I’ve been reading various election post-mortems this weekend, or catching up on them, having sensed that I ought to try to understand the federal Conservative arguments over whether to keep Pierre Poilievre as leader or dump him. This is probably harder than usual from an Alberta vantage point. The election was (foreseeably) decided in Ontario, and whenever I manage to talk myself into some convincing account of how the Ontario boomer swing voter thinks, I always end with “But these same people keep electing Doug Ford.”
And that makes me suspect that the secret to politics is maybe just being lucky in your opponents, which Pierre Poilievre in 2025 just really wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong: I understand that Premier Ford has incredible, probably unsurpassed retail-politics ability. He’s built from the ground up to be what he is — an accessible, authentic sort of super-mayor of English Canada. But the political analysts keep saying that Poilievre was somehow too much like Donald Trump to win at a moment when Real Trump was sowing chaos and fear in Canada.
Get real, everybody. If you are really looking for the most Trump-like figure anywhere in Canadian politics, the person whose campaigning approach, sense of humour and overall demeanour are the most like Trump’s … the answer is really, really obvious. It’s the guy who keeps winning in Ontario, and who, like Trump, wins despite having little identifiable concrete political achievement beyond the winning itself. What was it George Orwell said about seeing what is in front of one’s nose?
Poilievre has attracted critics inside his party despite a genuinely impressive election result. He is haunted by the rapid evaporation of a gigantic lead in the between-election polls, a lead that he and his controversial inner circle somehow developed. Many of the election coroners are convinced that Poilievre has a personality problem, that he lacks a “softer side” and just can’t connect with Ontario’s suburban boomers. If so, it must be a problem that he suddenly developed this year, right around the time Justin Trudeau effed off into the gloaming. And the Conservative platform obviously wasn’t the problem, since the Liberal victory was built unapologetically on its stolen planks.
What’s obviously true is that the Conservative strategy was over-indexed on Trudeau, and that they didn’t anticipate the Liberal abandonment of consumer carbon taxation — a cause for which they had squandered oceans of money, planetary volumes of public and provincial goodwill, and the best years in the lives of innumerable lawyers. Everybody knew long before the election that there was a possibility that Trudeau could be talked by his caucus and cabinet into leaving, and that Mark Carney, central banker to the stars, might end up being the replacement.
But carbon pricing with consumer incentives was essential to Carney’s very being as a political philosopher — to all appearances, an absolute
sine qua non
. It was hard to imagine that he could be cynical enough to take the empty throne of the Liberal Party, cut off the head of the carbon tax, and hold it up to the crowd, happily bathing in the gore it effused. It must have been harder still to imagine that this would work. Trudeau departed at literally the last possible moment, and left Carney as little runway as he could possibly have — but the suddenness of the shuffle was almost certainly an advantage for Carney in the end.
Althia Raj’s multi-part election analysis for the
Star
reveals that on election night, senior Liberals were convinced
, and were dismayed at strong Conservative outcomes in the decisive parts of Ontario. Poilievre’s anomalous loss of his own seat — which awaits a proper explanation beyond “The dude who beat him is friendly and intelligent and worked really hard” — has obfuscated this crucial success. Under the circumstances, I don’t expect anybody to buy the idea that the Conservative campaign was fairly deft and responsive by the party’s own standards, and that it actually yielded an impressive late comeback hidden within an apparent fall from grace. But I wonder.
National Post
