The Liberal leader is leading in all demographic groups except for men aged 35 to 54

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on April 7, 2025.

OTTAWA—Women are stampeding to the Liberals in this election.

The most recent Ipsos Reid poll showed that, for women over the age of 55, Prime Minister Mark Carney holds a 27-point lead over Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

The Liberal leader is leading in all demographic groups except for men aged 35 to 54.

But the startling gap between women and men is worth examining.

Poilievre didn’t help himself last week when he launched his housing strategy claiming that women’s biological clock would run out before a Liberal housing program would help.

“I don’t think any woman wants to hear Pierre Poilievre talking about their body, period!” was the immediate retort from New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh.

Critics on social media questioned why Poilievre plans to cancel national childcare if he is so interested in women having babies.

The social gains introduced by the Liberals over the last decade are particularly important for women.

Obviously, childcare is huge, and the dental care program is especially important for older women on fixed incomes who cannot afford dental work. Ditto for school lunch programs and pharmacare, including free birth control, IUDs, hormonal implants, and the morning-after pill.

Poilievre is definitely not on board with national childcare, and has been ambiguous about dental and pharmacare. He has promised that no person currently covered under those programs would be cut off, but is silent on the extension of the programs to others. He also voted against the National School Food Program, and is silent on its continuation.

These are issues of particular interest to women.

It is not lost on them that several dozen members of the Conservative caucus have pledged to support limitations on abortion through private members’ bills. Poilievre himself, in his very first speech to Parliament, spoke out in opposition to public health funding for transgender medical services.

The Trump Supreme Court nominations that resulted in an end to reproductive choice in the United States, and the United States president decision to abolish equal rights policies for women, minorities, gays, and transsexuals has frightened Canadian women, as well. If it could happen there, what about us? Poilievre doesn’t pass that smell test.

Carney leads dramatically in net-positive favourability. That sum is the number achieved when you deduct unfavourable from the favourable viewpoints to discover what people think about each candidate.

Carney is enjoying a positive favourability among men and women. With men, the net range is 18-plus while for women it is 26-plus, according to the same poll.

The difference between Carney’s favourability rating and Poilievre’s unfavourable is stunning. Three in five women—at 61 per cent—say they have an unfavourable view of Poilievre.

Carney has also managed to attract the majority of young voters, a crucial element in Justin Trudeau’s 2015 majority government victory.

Forty-five per cent of young men between the ages of 18 and 34 now support the Liberals, and 46 per cent of men over 54 years old support the Liberals.

We are almost four weeks away from the vote, and the leaders’ debates could both have an effect on the outcome.

Poilievre has been cautioned publicly by members of his own party that he needs to pivot away from the anti-Liberal message to an anti-Trump stance.

But the challenge for the Conservative leader is that a significant percentage of his base also supports Trump. So if he is too tough on the American president, he will lose supporters, as well.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who is busy courting Trumpian podcasters and running her own “Trash Canada” campaign, is stoking the flames of separation in Alberta, which is decidedly unhelpful to her federal leader.

Poilievre not only has had to pivot on message that Canada is broken, he also has to attack Trump. The “lost Liberal decade” phrase, which peppers all his public declarations, seems to reinforce the notion that Canada is broken, even while his Bring it Home/Canada First mantra sounds like a page out of the Trump playbook.

Of course, Trump’s chaotic approach to government is ensuring that his prints are all over this Canadian election.

His ill-advised Liberation Day announcement of worldwide tariffs on April 2 has certainly caught everyone’s attention. Even if the American Senate is successful in reversing the emergency resolution that allowed the president to impose tariffs, it is going to take time for this to happen.

Financial markets and ordinary citizens in the United States are already very nervous about the cost of these tariffs.

But Trump’s tenure is four years, and Poilievre only has three weeks.

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

When Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh announced their confidence and supply agreement, they were replicating a similar Liberal-New Democratic minority government move a half century ago.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on March 28, 2022.

OTTAWA—There is a reason we say history repeats itself.

Because it does. We only have to watch the unfolding despotic massacre in the Ukraine to see a repetition of the slow-moving Second World War commitment by the Allies.

Just last week, politicians finally acknowledged what the world has witnessed. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. He is breaking all the rules by bombing innocent civilians in his attempt to carry out a human annihilation that breaks all the rules of international armed combat.

Even close Russian allies are starting to have doubts, with two senior advisers resigning and fleeing the country in the past few days.

At home, we see another example of history repeating itself. When Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh announced their confidence and supply agreement, they were replicating a similar Liberal-New Democratic minority government move a half century ago.

The 1972 election yielded a Liberal minority with Pierre Trudeau as prime minister and David Lewis as leader of the NDP. By working together, the pair introduced new initiatives such as the creation of Petrocan, a national Crown corporation designed to manage Canadian oil and gas supplies.

Their agreement was not a formalized one, as Lewis was worried that too much co-operation might assist the Liberals more, so his party withdrew its support after two years, prompting the 1974 election.

Lewis was right. The Liberals were rewarded for this cooperative period with a majority while the New Democrats were reduced to a rump with Lewis losing his own seat.

The same thing happened to Liberals in Ontario when leader David Paterson negotiated an agreement with then NDP leader Bob Rae to take over after the minority election of 1985.

Rae also initiated discussions with Progressive Conservative leader Frank Miller, whose party had four more seats than the Grits.

But in the end, the program negotiated with Peterson won the day and the formalized agreement resulted in a Liberal-NDP accord, in which the New Democrats agreed to support the Liberals for two years.

Once the two-year agreement lapsed, the Liberals called an election and ended up winning the second largest majority in the history of Ontario politics.

But Rae’s reduced party hung in there, and when Peterson called a premature election in 1990, to everyone’s surprise, the New Democrats formed a strong majority government.

The current federal Liberal-NDP agreement gives the government double the amount of breathing room that existed in the Peterson-Rae accord.

By introducing certainty, the Trudeau-Singh agreement takes the drama out of federal politics until 2025. That may be a good thing for them. But it certainly takes the guesswork out of politics.

And observers like guesswork.

In a minority, there is always an open question about when the government might fall, but this has been replaced by a road map of aggressive social programs that will dominate public discourse.

National pharmacare and dental care have been firmly vaulted to the front of the government’s agenda in Ottawa.

As Jagmeet Singh said last week, he didn’t know whether it would help his party win, but the programs would certainly help people.

All in all, there is a significant public appetite for parties wanting to work together.

And the vitriolic response to the agreement from the Conservatives may actually have been overstated.

Ordinary Canadians like it when political parties manage to co-operate instead of fight. It runs counter to the general view that politicians spend all their time bickering.

Pharmacare and dental care may end up being much more costly than has been predicted. And that could certainly give some credence to the Conservative cry that the Liberal government is running a reckless deficit.

Depending on what happens with inflation and the ballooning deficit, the agreement may also put some pressure on Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s ambitions. If she is going for the brass ring, she has to be able to keep the country’s finances in check as a first step to the prime minister’s chair.

The agreement also runs counter to the separatists’ view that Quebec should have ownership over all decisions in health care. That could open the door to a resurgence of the Bloc.

But on the principle of dental and drug coverage, most Quebecers probably don’t care who delivers but would simply embrace the new benefits.

In the end, Singh may become the father of dental care, following in the footsteps of another NDP leader, Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas.

If history repeats itself, the party rewarded for this agreement in the next election will be the Liberals.

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