First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

With just two weeks to go until voting day, polls are beginning to show evidence of Conservative momentum as Canadians’ fear of U.S. President Donald Trump begins to dissipate.

The current numbers still heavily favour some kind of Liberal victory, but a series of new polls show a noticeable trend towards the Tories, including one of the few polls this election to put the Conservatives in the lead.

The latest survey by Mainstreet Research had the Conservatives with 43 per cent as compared to 40 per cent for the Liberals.

It’s the first of 21 Mainstreet polls conducted during the federal election campaign to show a Conservative lead.

Meanwhile, as Trump’s trade war with Canada fades into the background, there is spiking interest on affordability and the economy — the two issues on which the Liberals have traditionally polled quite poorly.

“For all those banging on about Canadian election being all about Trump, that’s not what numbers show,” wrote Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, in a series of Sunday social media posts.

Most critical force in any election is momentum, what Bush 1 called the big ‘mo. Difficult to create, difficult to manage, difficult to measure. Does seem over last few days to have switched a bit. Too early to say it’s a trend, but there’s been a wobble.

— Darrell Bricker (@darrellbricker) April 13, 2025

Citing a new batch of Ipsos numbers, Bricker said “cost of living” is now leading the list of voters’ concerns by 14 points, while worries about Trump are now at the “mid-tier” of what Canadians think the election is about.

“If election becomes about personal prosperity, race will continue to tighten,” wrote Bricker. He added that “there’s been a wobble” in the race’s momentum.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney has enjoyed a commanding lead for the first three weeks of the election campaign, but pollsters have long warned that his advantage was more volatile. As The Hill Times put it in the election’s first days, the Liberal lead was “built on toothpicks and very dry sand.”

For one thing, Carney has only been a politician for two months prior to the election, and he remains a relatively unknown quantity as compared to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has occupied the post since 2022.

Still, despite the most recent Mainstreet poll, most of the available indicators are still showing the Liberals on course for victory.

The poll aggregator 338Canada is projecting a Liberal caucus of 190 seats, much more than the 172 needed to win a majority.

The election modeller Poliwave is much the same; they’re projecting a 193-seat Liberal majority.

Even the betting markets are in the tank for the Liberals. The website Polymarket has racked up more than $40 million in bids on the question of who will be the next prime minister of Canada.

Although Poilievre has edged up slightly in recent days, he’s still at 32 per cent likelihood, as compared to 69 per cent for Carney.

The Conservatives are ironically experiencing the most successful polling streak in their history. At no other point since the party’s 2003 founding have they so consistently polled at 40 per cent or higher.

The problem for the Tories is that the progressive vote has consolidated around the Liberals. NDP and Bloc Québécois fortunes have dropped off a cliff, while the Liberals are hitting sustained levels of support unknown since the 1960s.

It also means that only a slight uptick in NDP or Bloc fortunes would have an outsized impact on the Liberals’ election day results.

At least in the last 50 years, most Canadian federal elections have followed a relatively predictable course: Whoever is in the lead at the election’s outset ends up winning.

The three federal elections contested by Liberal Leader Jean Chrétien, for instance, were all ludicrously uneventful. In 1993, 1997 and 2000, the Liberals exhibited double-digit leads almost immediately, and held the lead until election day, where they won comfortable majorities.

But there are scattered examples of momentum beginning to shift halfway through a campaign.

It happened in 2006. When a motion of non-confidence dissolved the Liberal minority government of Paul Martin, an initial flurry of election polls showed the Liberals enjoying a lead of as much as 10 points.

This moment flipped in the final two weeks of the campaign, ultimately yielding a victory for the Conservatives that even they found surprising.

A mid-election momentum switch happened again with the 2011 “Orange Crush.” In the final two weeks of the campaign Quebec suddenly leaned hard for the NDP, largely at the expense of the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, who both suffered sudden and catastrophic defeats.

But the textbook example of a mid-campaign momentum shift belongs to 1984, an election which shares similarities with the 2025 race in that it also featured an incumbent Liberal government headed by a rookie leader.

John Turner called a federal election immediately after succeeding Pierre Trudeau as Liberal leader, and a Carleton-Southam poll published soon after the July 9 election call had Turner enjoying 45 per cent support as compared to 42.5 per cent for the rival Progressive Conservatives.

Only after Turner’s lacklustre performance in the official leader’s debate did that lead dissolve, leading to a rise in Progressive Conservative fortunes that would ultimately yield one of the largest landslides in Canadian history.

 

BUTTONGATE

Last week, a CBC journalist was hanging around some Liberal election staffers at an Ottawa bar when one of them talked about circulating fake Trump-like campaign buttons at the recent Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference.

“When confronted, the staffer at first confirmed what he’d done. But he then denied saying anything when told that CBC News would be reporting on the operation,” read an account by Kate McKenna, the CBC journalist in question.

One of the fake buttons identified by CBC read “stop the steal” — a direct reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s perennial claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Other suspicious buttons turned up by the Toronto Sun included the slogans “Lock Justin up,” “Make Canada Great Again” and “It’s time to stay calm because there is no climate crisis.”

The actions would seem to veer close to violating the Elections Act. Under Canadian electoral law, you risk jail for making a “false statement” about the “membership in a group or association” of a candidate or “a public figure associated with a political party.”

But the Liberal Party was noticeably unapologetic in their statement confirming the fake buttons. “After many news reports last week about conservative infighting and prominent Trump allies being hosted at this Canadian conservative conference, it’s been reported that Liberal campaigners had created buttons poking fun at those reports — which regrettably got carried away,” read a statement sent to Postmedia reporter Bryan Passifiume.

EVERYBODY’S TALKING (BUT IN FRENCH)

One of the major differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada is that they have talk shows which basically everyone watches. Tout le monde en parle (Everybody’s talking) routinely attracts Sunday night audiences of up to one million, meaning that it’s not unusual for one in every nine Quebecers to be watching.

As such, a good TLMEP appearance can make or break a close election: NDP Leader Jack Layton’s performance on the show was largely credited with his party sweeping the province in the 2011 election.

And on Sunday, Quebecers saw both Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Leader Mark Carney.

Poilievre reportedly did quite well in a venue that is not known for its love of conservatives, much less those born in the Prairies. He even managed an inside joke of sorts, saying that his wife only accompanied him to meet fellow guest Kevin Parent, a well-known Quebec singer-songwriter. “She’s here for him, not for me,” he said.

Carney had a bit more ground to make up, given that he has noticeably shaky French and keeps flubbing basic facts about Quebec, such as confusing the 1989 Polytechnique massacre with the 1992 Concordia University massacre. But his interview did feature the extremely rare occurrence of Carney seeming to criticize his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

“We have the same values … but me, I’m going to put an emphasis on the economy,” he said. “Mr. Trudeau, we should say that he was less interested in this.”

Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.

• ‘The truth hurts’: Poilievre wouldn’t be losing if he had my campaign manager, Doug Ford says
• After a miracle byelection win, the Bloc is ready to lose in Montreal

Despite being one of the world’s top natural gas producers,

Canada

doesn’t have a single natural gas export facility. The Americans, on the other hand, have surged to

world dominance

in exporting LNG, turning the Gulf Coast into a

ring of energy exports

that generates billions of dollars.

For more than a decade, Canada has embarrassed itself with constant delays, chronic indecision and habitual overregulation in the energy sector, which has hamstrung LNG production. There is an opportunity, however, on the West Coast to salvage Canada’s limited capacity and make it an LNG superpower.

Currently, there is a single working LNG facility on the Pacific coast of North America, and that is the Energía Costa Azul facility

near Tijuana

in Mexico. Canada will soon change that, with several major LNG facilities in B.C. on their way to completion: Cedar LNG and LNG Canada in Kitimat are slated to finally come online imminently, while Woodfibre LNG in Squamish is under construction. A fourth project, Ksi Lisims LNG near Prince Rupert, is sifting through the approval process.

Once completed, these facilities on the B.C. coast will give Canada unrivalled access to Asian markets hungry for modern energy, such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Unless, of course, another American rival emerges, and that may very well come to pass if Alaska LNG, a

proposed

pipeline and export terminal in south-central Alaska, is completed.

Although Alaska LNG remains only an idea, President Donald Trump has made the completion of the US$44-billion (C$61-billion) facility a signature piece of his energy policy. American allies and trade partners such as Japan have even

explored

the prospect of joint participation in the project.

B.C.’s LNG facilities are well ahead of Alaska LNG in development, but aside from LNG Canada and Cedar LNG, Woodfibre and Ksi Lisims are still far from completion. Although Alaska is still a proposal, we should not underestimate the will and ability of the U.S. to build things bigger and faster than their Canadian counterparts.

The Americans’ tendency to shoot first and ask questions later is flipped in Canada. Consequently, the U.S.

had

seven LNG export facilities in operation as of 2020 and another five under construction; 15 others had been approved.

When a global

LNG boom

was triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, U.S. exports to Europe soared. Meanwhile, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

insisted

there was no business case for Canadian natural gas exports to Europe.

This was a self-inflicted wound. Canadian LNG development has been subject to

court challenges

, violent

attacks

by anti-LNG activists and

bureaucratic delays

.

American LNG exports could reach as high as 150 million tonnes annually by 2029, which is

11 times

what Canada will be able to muster. By leveraging existing energy infrastructure and with bipartisan support for natural gas exports in Congress, the Americans “have the cards,” to quote Vice-President J.D. Vance.

There is one market that the Americans can’t reach with ease: Asia. American LNG faces the Atlantic, and any natural gas exports to Asia must pass through the

Panama Canal

on tankers. Once completed, British Columbia’s LNG facilities will have a much faster straight shot across the Pacific to feed Asian markets, cutting down on costs for producers and customers alike.

As of right now, however, Canada is

fuelling

American LNG dominance by sending its gas to the Gulf via pipeline. This is why the Pacific coast is the last battleground for Canada to secure a strong foothold in world LNG markets without relying on the U.S. for access.

Team Canada is the theme of the day and used to justify any partisan policy position, but winning the race to bring LNG to the Pacific should be a non-political, national goal given how much prosperity it would bring: LNG demand is expected to

rise 60 per cent

by 2040, driven by growing Asian demand.

Expanding LNG is the position of the federal Conservatives and has been for years, but even BC’s NDP government, to their credit, has announced plans to

relax industry regulations

that relate to emissions and permitting.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged that, if re-elected, his Liberal government will support making Canada into an “

energy superpower

,” but questions remain as to which energy he is referring to. Carney is famously an advocate of “clean” energy, but hydrogen and other such energy sources are ages away from being produced at the scale required for mass export.

Right now, natural gas is primed to become a signature Canadian export, but if Alaska LNG is allowed to overtake B.C.’s future facilities and lock up a mammoth share of the market, it may be too late.

This is a time for Ottawa to choose whether it will commit to LNG and give it a fast runway to completion, or choose to delay and risk failure. The choice for anybody claiming to support Team Canada should be very clear, and a litmus test of just how sincere that slogan truly is.

The last thing Canada needs is to embarrass itself one more time with another self-inflicted wound.

National Post

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The 2025 federal election already has one big winner. Congratulations, CBC!

Barring a reversal of fortune, Liberal Leader Mark Carney saved the bacon of Canada’s natural broadcasting corporation when he announced that, should he remain prime minister after April 28, his government would not only keep the Crown corporation alive, it would raise its allowance until it reaches levels similar to those in Britain, Germany and France.

Why Canada should match Europeans in broadcast subsidies but not defence spending or other random areas of expenditure was left unexplained.

For the broadcaster’s 7,500 employees, it was a near-run thing. Before Justin Trudeau stepped aside, with odds favouring Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre emerging as prime minister, their future looked bleak.

Poilievre was set on “defunding” the English wing of the operation, sending hordes of journalists, editors and executives out the door. Once they’d been evicted from their cushy headquarters, Conservatives sniggered, the building would be turned into housing for more deserving inhabitants.

Not anymore. Not, at least, if Carney continues to hold his lead and keeps the Liberals in power for a fourth consecutive mandate. In that case, the corporation will get an extra $150 million a year, on top of the $1.4 billion already sent its way from Ottawa.

And this would just be the beginning of Carney’s plan to bring its funding in line with other public broadcasters. While no cap on the extra funding is identified in the Liberal announcement, a raise of $1 billion or so a year over time is not out of the question.

Carney

couched

the plan in the usual manner of CBC defenders.

“In this time of crisis,” he declared, “protecting our identity is a critical part of keeping Canada strong.”

While it’s hard to argue with that, it’s also disconcerting that, 158 years after Canada became an independent country, with all the history and achievements those decades contain, it’s still considered reasonable for a federal leader to suggest Canadians wouldn’t be capable of protecting our identity on our own, without having the CBC do it for us. If $1.4 billion a year isn’t enough to keep us protected, is an extra $150 million going to do the trick?

In any case, for English-speaking employees of the corporation — Poilievre was always going to spare the French wing for fear of losing crucial Quebec votes — the news must have come like a last-minute call from the warden, announcing a reprieve just as the prisoner was being marched off to the electric chair.

In addition to the prospect of more staff, more bureaus and a continuation of year-end bonuses, Carney said the money supply would henceforth enjoy statutory protection, requiring parliamentary approval for changes rather than leaving it to “ideologues” — by which he meant any party but the Liberals.

It’s worth noting that on the campaign trail, Carney hasn’t shown himself to be a particular admirer of the corporation’s methods. He gets just as testy when being challenged by CBC reporters as he does with those from any other news outlet. It was the CBC’s Rosemary Barton who he advised to “look inside yourself” when she dared question his refusal to reveal more details about the assets he’d stowed away in a blind trust.

 

But polls show Canadians largely support the corporation and don’t want it to die, even if most of them rarely watch it and a significant portion agree with charges that it’s biased, top-heavy, Toronto-centric, too woke and represents a very real danger to the survival of private-sector competitors. From a purely political viewpoint, it made sense to retain Ottawa’s attachment to the network, whatever its flaws.

Where it doesn’t make sense is in its implications for its competitors, who don’t enjoy the benefit of an indulgent government and are trying to stay alive without being hooked up to the federal life-support system.

CTV, Global, Rogers and Quebec’s TVA have all slashed jobs and news coverage due to the loss of advertising revenue. What’s happening to television is what already

happened

to the print industry, which finds itself sadly diminished and increasingly beholden to government subsidies after having its income sources sucked up by monumentally bigger and richer U.S.-based tech giants.

 

By pouring more money into the CBC, Carney will further protect it from the challenges facing everyone else. It can compete for ads, launch new services and lure away viewers, all in the knowledge that Ottawa is covering much of the bill.

CBC television already struggles for an audience in much of the country, but why bother changing strategies when the money will flow in anyway, and in ever-increasing amounts? Carney’s promise ensures the corporation is relieved of concern about its future, while increasing the uncertainties facing private broadcasters.

 

To justify its intentions, the Liberal plan includes some caveats, among them the expectation that the Crown corporation will strengthen “local news with more local bureaus and reporters.”

Smaller regional operations could thus find that they, too, face new competition from a government-financed rival. It’s like the local shoe store owner got to work one day to find Ottawa opening a discount operation next door selling cut-rate Nikes on the government dime.

It’s odd that a leader who stakes his claim to office on his status as a seasoned executive with real world experience in the private sector would be vowing to further coddle a government-backed broadcaster against rivals that have to fend for themselves to make a buck.

Carney’s major pitch to voters is that he has better management skills than the crew that’s been running the joint for the past nine years. “I know how the world works,” he likes to say. Everyone knows business guys are better at running things than government guys. More efficient, more effective, with less waste and a closer eye on the bottom line.

Except, it seems, when the product is appearing online, or on TV or radio.

Shouldn’t a new, more secure and self-reliant Canada be promoting a strong, independent, self-supporting and competitive broadcast industry to keep it informed, rather than a two tier-system divided between a private sector operating by one set of rules and a public broadcaster safe in a different, more protected world?

It’s the opposite of the Canada Carney claims he can deliver — a bold, confident country but with the same old protected public broadcaster. If tariffs are bad because they stifle competition and innovation, how does the equivalent bring anything better to what we see on the tube?

National Post

• Jesse Kline: We spent $1.4B on the CBC and all we got was lousy anti-Israel bias
• NP View: The CBC exploits its unfair advantage

With race-based appointments to academic jobs in Canada now common, it should not be surprising that there are business opportunities embedded in them, and it is notable that a new search consultancy has entered and risen in the field: BIPOC Executive Search Inc., based in Toronto. The firm has a team of 15 and specializes in the recruitment of Black, Indigenous and racialized candidates. It has current job postings for 12 executive positions at three Toronto universities (York, U of T and OCAD), and no doubt the promise of many more as Canadian universities rush to make race-based appointments to their academic and administrative ranks. With a 15-member team, BIPOC Inc. needs plenty of work to meet payroll.

BIPOC Inc. cannot be faulted for taking advantage of business opportunities afforded by its institutional clients discriminating against whites and others — regardless of their qualifications — in the interests of appointing Black, Indigenous and persons of colour to job openings. It is the discriminatory behaviour of its clients that should attract our attention. As surrogates of governments in providing post-secondary education, universities are required to abide by the principle of non-discrimination that has broad roots in Canadian laws and values including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Universities claim to act in the name of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and we turn to definitions offered by one Canadian university: equity is the promotion of fairness and justice for each individual that considers social, historic, systemic and structural issues that impact experience and individual needs; diversity is a measure of representation within a community or population that includes identity, background, lived experience, culture and other aspects; Inclusion is the creation of an environment where everyone shares a sense of belonging, is treated with respect, and is able to fully participate.

Taking these definitions as our guide, we note that diversity recognizes that participation of different backgrounds in public life is a sign of societal health, and surely this is true. The definitions of equity and inclusion require fairness and justice “for each individual” and participation by “everyone” in an inclusive environment, and it is individuals who are accorded freedom from discrimination in the Charter and in human rights codes. Consideration of “social, historic, systemic and structural” issues points to the need for broadly-based recruitment, admissions and appointment processes. They do not mandate race discrimination.

The principle of non-discrimination is in marked decline in our universities, and this trend is aided and abetted by the federal government’s EDI requirements for research grants and appointments to Canada Research Chairs. I have noted in

earlier columns

that identities of race and colour are prevailing over competitively assessed individual merit in admissions and jobs. With respect to the latter, the Aristotle Foundation has

documented

the decline: it reviewed 489 employment advertisements from 10 universities, including the largest public university in each province. It found that 477 of these “employed some kind of DEI requirement or strategy in filling academic vacancies.” These fell into one of three categories: restricted hiring where all applicants had to belong to a preferred identity group; preferential hiring, which does not restrict applications but preference is given to those in preferred identity groups; and a third category that requires applicants to pledge support for EDI and state how they would support and advance it.

The universities’ answer is that they are practicing affirmative action which is permissible and constitutionally protected, and this answer brings us to the nub of the issue: how far can they go in the name of affirmative action? If they can discriminate widely or without limit, the principle of non-discrimination is severely diminished, sometimes even eclipsed.

Universities have made their choices to practice affirmative action that intrudes widely upon individual rights, and it is the Canadian people, including governments, university alumni and supporters, who must rein them in. It is more than a fair bet that Canadians as a whole would insist upon respect for the first principle of non-discrimination and clear limits that curb race-based admissions and hiring. Universities would be wise to listen to them.

National Post

Peter MacKinnon has served as the president of three Canadian universities and is a Senior Fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

• Peter MacKinnon: TMU doubles down on race-based admissions
• Peter MacKinnon: Have universities killed our Charter of Rights?

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had long ago expressed

appreciation for the notwithstanding clause, which allows legislators to override some sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So it should have come as no surprise that on Monday

he vowed to use the so-called “override clause” to reinstate consecutive life sentences for multiple murderers

. By rights, it should be something of a slam-dunk for the Conservatives.

“The worst mass murderers should never be allowed back on our streets,” Poilievre said in Montreal, adding a typically Poilievre-ian flourish: “They should only come out in a box.”

Crime isn’t showing up on pollsters’ lists of top priorities nowadays, but it was certainly on those lists before President Donald Trump retook the White House. And when political opponents are actually willing to oppose plain common-sense ideas, it’s usually good politics to invite them to try. To wit: On Monday Liberal leader Mark Carney called Poilievre’s proposal a “very dangerous step.”

It’s not a step that should be taken lightly, certainly. But

Poilievre cited two truly compelling examples

of multiple-murderers who should obviously be locked up automatically and forever, or at least for way more than 25 years:

Alexandre Bissonnette, author of the 2017 massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Sainte-Foy, Que.

; and

Justin Bourque, who murdered three RCMP officers in Moncton, N.B.

in 2014.

Under a Conservative-era law allowing consecutive life sentences — not just 25 years without parole, no matter how many people you kill — Bissonnette was condemned to 40 years and Bourque to 75. The former, especially, wasn’t a remotely draconian sentence. It was less than seven years per parishioner whom Bissonnette cut down in cold blood, as opposed to the 25 per he would have gotten had he murdered only one. He would have been eligible for parole with a good few years left to live. All was well. But then in 2022, in its infinite and baffling wisdom,

the Supreme Court busted those sentences back down to 25 years without parole

.

Poilievre’s Conservatives quite rightly honed in on a key element of that ruling — a passage that makes an utterly compelling case to keep the notwithstanding clause around forever: “The imposition of excessive sentences that fulfil no function … does nothing more than bring the administration of justice into disrepute and undermine public confidence in the rationality and fairness of the criminal justice system,”

Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote for the unanimous majority

. “And … the imposition of extremely severe sentences tends to normalize such sentences and to have an inflationary effect on sentencing generally.”

Excessive, irrational, unfair … says who? Criminal sentences should not inflate but deflate … why? “Fulfils no function”? The sentence is the function, surely. Lots of people die in prison before their sentences are up; they don’t get it back in casino chips when they check in at the pearly gates.

Locking up Paul Bernardo, William Pickton, Alexandre Bissonnette or Justin Bourque forever would “undermine public confidence in … the justice system”?

Unhinged.

(Incidentally, if you’re thinking the court must have cited precedent to back up these odd conclusions, you are correct. It cited

a 2016 paper published by Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law Review

, which was entirely about the United States and not in any respect about Canada.)

There’s just one maddening problem for Poilievre here, and for conservatives in general: Canadians are torn on the notwithstanding clause, which is Section 33 of the Charter itself.

In January 2023, the Angus Reid Institute found

55 per cent of Canadians would prefer to abolish it, with 45 per cent wanting to keep it. Even Conservative voters were split down the middle, with 51 per cent in favour of keeping it and 49 per cent preferring abolition.

Poilievre has a very good case to make here, but he’ll have to make it. It won’t make itself.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

Questions about his support from China and his corporate tax dodging have had Liberal Leader Mark Carney stumbling and snapping at reporters, even suspending his campaign to seek refuge in the image-friendly prime minister’s office. But the bigger question is whether he can avoid fumbling his front-runner status in the last two weeks of the campaign, as Brian Lilley discusses in our weekly election panel with Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson from Postmedia’s Political Hack newsletter. They also consider whether Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s campaign will finally get the boost it needs with the coming leaders’ debates after weeks of struggling against U.S. President Donald Trump’s intrusions and irksome conservative infighting. (Recorded April 11, 2025.)

• Michael Higgins: Carney’s new Project Fear is to scare Canadians into voting for him
• NP View: What Pierre Poilievre’s massive rallies tell us about the election

If the Liberals’ basic campaign strategy was to transfer Justin Trudeau’s politics into a new, less objectionable host — less objectionable to some, anyway — then they can only be said to be knocking it out of the park.

Nothing has noticeably changed back at HQ with respect to their communications strategy: Trump, abortion, gun control, all the greatest hits are on shuffle. Carney spouts nonsense somewhat differently than Justin Trudeau did, but the nonsense comes just and thick and fast: About

whom he’s met in the past

, about

the name of the Montreal school where 14 women were slaughtered in December 1989

, about

his involvement with Brookfield when it relocated its headquarters to the United States

.

On Sunday,

CBC reported that Liberal operatives had distributed

“stop the steal” buttons — a reference to some Trump supporters’ contention that their man did not, in fact, lose the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden — at the conservative Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference, the better to accuse conservatives of being horribly Trumpian. CBC reporter Kate McKenna overheard Liberal staffers bragging about it in a local watering hole. That’s just about as old-school greasy as Ottawa politics gets.

There are some notable changes, of course. The carbon tax is gone. But even there, there is consistency: As Liberals always do, the second Carney ditched the tax, MPs and candidates who had defended it as revenue-neutral if not essential for the planet’s survival

instantaneously

pivoted to boasting of all the money they were saving us.

And an Abacus Data poll suggests the Liberals are actually getting credit among voters for doing that.

Still, the Liberals’ commitment to The Old Ways is truly remarkable, considering how near oblivion the Trudeau gang flew the party. I certainly never thought I would see again what might be

the single dumbest campaign of recent years

: In a lakeside park in Sudbury, Ont. on Sept. 26, 2019, I witnessed Justin Trudeau arrive at a press conference by canoe and announce a “a travel bursary of up to $2,000 to (help Canadians) experience places across the country from Killarney, Banff, Gros Morne, and the Cape Breton Highlands,” while “partner(ing) with Via Rail to make these opportunities accessible and affordable.”

Via Rail doesn’t operate in Newfoundland, on Cape Breton, or go to Banff. It’ll get you from Toronto to Sudbury, which is about 90 minutes’ drive from Killarney Provincial Park … twice a week, and it takes seven hours if you’re lucky, and there is

a much quicker bus straight from midtown Toronto straight to Killarney

(and many more to Sudbury), so why would would anyone do that?

It was delusional and weird on every level, evincing a total misunderstanding of how real people live, or of how Canada actually works, or both. Railway delusions aside,

my basic take at the time was

: imagine telling a family struggling to make ends meet that you have $2,000 to help them out … but (they) have to spend it camping … and in a government-run campsite to boot.

Needless to say, the camping bursary never came to pass. But now it’s back, sort of, under Carney.

His “Canada Strong Pass,”

unveiled Saturday during Carney’s ongoing “campaign pause,” would “provide children and youth under the age of 18 with free access to Canada’s incredible national galleries and museums, and free seats on Via Rail when they travel with their parents,” during the summer of 2025.

The campaign had already promised

to make national parks and historic sites free to visit this coming summer — “free” meaning we all pay for it, naturally, as opposed to just those who use the facilities. And while there’s no “camping bursary” on offer this time, Carney pledges to “reduce prices for camping sites in national parks for all Canadians from June to August.”

Introducing, the Canada Strong Pass. pic.twitter.com/exM85OXnL0

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) April 12, 2025

Now, free access to museums and national historic sites is something I could get behind. (Team Carney says it’s willing to help provinces offer the same for their own attractions.) Canadians are appallingly ignorant of their history, and I don’t think we promote some of these sites enough: I blundered into

the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site on Cape Breton a few years ago

, never even having heard of it, and was completely blown away. Camping at national parks, I’m not so sure about. A

lot

of those campsites will already be booked for this summer anyway, not least because they’re quite reasonably priced to begin with.

But it’s the Via Rail thing that really boggles my mind, again — that hints at a fundamental lack of understanding of what this country really is and how it works. It’s like a vision of Canada based on stamps, or on passport illustrations. Via Rail is, on its very best days, a relatively practical and efficient way to get between Windsor and Toronto, or Toronto and Ottawa, or Ottawa and Montreal, or Montreal and Quebec City. Beyond that it’s useless for people who actually need to get somewhere on time, or at all, including on a vacation or camping trip — unless you have a few days on either end to kill getting there and back, which most people, unlike politicians, do not.

Indeed, the authors of the Canada Strong Pass almost seem to buy implicitly into the reality of Via’s practical irrelevance when they insist teenagers travel with their parents to enjoy free fares. Why on earth would they do that? Seventeen-year-olds go to university. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds are perfectly capable of going on trips together — to cities, to national parks, to campsites.

Alas, they don’t vote.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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Leave it to politicians to find unanimity on terrible ideas. Despite the wide gulf between Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, when it comes to trade, both agree on policies that leave Canada worse off: maintaining our system of supply management,

protecting

the

digital service tax

and

renegotiating CUSMA

, USMCA, or whatever you want to call the new NAFTA, without delay.

When CUSMA was being negotiated during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration ensured it contained a

sunset clause

to force the parties back to the table every six years. That review does not come due until

July 1, 2026

, but in light of current trade tensions, Carney and Poilievre have both vowed to enter into negotiations right after the election.

This, however, would be a mistake, and it’s exactly what the president wants. “Virtually every country wants to negotiate,”

Trump boasted

on Monday, days after announcing plans to impose tariffs on virtually every country in the world. Indeed, his modus operandi on a host of issues, from trade to the war in Gaza, has been to announce extreme measures and then sit back as foreign dignitaries flock to the White House to kiss his ring.

On Wednesday, following a vocal backlash from markets, businesses and foreign leaders, Trump lowered the tariff rate on most countries to 10 per cent, with the administration disingenuously claiming it was because so many of them offered to enter into talks.

Yet despite the fact that Carney said he had a phone call with Trump in which

they agreed to

“commence negotiations on a new economic and security relationship immediately following the federal election,” Canada

was noticeably absent

from the list of countries facing lower tariffs.

It would appear as though Trump is treating Canada as a special case, likely because we are such a large trading partner, situated so close and have similar environmental and labour standards, he believes we’re the low-hanging fruit in his plans to pressure businesses to move production to the United States. By entering into negotiations ahead of the July 2026 deadline, the next prime minister will be playing right into his hands.

For one thing, as it stands, CUSMA is the only thing standing in the way of 25 per cent tariffs being imposed on all Canadian exports to the U.S., and 10 per cent on energy and potash. So far, Trump has at least pretended to abide by the agreement he negotiated during his first term by exempting CUSMA-compliant goods from his across-the-board tariffs.

He has also made no secret of the fact that he wants vehicles, and their component parts, to be manufactured

in the U.S.

, and that he would like to see

the F-35 contracts

that went to Canadian firms to be awarded to American companies once they come up for renewal.

There should thus be no doubt that Trump doesn’t want to negotiate a freer trade agreement with Canada and Mexico; he wants one that will incentivize companies to move to the U.S. — which is why he’s doing it with a gun to our heads.

Knowing that the current agreement is protecting much of our trade and likely to be better than anything that replaces it, it is in our interest to maintain it for as long as possible. Entering into negotiations now would put us at a distinct disadvantage — especially if we’re unwilling to budge on known trade irritants like the digital services tax imposed on tech giants and our costly and inefficient system of supply management.

But by the summer of 2026, the effects of Trump’s broader trade war will have had time to play out, and there’s a very good chance that the administration will either have backed down from some of its harsher policies, or the U.S. economy will be in shambles.

At that point, the country will also be four months out from the

midterm elections

. If Trump’s tariffs significantly increase the cost of living for Americans and lead to widespread job losses, as expected, Republicans will be nervous about losing control of Congress and may try to distance themselves from the White House’s trade war.

At the same time, a Democrat-controlled Congress will likely be more forceful in asserting its constitutional right to control tariffs and ensuring the executive abides by trade agreements it ratified. The Senate has already

passed a bill

to terminate the national emergency that Trump used as a pretext to impose tariffs on Canada. If Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, such a bill would have a chance of escaping a presidential veto.

Waiting out the clock on renegotiating CUSMA would also give us time to test the dispute-resolution mechanisms in the current agreement, and see how our

complaint

to the World Trade Organization and

court challenges

to Trump’s authority play out. There are a lot of moving parts, but there’s a very good chance that Canada will be in a much better negotiating position a year from now than we are today.

Moreover, if we are successful at contesting Trump’s auto, steel and aluminum tariffs, all of which appear to violate CUSMA, using the agreement’s dispute-resolution mechanisms and the administration fails to abide by the decisions, we will know that any deal struck with President Trump isn’t worth the paper its written on.

In that case, rather than entering into negotiations with an untrustworthy partner, it may be in Canada’s interest to focus its attention on trade deals with other countries until the White House is occupied by someone who’s less hostile and will negotiate in good faith.

If our next prime minister — whether it be Carney or Poilievre — enters into negotiations with the U.S. right away, he will be doing so from a position of weakness and Trump will walk all over him.

While politicians always like to be seen to be doing something, in this case, it would be far better for us to bide our time and see how events play out, rather than allow Trump to bully us into an unfavourable deal, which will have ramifications that far outlive his administration.

National Post

jkline@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/accessd

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