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.
