The election dust has settled, leaving the Liberals with a minority government. This has led to calls — from both conservatives and progressives — for Pierre Poilievre to step down as Conservative party leader. But these calls are premature, overlook the success of several of Poilievre’s policies — many of which were co-opted by the Liberals in order to win — and severely underestimate the Liberals’ incumbent advantage in the face of an unforeseeable natural disaster that plagued an otherwise normal Canadian election campaign —  U.S. President Donald Trump.

In late December, 45 per cent of voters

polled

by Angus Reid intended to support Poilievre’s Conservatives and their policies while only 16 per cent polled said they’d vote for the Liberals. Angus Reid referred to this as “The Federal Liberals’ New Year’s Eve Nightmare.”  Until this point, Poilievre’s leadership was favoured. And, it turns out under his leadership Conservatives

managed to secure

42 per cent of the seats to 41.3 per cent of the votes. So, what likely happened to that other 3.7 per cent of the vote?

The failure of the Conservatives to form government is a product of a perfect storm — a turn cloak Liberal government switching from publicly mocking Poilievre’s policies to adopting them wholesale without acknowledging from whence they came, and the entrance of a chaos agent, whose tariff threats loomed large in the backdrop of this election, and whose trolling memes were such an offense to Canadian sensibilities that at least some of us appeared to forget why we wanted to vote the Liberals out in the first place.

It turns out one party’s nightmare is another’s winning lottery ticket.

None of this suggests that Poilievre should step down as party leader — quite the opposite — it suggests that he understands what’s important to Canadians so well that his opposition has to copy his ideas.

Yet, this hasn’t stopped critics from suggesting that nothing was, as one former Stephen Harper advisor put it, “

more avoidable”

  than Poilievre’s loss, suggesting that “enough of the electorate recoiled from a man who was unable to make the transition from polemicist to statesman,” and doubted his ability to lead in “one in the most critical moment in Canada’s modern history.”

But Poilievre’s polemics were clearly not a problem in late December, and they

softened noticeably

during the campaign.

It’s also arguable that it was Liberal Leader Mark Carney who ran a highly polemical campaign against Poilievre. Carney pulled out all the stops to link Poilievre, without any evidence, to Trump.

In late March, in front of Rideau Hall, Mark Carney

told Canadians

that this election would be one where they were choosing between “a government that is unifying, standing up for Canada and is taking focused action to build a better economy” or one that promotes “want division and Americanism.” He continued, “That’s what Mr. Poilievre seems to be offering. Just endorsed by the premier of Alberta.”

This was in response to Alberta’s Danielle Smith suggesting that although there would be many disagreements, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre would be “very much in sync with … the new direction in America” and that the two countries would “have a great relationship,” pointing to issues they’d have in common: “If we do have Pierre as our prime minister, then I think there’s a number of things that we could do together. Pierre believes in development, he believes in low-cost energy, he believes that we need to have low taxes, doesn’t believe in any of the woke stuff that we’ve seen taking over our politics for the last five years.”

Apparently, it would be just horrible if a Canadian Conservative prime minister had many disagreements on some things with U.S. President Donald Trump, but agreed on some other important issues. Isn’t that exactly what Canadians expect Carney will be doing?

Despite the fact it was Smith who made these claims, Poilievre suffered their damage.

Calling Poilievre a “

slick-haired populist with the razor-sharp mind and bunker mentality

,” Globe columnist Lawrence Martin argued that the Conservative leader was caught flat-footed to the Liberals who had been in power for 10 ten years. But of course, he wasn’t. He was caught flat-footed by a party that abandoned even one of their own most beloved policies, including the consumer carbon tax, to win, and by Trump, and those who unfairly accused him of being like Trump.

If roles had been reversed, and Conservatives had been in power for ten years when Trump’s threats began, they, too, would have benefitted from incumbency and the rally-round-the flag effect that the Liberals enjoyed.

The only difference is, of course, because of conservative policies, the country probably would’ve been in much better economic condition when it happened. In contradiction to ten years under the Liberals and a

lost economic decade

, ten years under the Conservatives instead may have resulted in a stronger energy industry in Canada which we could have used to support our neighbours in Europe when they needed our help replacing energy from Russia.

The Liberals’ failure to secure a majority was in part, due to losses in Ontario, likely because they did not adopt

enough

of Poilievre’s policies, specifically, in regards to public safety, crime, and immigration. These are some of the complaints Liberal MPs heard while canvassing lost ridings such as Vaughan-Woodbridge and

Markham—Unionville. Abacus Data pollster David Coletto suggested that crime (especially car theft) likely played a “subtle but effective role” in flipping York region to Conservatives. This suggests that in these and other Ontario ridings that flipped, Mark Carney wasn’t enough like Pierre Poilievre.

It seems strange to suggest that Pierre Poilievre should step down as leader when his policies actually worked for the Liberals and would have likely secured them a majority if only they’d taken more of them on. I see no evidence that any non-incumbent leader would have been able to withstand the Trump chaos factor which the Liberals leaned into. Poilievre should proudly stay on as party leader and fight the Liberals tooth and nail on their blatant hypocrisy. He should just do it with the confidence and subdued tone of Canada’s next prime minister. After all, Canadians may soon have buyer’s remorse.

tnewman@postmedia.com

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• Terry Newman: On election night, CBC shamelessly cheered on Mark Carney
• Terry Newman: Mark Carney won on phoney values. They won’t fix Canada

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TOP STORY

The immigrant vote, long considered a reliable vote store for the Liberal Party, is quickly emerging as an important factor in having denied Prime Minister Mark Carney his expected majority.

Not only did immigrants break for the Tories in any number of pre-election polls, but immigrant-heavy ridings were the most likely to see their share of the Conservative vote increase as compared to 2021.

An analysis

published Thursday

by The Economist found that among the 31 Toronto-area ridings whose population was at least 40 per cent immigrants, almost all of them experienced a shift to the Conservatives as compared to the 2021 federal election.

The reverse was true in ridings where the Liberals picked up support. The fewer new Canadians in a riding, the more likely they were to flip red.

The Economist concluded that while Canada’s 2025 election yielded effectively the same result as in 2021, underneath the surface the country had undergone an electoral realignment similar to what’s occurred in the United States. “Just as in the United States, working-class and immigrant voters swung right,” wrote the publication.

“The immigrant community of Canada just blocked the Liberals from forming a majority,” declared Angelo Isidorou, executive director of the B.C. Conservative Party, in a post-election assessment.

“These new Canadians share our conservative values of hard work and the Canadian dream.”

The B.C. Conservatives experienced a similar phenomenon in their own election in October. Although they lost to the B.C. NDP, the party

saw its most dramatic gains in the immigrant-heavy suburbs

of Metro Vancouver.

Mainstreet Research polls leading up to the Oct. 19 vote also found that the B.C. Conservatives were conspicuously preferred by non-white voters, be they Black, East Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern or South Asian.

This trend wasn’t as noticeable in Monday’s federal election, as the Liberals were able to capitalize on a wholesale collapse in NDP support and head off Conservative gains.

But the trend was there: A

comprehensive map

of 2025 Liberal-Conservative vote shifts making the rounds on reddit on Thursday showed that the more immigrant and non-white a Vancouver riding, the harder their shift to the Conservatives.

One of the few Canadian ridings to flip from Liberal to Conservative on Monday, in fact, was the majority Chinese-Canadian riding of Richmond Centre—Marpole.

In the final week of the campaign, a survey by Innovative Research Group had noted that B.C.’s Chinese-Canadians had been emerging as

far more Conservative than average

, with this support almost entirely concentrated among first-generation immigrants.

Among Chinese-Canadians who had immigrated to Canada since 2011, Conservative support stood at an overwhelming 65 per cent. This was compared to just 18 per cent of Canadian-born Chinese-Canadians.

Conversely, the B.C. capital of Victoria has

long charted rates of ethnic diversity and new immigration

that were well below the national average. On Monday, the city ended up posting some of the most dramatic vote shifts to the Liberals in the country.

The 2025 election also saw a noticeable shift among younger voters, with a plurality of Canadians under 34 supporting the Conservatives.

A post-election Nanos poll concluded that 41 per cent of Canadians under 34 voted Conservative, against 32 per cent who voted Liberal. Among the over-55 cohort, meanwhile, the Liberals dominated at 52 per cent to the Conservatives’ 34 per cent.

The 2025 election thus represents one of the few times in Canadian history where the average 25-year-old was more likely to vote Conservative than the average 65-year-old — and where the average immigrant was more likely to vote Conservative than the average native-born Canadian.

As to why both groups are shifting right at the same time, one explanation is that both have been disproportionately vulnerable to the decline in living standards that has defined Canada’s last 10 years, particularly in the area of housing affordability.

Increasingly unaffordable homes have not only shut out young people from real estate ownership, but large numbers of new Canadians.

A July 2024 poll published by the Angus Reid Institute found that recent immigrants were some of the most likely to report being overwhelmed by high shelter costs. “Many recent immigrants are departing the country because of the high cost of living, and especially housing,” read an accompanying analysis.

A Leger poll from that same year found that 84 per cent of recent immigrants to Canada

reported that they found life “more expensive”

than they’d anticipated.

New Canadians have also started to emerge as prominent opponents of some of Canada’s more liberal social policies, including harm reduction, repeat bail for chronic offenders and even

lax integration of other immigrants

.

This was highlighted by Abacus Data’s David Coletto in a comprehensive Friday breakdown of how the election fared in the Toronto suburbs, where Coletto concluded that — even in the face of a nationwide Liberal upsurge — Conservatives “maintained their base and grew it.”

Coletto

pointed to large populations

of South Asian and Chinese Canadian voters in the suburbs bordering the City of Toronto and said they jibed with the “cultural conversatism” represented by the Tories.

“They value family, faith, entrepreneurship, and community order,” wrote Coletto. “For many, the Liberals’ progressive stances on gender, parental rights, and criminal justice reform felt out of touch.”

 

IN OTHER NEWS

The King is coming to Canada. Although King Charles III has been our head of state for more than two and a half years at this point, he hasn’t yet made a trip to Canada, which is somewhat understandable given that he was diagnosed with cancer early last year. But Prime Minister Mark Carney, who spent a lot of time with the King while governor of the Bank of England,

appears to have convinced him

to read the speech from the throne when Parliament reconvenes on May 27.

Ujjal Dosanjh is one of the only Canadians who might be able to empathize with what just happened to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. In 2000, Dosanjh was leader of the B.C. NDP when it suffered one of the most lopsided defeats in Canadian history, going from a majority government to just two seats. But Dosanjh, who also served as minister of health under then prime minister Paul Martin, didn’t mention any of that in a

recent blog post

. Instead, he welcomed the new government of Mark Carney, said he trusted him on fiscal issues, but warned the Liberals to be more diligent about requiring new immigrants to assimilate. “We need immigrants but not the kind that tell us to bend to their whims, religious or otherwise,” he wrote. “I hope Mr. Carney doesn’t believe one can come to Canada and not change even a bit and be in Canada ‘who you were where ever you were.’”

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• The Liberals may have lost seats in Ontario — and their majority — because of crime and Trudeau fatigue
• Pierre Poilievre to contest byelection in Alberta riding after Damien Kurek steps down

If more provinces stood up for themselves when the feds started encroaching, we’d be a lot better off as a country. That in mind, it was good to see Alberta announce on Thursday that it would be

challenging

the federal Clean Electricity Regulations, which became law in December.

The

new rules

aim to net-zeroify the entire Canadian grid by 2050, banning carbon emissions by new units with at least 25 MW of electrical generation capacity over a preset “technology-neutral annual emissions limit” by 2035; the ban will also cover existing units by 2050 at the latest. It’s

expected

to cost the country $40 billion from now until 2050 — and it’s justified because magic math in Ottawa pegs the benefits to society in that time will be worth $55 billion.

Aside from spelling disaster in Alberta (and other provinces, to a lesser extent), there’s a pesky little document that could stand in its way: the Constitution. In 1867, it was

decided

that legislating on the “development, conservation and management of sites and facilities … for the generation and production of electrical energy” was exclusively the job of provincial legislatures.

On that basis alone, the Clean Electricity Regulations should have set off alarm bells in premiers’ offices across the country. Premier Danielle Smith saw that plain and clear.

“Section 92 of the Constitution … enumerates our exclusive jurisdiction,” she said Thursday, speaking at a news conference. “That’s the word (used) in the Constitution: ‘exclusive’ jurisdiction over resource development and the development of electricity — and there’s a reason for that. It’s because every province has different endowments and different abilities to generate electricity. That is why it has been assigned to the provinces to make these decisions.”

Like Smith, the feds are well aware that Alberta is a fossil-fuel rich province that relies on natural gas for most of its power and does not have an abundance of dammable rivers. This was explained in the regulatory impact analysis

statement

that was released alongside the official, final version of the Clean Electricity Regulations.

“Notably, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and to some extent, New Brunswick and Ontario, rely more on unabated emitting generation than the national average. Accordingly, these provinces are expected to experience the biggest shift in generation sources as a result of the Regulations.” In other words, “You guys better get ready to lay out a whole lot of solar panels.”

As for who will feel the most pain, take a wild guess: “Ontario and Alberta are modelled to take on nearly 70 per cent of the total costs net of cost-savings accounted for in the (cost benefit analysis), largely driven by incremental capital costs for new electricity system capacity.”

Before the regulations were finalized, Alberta did its best to

express

concerns with the real-life effects of the proposed framework. For example, the draft regulations proposed to cap power generation at peaker plants, which run at peak times to ensure blackouts don’t happen, at 450 hours per year, which would limit these facilities to using only five per cent of their capacity. Alberta protested, and the time limits were removed — but even so, the

other provisions

of the regulations will cap these facilities to operating at a maximum of 20 per cent capacity. In the end, it means Ottawa is still strangling the provinces’ ability to manage their grids at peak times.

For another example, look at how the regulations treat emergency management. The first draft actually required the federal government to sign off on allowing exemptions to the rules in cases of local emergency — which exposed anyone who needed to break the rules to the risk of jail. Alberta objected, and now the final rules allow emissions in emergency circumstances (which must meet federal criteria) to be exempt from the overall emissions cap for 30 days (extensions would be allowed, but only with federal approval) — with an added requirement that any use of this provision must come with a detailed justification.

So, instead of getting rid of this leash that limited a province’s emergency response, Ottawa merely lengthened it while trudging into the zone of provincial emergency management. And criminal penalties for those who step outside the federally drawn lines are

still on the table

.

“We have zero large-scale natural gas plants being proposed,” Smith told the news conference. “That tells me something about the level of uncertainty that natural gas plants have, because remember, this is written as (a) criminal violation if you do not meet the target by 2035.”

“What CEO is going to, by 2035, building with today’s technology, be able to guarantee a 95 per cent abatement on their CO2 within 10 years, with technology that doesn’t exist, on the risk of going to jail? I’m going to tell you there are zero,” she added.

It’s unclear how this will go in the courts. The feds will no doubt point to the top court’s 2021

ruling

on greenhouse gas pricing, which opened up new bubbles of federal jurisdiction within what was otherwise provincial domain if the intent was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A majority of the court figured that climate change was such a dire and existential threat that it was entitled to greenlight one very specific policy tool to deal with it: former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax.

In reality, climate change turned out to be not as cataclysmic as originally thought, because the Liberals set the carbon tax to zero in March.

Meanwhile, it’s also been demonstrated that playing the environment card doesn’t always work. Major provisions in the federal government’s overzealous Impact Assessment Act were declared unconstitutional after a different court challenge by Alberta; the law cast its net so wide that it unlawfully pulled provincial projects into the onerous federal review process. (This law has since been revised, but unsatisfactorily, so it’s off to the courts again).

Smith is doing the right thing by fighting out these incursions in court. Just like how lawns need to be edged, the naturally expanding bureaucratic hulk of federal jurisdiction needs to be checked. If Alberta ends up winning — and it’s very possible it does — it would be a victory for not just the province’s grid, but for every province that believes in preserving the Constitution’s division of powers.

National Post

• Jamie Sarkonak: Liberals push Canada toward a net-zero electricity grid — with a stick instead of a carrot
• Jamie Sarkonak: Alberta steps in again to protect Canada from Steven Guilbeault