OTTAWA — As the federal election campaign approached its final days, the Conservative war room couldn’t help but dwell on a brutal paradox.
Inside the confines of the office where the campaign was headquartered in downtown Ottawa, insiders say the overwhelming feeling was that the campaign couldn’t have gone much more smoothly. Despite mounting criticism from pundits and even fellow Conservatives, everyone on the campaign seemed to be rowing in the same direction. Unusually, the media coverage was mostly favourable, or at least neutral. And they had entirely avoided the “bozo eruptions” that had plagued so many Conservative campaigns before.
And yet, none of it seemed to matter enough.
The Liberals, down about 24 percentage points in opinion polls just months earlier, had suddenly taken the lead as the writ dropped and never relinquished it. Nothing had gone wrong with the Conservative campaign, but they watched, agape, as every lucky break that happened somehow seemed to go to Mark Carney’s Liberals.
That frustrating gulf between the Conservative campaign’s vibe and the results has been one of the unanswered, behind-the-scenes questions from what many described as the most important federal election in decades.
Some Conservative sources credited the relative smoothness of the campaign to their controversial decision to keep reporters off the party’s campaign bus and plane, instead relying
heavily on videos made for policy announcements
, that were posted each morning on social media channels.
That video plan had set off a few days of grousing by media outlets and teasing from critics, but it also caused grumbling among campaign staff because it sucked up a lot of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s time in the run-up to the campaign. The leader personally narrated each of those videos, meaning that for days he was locked in a room narrating dozens of six-minute-long videos, in both English and French. Still, the spots gave media organizations something to write about each morning on almost every day of the campaign and the news stories were generally positive.
Yet the opinion polls — the bottom line during any election campaign — were suggesting that the strategy wasn’t moving the needle as far as it had to. That was confirmed on Monday, when voters handed the Liberals another minority government. The Conservatives did better than many expected, hitting new high-water marks in key places. But it wasn’t enough. They lost. Again.
No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t wrestle a Donald Trump-themed election back from Carney’s Liberals onto their own home turf of affordability and cost of living. Political observers interviewed by National Post agree the Conservative strategy was excellent, but it was designed for a different time, and a different kind of campaign.
“It’s one of the hardest things to do in sports, is to go in the locker room at halftime and say what we’ve done all season isn’t working,” said Mitch Heimpel, a former senior Conservative operative, now policy at Enterprise Canada. “The problem is that every coach that has ever said that has been right.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney held his
first post-election press conference on Friday
, and has been huddled with his team creating a new cabinet and planning the first months of legislation for his re-elected Liberal government. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are left debating how things could have gone differently.
It was an election that was “absolutely winnable” for Conservatives, said a senior party source, who wished the campaign had done better zeroing in on the main issue of U.S. President Donald Trump. In the end, it surprised everyone, from Conservatives who were sure they would be in government, but aren’t; and Liberals who had gone from thinking weeks ago they would lose badly to believing in the closing days they would win a majority, but ended with neither.
National Post spoke to insiders on multiple party campaigns, from those who toiled in the war rooms to those on the leaders’ tours, including senior advisers, to get the inside story on what led to this week’s election result — from the ugly internal struggles within the Conservative party to the Liberals’ sudden “holy sh-t” moment where they realized they had a chance of saving their party from electoral oblivion, and the incredible turns of luck that seemed to somehow all turn one way: for Mark Carney.
___
The biggest problem for the Conservatives was that they were facing off against the wrong guy.
When the writ dropped on March 23, it was Liberal Leader Mark Carney standing outside Rideau Cottage speaking to Canadians, not former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
The Conservatives had been planning for months, if not years, to campaign against the unpopular and increasingly out-of-touch Trudeau. It was to be a campaign that naturally emphasized the issues where Tory polling revealed government weakness: the carbon tax, affordability, crime, resources extraction, housing and, perhaps most of all, Trudeau himself. Canadians had badly soured on a prime minister who had enjoyed so many years of celebrity. Trudeau seemed blithe about the painful rise in the cost of living since the pandemic, the increase in dangerous crime that seemed to trace back to his permissive legal reforms, and the worsening housing crisis. He stubbornly continued to defend his carbon tax, despite polls showing more than two-thirds of Canadians had turned against it.
The focus groups spoke for themselves: people were saying they wanted a change most of all, but also to punish what they saw as the arrogance and indifference of Trudeau’s Liberals. The Conservative party’s 20-point lead in the national polls in December seemed too good to believe. Some Tories were talking about the downside of winning too many seats — the risks of having too large a caucus to control. An election was scheduled for 2025, and the opposition parties had finally agreed in late 2024 to bring down Trudeau’s government at the first opportunity. Media reports wrote credibly about a historic Conservative landslide, and the possibility of the Liberals beaten down to rump status.
Then, two groundbreaking events occurred that changed everything.
On Jan. 6, Trudeau quit, pushed out by his own caucus who had finally broken with his self-destructing leadership. After a hastily called leadership race, Carney romped to victory to replace him as Liberal leader and, at least briefly, as prime minister.
Before he threw his hat in the ring, and despite years of envisioning himself as Canada’s leader, Carney had been hesitant to join the race. Senior Liberal sources said that Carney, who had been nicknamed “PM” by some friends while in university, wasn’t sure the time was right.
As late as Christmas, friends said it still wasn’t clear if he’d throw his hat in the Liberal leadership ring if the job became available.
Then came the second event — and the time, suddenly, became exactly right.
U.S. President Donald Trump, in the run up to his inauguration on Jan. 20, had begun sounding very serious about his plan to pose a grave threat to Canada’s economy and sovereignty. On Jan. 7, the day after Trudeau’s resignation, Trump said he would use “economic force” to take over Canada.
“We’re going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada,” Trump said.
On his first day in office, the president said he would slap a 25 per cent tariff on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1, the start of a teeter-tottering trade policy that has yet to stop fluctuating even today.
But while dark clouds were gathering over the Canadian economy, Carney could see a silver lining for his own political prospects. Even Conservatives saw it coming.
“Donald Trump … turned this election into a referendum on leadership style as much as policy. Carney exudes technocratic calm; a clear contrast to the volatility and chaos coming from the White House,” said Dan Robertson, who was chief strategist for the Conservative party during the 2021 election.
Not for the first or the last time, the electoral heavens smiled down on Carney. The two big events — Trudeau’s quitting and Trump’s menace — had opened the doors for a rookie politician, a Liberal who could claim outsider status, to lead the country.
It was a Hail Mary pass of sorts for the party to go with a rookie outsider best known for his ability to move interest rates, not crowds. But when you’re getting crushed in the polls, why not go for broke?
At the time, former Trudeau adviser Gerald Butts, who had returned to service with Carney, would later say he took a look at the party’s election forecasts in January and found them predicting fewer than 50 seats.
There was almost literally nothing for the party to lose.
___
Carney had soft-launched his political career on Jan. 13, on The Daily Show. Asked whether he would run for Trudeau’s job, Carney said
“I just started thinking about it,” which everyone who knew him saw right through. He also said he would run as “an outsider,” which his opponents also saw right through. Carney, in fact, had been sauntering around inside the Liberal party in one capacity or another for a decade, most recently as an economic adviser to Trudeau.
And as the campaign kicked off, Carney’s credentials as the “change candidate” didn’t hold up to scrutiny.
As Poilievre repeatedly argued, Carney was surrounded by Trudeau’s former team at all times. Communications staff from the PMO and who had served Trudeau ministers worked the campaign trail and the senior campaign staff was a who’s who of the original Trudeau brain trust.
Even Butts, who had previously sworn off politics, was now back in what he would later describe in a podcast interview (with journalist Paul Wells) as a “mentorship” role. Former Trudeau cabinet minister Scott Brison was also on the plane with Carney during the leader’s tour, ambling around the various campaign events, mingling with supporters and chatting with journalists. Brison, a friend of Carney’s now working as a bank director, was vague when asked by reporters what his role on the campaign was.
The Liberal election platform, which was unveiled on Easter weekend, had an unmistakably Trudeau-era feel to it, too. The deficits were even bigger than the Trudeau government had projected in the last economic update, and the projected new revenues were vague: billions were apparently going to be saved by government productivity gains. Reporters with good memories knew that, although the platform had Carney’s input, it was substantially completed before the leadership race had even ended — under Trudeau’s guidance. Liberal MP Mona Fortier said on the night of the leadership vote that she was ready to hand over a mostly completed platform to whoever won.
Similarly, Liberal campaign manager Andrew Bevan had told caucus in January that he had prepared a “campaign in a box,” to whoever won the race. At the time, the party was at DEFCON 1 in its election preparations because the opposition parties were waiting for their chance to topple the Trudeau government. In fact, while the Liberal leadership candidates battled each other in January, the party was already securing candidates across the country for a now-looming election.
Carney was sworn in as prime minister on March 14. Nine days later, he called an election.
___
After speaking to the Governor General and dissolving Parliament on March 23, Carney hit the campaign trail and made full use of his role as the new prime minister and the danger of Trump to juice his incumbency advantage.
In the first week, new threats from Trump about imminent tariffs were enough to spark a campaign pause, and a series of official meetings in Ottawa.
On March 27, Carney emerged from a meeting with his federal cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations in Ottawa with a grim warning for Canadians.
“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said.
“The road ahead will be long. There is no silver bullet, there is no quick fix, and I know and I understand that many are feeling anxious and worried about the future,” he said.
The quotes were powerful — and they had their intended effect. News stories in Canada and around the world replayed Carney’s ominous quote, with the prime minister, looking very serious, very much in charge, and very much like a leader prepared for a crisis.
The next day, Carney said he had spoken with Trump by phone, and the president had been respectful. Trump had described the call as “productive.”
In the second week, the campaign looked ahead to Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day,” when a series of global tariffs were set to be announced, and saw another golden opportunity to get Carney in front of cameras and behind the prime minister’s podium, exuding the calm, reassuring leadership they needed him to project to win over voters.
On April 1, after a rally in Winnipeg, the Carney plane made a last-minute itinerary change. Journalists were told to forget about the earlier plans to campaign in Montreal and prepare instead to head back to Ottawa. Carney put the government-leader suit back on and spent the entire next day in Ottawa in private meetings about the Trump threat.
Liberal sources confirmed that Carney’s prime ministerial diversions, even if they argued it was necessary, served a vital role for the campaign. First, it reminded Canadians of the Trump issue and reinforced the idea forming in voters’ minds that Carney was the best option to deal with it. Second, it gave him a break from the campaign trail, where mistakes were always a possibility for the political neophyte. And mistakes had been made.
Carney had already blundered in Quebec when he mangled the name of a Liberal anti-gun candidate and incorrectly described her as a survivor of the “Concordia University” massacre rather than Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. He spent days on the campaign trail sticking up for Liberal candidate Paul Chiang before accepting the embattled Toronto candidate’s resignation for
his suggestion to Chinese media that people
in his riding turn over a rival Conservative candidate to Beijing’s authorities. He had peevishly snapped at reporters who had pressed him over his refusal to disclose potential conflicts of interest from his previous role as chair of the massive Brookfield Asset Management investment empire.
Trump had saved him from all of it.
Instead of campaigning in Montreal on April 2, Carney spent the day in closed-door meetings, speaking to the media for only a minute without taking questions. The next day, Carney went before the cameras on Parliament Hill and addressed the country as prime minister before belatedly heading to Montreal in the afternoon. Carney
unveiled counter-tariffs and warned
Canadians they could be in for a long fight. There were no campaign media events on both days, and just one French-language interview on Quebec television.
On April 4, at a rally in Scarborough, Ont. the campaigning Carney went before Liberal supporters and ripped Trump over his threats to Canada, in a departure from the subdued rhetoric of the prime ministerial speech two days earlier. At one point, Carney joked about Trump’s age saying that, at 78 years old, Trump was unlikely to change any time soon.
Carney the campaigner seemed unafraid of giving Carney the prime minister headaches from the volatile president south of the border.
It was the paradox of the Liberal campaign. Carney had to look like the “adult in the room” that would deal with Trump, while ginning up the threats from the American president.
Then, seemingly unfavourable news broke on the eve of the election that Carney couldn’t get his story straight about his March 28 phone call with Trump. Carney had said Trump respected Canada’s sovereignty, but Radio-Canada had discovered that wasn’t the case: Trump had continued to refer to Canada as the “51st state” on the call. NDP and Conservative staffer immediately smelled a rat.
It resulted in a gruelling news conference for Carney, who got irritable with reporters and insisted he had been clear from the start about the call, although he hadn’t. But it wasn’t all bad news for him: the opposition parties knew that the mere fact of having Trump in the headlines again, even if it was because of Carney’s deception, would benefit the Liberals.
Some even wondered if the Liberals had planted the story, assuming that a bad day for Carney would still be a net benefit for the incumbent party.
No matter which way things broke, they all seemed to help Carney.
___
As Carney basked in the Trump threat and his unbeatable luck, Conservatives were faced with a critical strategic decision that would dog them throughout the campaign.
They had to choose if they still wanted to fight the election campaign on what was widely viewed as the ballot-box question: Canada’s response to the Trump tariffs. Or whether they should try to change the question, so that it was still about the problems under the Liberals: the housing shortage, the cost-of-living crisis, the economic sluggishness, the runaway immigration rates and rising crime. The ballot-box question that would have been, had Trump not so violently shaken up the box.
For the Tories, that second question was undoubtedly more favourable terrain and likely an easy win. But there was no guarantee they could change the top issue in the election.
“If you’ve got a pretty typical election, you can absolutely get to a place where fighting over the ballot question is a reasonable, plausible strategy. But (hundreds of thousands) of jobs are on the line in the province of Ontario and the automotive sector, so you don’t get that option,” said Heimpel.
At the leaders’ debates on April 16 and 17, Poilievre doggedly pressed Carney on his attachments to the Trudeau government and even got widely positive reviews for his performance. Still, the polls remained stubbornly unmoved. Day after day, Poilievre beat Carney over the head with the Liberal record, but he couldn’t get voters to make that their top issue again. The Liberals’ polling lead would last until the days before the election.
The reality was that when it came to Trump, polls showed that Canadians simply trusted Carney more than Poilievre. And the Conservatives had another challenge on this front too: A chunk of Poilievre supporters actually liked Trump.
The Conservatives decided to stay on their key message.
They spent much of the campaign being criticized for it by erstwhile allies.
Bevan, the Liberals’ campaign manager, later said he would have played his hand the same as the Tories did, if he had been in charge of their campaign. He knew that the Liberals held an insurmountable lead on the Trump issue and that the Conservatives’ only hope was to wrestle the ballot question back to affordability.
“The Conservatives had to try and make the ballot question something different, make it around cost of living and change. I actually think they were right to continue to try and fight for that,” said Bevan
on the Paul Wells podcast
.
“If they had tried to shift ever more so into the anti-Trump ballot question, the reality is they wouldn’t have been able to compete with us.”
Some Conservative strategists agreed, saying Trump was the incumbent advantage for the Liberal leader, and it couldn’t be matched. Poilievre needed to stay authentic to his message.
“He (Poilievre) won those voters based on driving contrast and arguing for change, and I would argue that had he moved off that track too much, he would have lost the contrast and even more voters would have folded in to the guy who could get the President on the phone,”
wrote Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategy
and former director of communications for Poilievre during his party leadership race.
But one senior Conservative source who was plugged in to the campaign argued otherwise, saying Poilievre, and his campaign manager Jenni Byrne, resisted pivoting to the Trump question until too late because they relied too heavily on their instincts. It may have cost the party, the source said, an “absolutely” winnable election.
“They don’t believe in research,” the source said. “They believe in gut.”
Some Conservative insiders still think Canadians were looking for somebody to stand up to Trump, while Poilievre stuck to his plan to talk about grocery prices, fentanyl dealers, and other issues that were seen to favour their side.
“We wanted Captain Canada and we got Captain Capitulation,” said Kareem Allam, who worked on former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s federal campaign in 2021 and has known Poilievre for many years.
But the Poilievre campaign believed strongly in the strategy, and their faith only increased as the campaign rolled on and the polls encouragingly began to tighten before election day. They also firmly believed it would be campaign suicide to pivot directly into Trump. The Conservative party’s internal polls also supported the fact that Canadians overwhelmingly preferred Carney to Poilievre on the question of who they trusted more to deal with this issue. Trump was Carney’s winning issue, not theirs.
But in the first week of the campaign, while Carney was pausing to do his prime ministerial duties, the Conservatives faced a tidal wave of criticism about the strategic choice.
In the second week of April, Kory Teneycke, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign manager, called the decision to not fight the campaign over the tariff question “campaign malpractice.” Just to make sure no one missed it, he then repeated his criticisms of the Poilievre campaign during a television interview later in the week.
“I know it’s uncomfortable for people to hear that said out loud, but it’s in every poll and every poll aggregator, the numbers are the numbers, and saying that you don’t believe in polls, if you’re managing a campaign, it’s delusional,” Teneycke told CTV’s Power Play.
Adding further evidence of the remarkable rift between the Ford and Poilievre camps, the Ontario premier himself piled on a few days later, saying that the federal
Tories wouldn’t be losing
if they had Teneycke running their campaign.
“As for Kory, I’ve said right from Day 1, he’s tough as nails, but he’s the best campaign manager in the country. And to be very frank, if Kory was running that campaign I don’t think Mr. Poilievre would be in the position he’s in right now,” said Ford. “
(S)ometimes the truth hurts.”
Both comments were direct shots at Byrne and Poilievre and a salvo that made public a lingering feud between the pair and some leading Ontario Tories. Conservative sources say the bad blood is partly ideological, with the Poilievre camp seeing the government at Queen’s Park as too moderate. Others say it’s more personal.
Players in the Poilievre camp were furious at Teneycke and Ford for their interjections, saying it took the federal campaign off message for a number of days, and that that may have cost the Tories the election.
In a live television interview on election night, re-elected Ontario Conservative MP Jamil Jivani called Ford an “opportunist,”
and blew the conflict wide open
.
Jivani said the federal Conservatives had abstained from criticizing Ford, even when they had serious misgivings about his stewardship of Ontario, but Ford hadn’t returned the favour.
“When it was our turn to run an election, he couldn’t stay out of our business, always getting his criticisms and all his opinions out, distracting our campaign, trying to make it about him, trying to position himself as some kind of political genius that we need to be taking cues from,” said Jivani, to a CBC reporter on election night.
Ford was a “hype man for the Liberal party,” said Jivani.
Conservative supporters watching Jivani’s rant on a giant screen at the party’s HQ erupted into applause. One Conservative, who hadn’t had any beef with Ford before the election, said that what Ford had done was “unforgivable” and that this view was shared by almost everyone putting hours in on the campaign trail.
Poilievre’s Conservatives believe they did everything they could to stay out of Ford’s way during the Ontario provincial election campaign in February. The party knew that a “Canada First” rally Poilievre had arranged for on Feb. 15 would annoy Ford’s team, who were in the middle of a provincial campaign at the time. But they saw it as an electoral imperative to publicly meet the Trump threat.
The federal party made a notable concession to Ford to ameliorate the problem: the rally was originally planned to be held in Etobicoke, Ont. the premier’s home turf and the heart of his “Ford Nation” base of support. But when the writ dropped in the Ontario election, the Conservatives hastily rescheduled the event for Ottawa — and lost a substantial deposit in the process.
Many Conservatives seemed unsure of Ford’s ultimate motives. Maybe it was personal: one federal Conservative source said Ford simply dislikes Byrne and was pursuing a vendetta against her more than Poilievre. Maybe it was because he actually wanted Carney to win the election because he thought he could extract more for Ontario from a spendthrift Liberal government. Or maybe it was because he harboured a secret ambition to succeed Poilievre as the federal leader should he lose. Nobody in the federal party seemed to know for sure.
But if Ford somehow thinks he can go on to become federal Conservative leader after very publicly hampering the party’s chances in the election, one war room veteran said the premier is “delusional.”
___
Once Canadians had decided the question on the ballot was how to best deal with Trump, they came to view it as binary choice: Carney or Poilievre.
Everyone else was out of luck.
For party leader Jagmeet Singh and his New Democrats, the fall was particularly steep. The NDP had played an important role in the previous Parliament because it had used its lightweight caucus of 24 MPs to prop up the minority Liberals. The NDP believed that its role had influenced key policies, particularly Liberal steps toward national dental care and pharma care.
Now, after shifting his campaign to solely protecting incumbent seats in the final weeks, Singh was unable to save his own. He came in third in Burnaby Central and
resigned as leader of the party on election night
, with the NDP reduced to a woeful seven seats in the House of Commons — below the threshold for official party status.
The Bloc Québécois was kneecapped nearly as badly, winning only 23 seats, losing 10 — and with them the ability to hold the balance of power in the House. The Liberals, with 168 seats, ended four short of a majority and can make deals with either the NDP, Bloc or even Conservatives to pass legislation.
When the Conservatives finish their PowerPoint campaign post-mortem in the coming weeks, they will have a lot of data points to boast about. The party boosted its seat count, including stealing 10 seats from the NDP as part of a new working-class voter coalition. It had extraordinary success with South Asian and Chinese Canada voters, and their voting base was much younger than that of the Liberals. They won over 41 per cent of the popular vote, the most for Conservatives since the 1980s, breaking clean through what analysts for years has said was their maximum ceiling of high-30s. They successfully held off a surge Liberals were hoping for in the Greater Toronto Area.
But, in the two-horse race, the Liberals simply out-gained the Tories by poaching more NDP and Bloc seats.
From a consistent double-digit lead throughout much of 2024 and January of 2025, the Conservatives began a two-month slide starting the day Trudeau resigned. According to polling averages, their support tumbled from 44.8 per cent on Jan. 20, 22.9 percentage points ahead of the Liberals, to 37.2 per cent on March 21, the first day that the Liberals had taken the lead.
The Liberals, meanwhile, had jumped during that same period to 37.8 per cent from 21.9 per cent, carving substantial support from the Tories, the NDP and others.
One senior Liberal campaign source the “holy sh-t” moment came for the party on Feb. 27. That was the day Ford’s PCs in Ontario had won another whopping majority after calling a snap election, claiming they needed a new mandate to fight Trump. The success of that ploy suddenly had Liberals realizing they could actually win on the same question.
“It took people a while to bake in how much they didn’t like Trump,” the insider said.
The party had wisely timed the campaign to catch the moment — and kept it short enough to ensure it couldn’t fade.
That showed in the final week: the polls were tightening, particularly in Ontario, from nearly a 15-point Liberal lead at the start to nearly a draw on election day, according to major polls. One Conservative said they were wishing for just a little more time, but knew they couldn’t have it.
If there were two more weeks in this campaign, “I think we would win it,” the person said. But the Liberals had been extremely smart in how they had played everything, especially the timing of the party’s leadership race and the short writ period, he admitted.
The 36-day campaign — the shortest allowed by Canadian law — ended on April 28 with a minority government for Carney.
Poilievre had steered his party to the highest vote share in nearly 40 years and gained 24 seats. In the process, he lost his own Ottawa-area seat and will now have to run in a byelection to resume his role as Opposition leader in the House of Commons.
And Carney, having based his entire campaign on fighting back against Trump and his tariffs, wins the prize of having to deal with the fiery, unpredictable president and his economic depredations. The two men had a phone call after the election where they agreed to a meeting, planned now for next week in Washington. After the call, Trump called Carney “a very nice gentleman.”
But in politics, niceness arguably matters less than luck. And since his astonishing entry into politics in January, Carney has benefitted from a lot of it. Even with the clapped-out, unpopular apparatus of the Trudeau team behind him, Carney’s biggest break came from an incredible, almost inexplicable reset
in how Canadians viewed the Liberal government
, simply because Carney was not Trudeau.
Just as incredibly, the Trump administration saw it, too.
“I think the new prime minister is a serious person. Not the same experience we had with the old Canadian prime minister,” said
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Thursday
.
Carney has been catching every break, it seems, primarily by simply not being Trudeau. As he sets out to govern the country in its most serious moment in generations, maybe just looking more serious than the last guy will be enough to keep his luck going.
National Post
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