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FIRST READING: Poilievre now further from electoral victory than at any point since winning leadership

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre arrives on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday, May 30, 2025.

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TOP STORY

With Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre facing a leadership review as early as January, his party is now further from electoral victory than at any point since he first became leader in 2022.

A new Nanos poll released this week found that public support for the Carney government has surged since election day, to the point where the Liberals would now be poised to win a comfortable majority if the vote was held again.

The Liberals now hold a 12-point lead over the Conservatives (44.2 per cent to 32.2 per cent), far higher than the two-point lead they posted on election day (43.76 per cent to 41.31 per cent).

As per a projection by

electoral modeller Raymond Liu

, these new Nanos figures would easily yield a majority Liberal government, largely at the expense of the Conservatives.

According to Liu, the Liberals could expect 190 seats against a Conservative caucus of just 117 seats.

This would actually be the best electoral outcome for the Liberals since 1980, when Pierre Trudeau secured his final term with a commanding victory over the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark.

The Nanos poll also found Prime Minister Mark Carney dominating in rankings of “preferred prime minister.” Among Nanos respondents, 49.7 per cent favoured keeping Carney in the top job, against just 24.2 per cent who wanted to see a Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre.

This is the lowest that Poilievre has ever scored in the Nanos ranking since becoming Conservative leader in 2022.

The shift is particularly dramatic when considering that Nanos had Poilievre as a prime minister-in-waiting as recently as January. When the year 2025 began, the Tories were polling at 45 per cent to the Liberals’ 23 per cent, with Poilievre

posting an all-time high

of 40.5 per cent as preferred prime minister.

Against all this, both Conservative MPs and Conservative supporters appear to remain supportive of keeping Poilievre as leader.

In the immediate wake of Poilievre’s loss of the general election — and the loss of his own Ottawa-area seat of Carleton — dozens of Conservative MPs

came out in support

of keeping Poilievre at the helm.

Even Kory Teneycke, an organizer with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and a vocal critic of Poilievre during the electoral campaign, said he didn’t suspect the federal Conservatives would be opting for a new leader.

“I think the caucus that was elected this election is chock-full of Poilievre loyalists and people who owe their seat to his leadership, and I think they’ll very much want to see him stay,” Teneycke told The Canadian Press in May.

Just this week, MP Damien Kurek officially resigned from the Conservative safe seat of Battle River—Crowfoot so that Poilievre could contest it in a byelection. As a result, the Conservative leader could be could be back in the House of Commons as early as August.

Earlier this month, a survey by Abacus Data found that Poilievre

still retained an 80 per cent

approval rating among respondents who identified as Conservatives.

Those same Conservatives also remained roundly displeased with Carney. The prime minister had a 59 per cent disapproval rating among Conservative voters, against just 18 per cent who approved.

The Liberals’ postelection upsurge in public support is happening despite the fact that the election’s signature issue, U.S.-Canada relations, has largely dropped off the radar.

Earlier this month, a Leger Marketing poll commissioned by the Association for Canadian Studies found that while annexation threats from U.S. President Donald Trump briefly sent Canadian patriotism to all-time highs, it

has since receded to normal pre-election levels

.

This week’s Nanos poll found much the same, with “Trump/U.S. relations” plummeting in terms of overall voter concerns.

If Carney is continuing to ride high in public support, it seems to come largely from an impression that Canada is at least doing better than it was under Justin Trudeau.

A June 8 Abacus Data poll found that Canadian optimism in the direction of their country has reached a high not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 53 per cent now expressing approval in their federal government.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said at a press conference this week that Canadians should be allowed to shoot at people in self-defence.

It was in relation to a case in Vaughan, Ont. where a 35-year-old was charged after firing a warning shot near five men allegedly attempting to steal his Lamborghini. “He should get a medal for standing up,” Ford told a press conference, where he also said that he intended to fundraise for the man’s legal fees. There’s just one detail that Ford omitted in his statement: The gun was reportedly illegal. Although Ford surmised that the shooter was “a hunter or something,” among the charges he’s facing is unauthorized possession of a prohibited or restricted firearm.

 Amid word that the U.S. might be joining Israel’s war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump had to unexpectedly duck out of the G7 summit on Monday. “I have to be back early — for obvious reasons,” Trump told the assembled G7 leaders on Monday, just after the group photo was taken.

Former NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has been spotted in the wild.

Only a few weeks after his devastating defeat in the 2025 federal election, someone spotted him at a Toronto concert for rapper Kendrick Lamar.  This was apparently controversial, since Lamar has an ongoing feud with Drake, a Canadian rapper. After the concert, Singh used his social media to apologize to Drake fans for being there, saying he’d actually just wanted to see the show’s co-headliner. “I shouldn’t have gone at all,”

he wrote

. Anyway, Singh’s close adherence to the terms of a rap feud may or may not explain why he isn’t the leader of a federal party anymore.

 Although the G7 interactions between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney probably stood out most for both leaders agreeing to work out a trade deal within 30 days, there were also symbolic concessions from the American side. Trump not only refrained from threatening to annex Canada during the visit, but he also wore this Canada-U.S. pin.

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