Erin O’Toole. He served in Shearwater and attended law school in Halifax during his career in the armed forces as a regular and reservist.

Even though the Tories were wiped out in Atlantic Canada in the last election, they have deep roots and strong provincial organizations in every province.

East coast ridings have as much weight as vote-rich Alberta, so anyone who can sweep Atlantic Canada has a good chance of being toward the front of the pack on voting day May 27.

Raitt’s bold move will allow her to recruit Red Tories who have a deep connection to the party and do not want to see it go down the same path as the Republican extremism south of the border.

Many Atlantic Conservatives yearn for the time when they used to be progressive, and there are plenty of Tory icons, from Flora MacDonald to John Crosbie, who never supported the Conservatives’ shift to the right under Stephen Harper.

Raitt is banking on social media technology and new recruitment techniques, to swell Red Tory, anti-O’Leary ranks within the party with online recruitment. In so doing, she is well-positioned to become everyone’s second choice.

That is where the likeability factor can have an influence

The risk in launching such a public attack on O’Leary and Leitch is that Raitt may bruise her reputation for likeability.

It requires a delicate balance to trash colleagues with a smile.

If she succeeds in establishing herself as the most viable progressive Conservative choice, she may be able to eclipse the neo-cons in the race.

Raitt’s move is a political game changer.

 
Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era Cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.