Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney calls for a snap election after speaking with Mary Simon, the Governor General of Canada, on March 23, 2025 in Ottawa, Canada. Mark Carney will continue to be leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The elections are slated to be held on April 28, 2025.
Photo by Andrej Ivanov/Getty Images
After Stephen Harper won a majority government in Canada’s 2011 federal election, a widely-discussed book by columnist John Ibbitson and pollster Darrell Bricker advanced a bold thesis about the future landscape of Canadian politics. Just as its title suggested, 2013’s The Big Shiftpredicted not only another Harper victory but the structural transformation of culture and governance in conservatism’s favour. Long established as the national epicenters of politics and finance, they suggested, more liberal and left-leaning metropoles like Toronto and Montreal would increasingly be overshadowed by the growing power and influence of western Canada and suburban Ontario — both more conservative, and each a pillar of Harper’s 2011 majority.
In 2015, Justin Trudeau secured a massive election win of his own, by all appearances reestablishing the position of electoral dominance the Liberals maintained throughout much of the 20th century. (That very same year Alberta — the birthplace of modern right-wing politics in Canada — also threw out its hegemonic conservative dynasty and elected the social democratic NDP to a majority government.) In the years since, however, the Conservatives have steadily eroded Liberal support, winning the national popular vote (though fewer seats) in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. Under the leadership of veteran Ottawa-area MP Pierre Poilievre, chosen by a whopping margin at the party’s 2022 convention, the Conservatives have seemed poised for a victory of generation-defining proportions.
Buoyed by Trudeau’s deep personal unpopularity, Canada’s ongoing cost-of-living crisis, and Poilievre’s decidedly belligerent political style, the Conservatives have for the past two years enjoyed a lead in the polls so stable and comfortable that the upcoming snap election result — until very recently — looked like a foregone conclusion. Last summer, the Conservatives scored an unprecedented byelection win in downtown Toronto, spurring cabinet resignations and inspiring many longtime Trudeau loyalists to retire from Parliament altogether.
Among other things, Poilievre’s leadership has allowed Canada’s Conservatives to glimpse the intoxicating prospect of electoral success without the vexations of political or ideological compromise. Unlike his party leader predecessors Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, Poilievre cut a straightforwardly ideological path to the top job and has maintained this right-wing posture ever since. By preaching its gospel and openly courting its support, he successfully captured much of the energy generated by the so-called Freedom Convoy. He has refused to back down on highly controversial and unpopular positions like defunding Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC, and has planted his flag firmly on the Trump-adjacent right. He is widely branded a “populist”, though in Canada the label is most applicable in an aesthetic sense.
Substantively-speaking, very little of what Poilievre represents sits outside the longstanding orthodoxies of Canada’s conservative movement. At the level of style, however, he has clearly traded the more wishy-washy rhetoric of politicians like Scheer and O’Toole for an aggressive and confrontational tone that lambastes “elites” and is much more about feeding Jordan Peterson fans red meat than securing broad political respectability. While leaving much about the specifics of his own programme blank, Poilievre has also gained ground by acknowledging the economic and social pain wrought by Canada’s ongoing cost of living crisis. In the House of Commons, he has regularly raised issues like the soaring price of housing, food, and other essentials — adding to the Conservatives’ potential coalition a swathe of younger voters not traditionally in play and putting them on the precipice of only the second majority government in their history.
Over the past two months, however, everything has rapidly changed. With Trudeau’s January resignation — and recent replacement by former central banker Mark Carney — Poilievre’s Conservatives have been deprived of both an unpopular opponent and the would-be chief antagonist of their campaign narrative. By the time he announced the April federal election on 23 March, Carney’s calmly managerial pitch had found wide appeal amid the country’s rapidly shifting political sands. And thanks to Donald Trump’s tariff threats and musings about Canada’s economic annexation, a cost of living election will now instead be fought on the much less friendly terrains of trade policy and national unity.
Throughout most of the 20th century, issues related to the latter overwhelmingly belonged to the Liberals: the traditional party of federalism, and the dominant electoral force in both the power centres of Quebec and urban Ontario. Even putting aside this history, a rally-around-the-flag moment like the current one most typically benefits incumbents and, thanks in significant part to the pronounced anti-Trump sentiment now prevailing among older voters, the Conservative polling lead has all-but evaporated in a matter of weeks. Sensing a change in the political air, Poilievre has abruptly pivoted to a more nationalistic message — ironically conveyed by the Trump-derivative slogan “Canada First” — with mixed results thus far.
In effect, Poilievre now faces the same strategic dilemma that arguably doomed his immediate predecessors. Notwithstanding the inroads US-style right-wing politics have undeniably made, they remain less than appealing to much of the Canadian electorate, and on issues like gun control and LGBTQ rights, the Conservatives have often found themselves very much at a disadvantage. With the spectre of Trump now looming over the political landscape, however, they must confront the added challenge of managing his relative popularity within their own base while simultaneously appealing to the pronounced anti-Trump sentiment gripping the country as a whole. Poilievre’s own polarising style may similarly prove more of a liability than an asset in the weeks ahead.
Born from the revolt of Republican-inspired Western conservatives against the so-called Red Tories of central and eastern Canada, the Conservative Party emerged from its founding 2003 convention a visibly more right wing and Americanised project than the since-defunct party it replaced. In the seven elections since then, it has secured its one and only majority government under the leadership of Stephen Harper. Thanks, ironically, to a Republican president, Pierre Poilievre’s path to a second suddenly looks a whole lot less assured.
[See also: Mark Carney can’t save Canada]
Topics in this article : Mark Carney