Canada's ruling Liberals are on the verge of a stunning comeback

How Trump's imperialist bombast threw the Conservatives into disarray and upended the race

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (credit: Mark Carney Facebook)

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

After veteran lawmaker Pierre Poilievre easily won the Conservative Party's leadership race in the fall of 2022, he leveraged a relentless series of attacks against Canada's Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, into a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls. Just a year later, Poilievre looked all but assured of restoring the Conservatives to power for the first time in nearly a decade.

However, as the campaign period draws to a close, Canada's Conservatives are facing the very real prospect of seeing their hopes dashed on Monday—and, for the incumbent Liberals, the tantalizing possibility of securing a fourth consecutive term in office is more plausible than ever.

Most startlingly, media reports, citing both Conservative and Liberal sources, are suggesting that Poilievre is even at risk of losing his own, seemingly safe seat in Parliament.

What happened?

After first winning office in 2004 at the age of just 25, Poilievre built a reputation as a pugnacious attack dog in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government, first as a backbencher and later as a Cabinet minister. Twenty years later, after rising through the ranks, he appeared to be the inevitable successor to an increasingly unpopular and embattled Trudeau.

Under Poilievre's leadership, the Conservatives laid siege to the Liberal government, assailing one of Trudeau's signature initiatives, a consumer tax on carbon, as well as benefiting from general public malaise resulting from post-COVID inflation.

So strong was Poilievre's position—and so weak was that of the Liberals—that the Conservatives held a double-digit lead in every publicly-released national opinion poll between late January 2024 and the end of the year.

How an insurmountable lead collapsed

However, two major developments shook the earth from under Poilievre's feet and dramatically changed the trajectory of the campaign.

First, Trudeau, entering his 10th year in office, finally acceded to demands from within his own caucus and announced his resignation as prime minister. Trudeau's departure sparked an accelerated leadership race to succeed him as head of the Liberal Party, which in Canadian politics occupies the center-to-center-left of the spectrum.

That race was won handily by a complete neophyte in the world of electoral politics: Mark Carney, a former investment banker and bureaucrat who led, in succession from 2008 through 2020, the central banks of both Canada and the United Kingdom during historically turbulent financial times.

Carney not only replaced Trudeau as leader of the Liberals, he also became prime minister in his stead. In his first official act as Canada's new head of government, Carney killed the carbon tax implemented by Trudeau, robbing Poilievre of his cause célèbre.

The second sea change was also brought about by another change in leadership: Donald Trump's election to a second term.

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Not long after his victory, Trump began to call for Canada's involuntary annexation by the United States through "economic force" as its "51st state".

Trump's unprovoked aggression sparked a firestorm in Canada, beginning with grassroots-led boycotts of American products and even escalating to provincial governments removing U.S.-produced alcohol from the shelves of liquor stores.

While Carney leaned into the moment, cutting a playful video with comedian Mike Myers in which he insisted that there will "always be a Canada," Poilievre was caught flat-footed by the intrusion of his erstwhile ideological ally into Canadian affairs.

The Conservatives, unable or unready to pivot, stuck with Poillievre's "Axe the Tax" sloganeering, even though Carney had already done away with the carbon tax—and even as Trump was threatening to subsume Canada's people and resources into his desire to resurrect America's Manifest Destiny.

Poilievre's problems were not helped by Alberta's firebrand Conservative Premier Danielle Smith, who, in comments made to, of all places, Breitbart in early March, promised that Poilievre would be "very much in sync with the new direction in America."

While Smith's remarks somehow flew under the radar when her interview was first published, they dominated the first days of the official campaign period that commenced at the end of the month. Soon, they were disseminated widely in Canadian media, producing an unwelcome distraction for Poilievre that he struggled to deflect.

More headaches emerged for Poilievre in the form of "friendly fire" from associates of Doug Ford, the popular premier of Ontario and nominally a member of the same political party.

But Ford, owing to an old and remarkably petty feud, took seeming glee in sharing internal party polling showing Poilievre's federal Conservatives performing badly in the vote-rich province. Further leaks, from within Poilievre's campaign itself, painted a picture of a campaign in disarray.

What the polls portend

Final polls have generally shown the Liberals enjoying a low-to-mid-single-digit lead over the Conservatives. If accurate, that likely portends a Liberal majority in the 343-member federal legislature, due to the inefficient distribution of Conservative voters in the western provinces. (Canada added five seats to its Parliament since the last election in 2021. All 10 provinces also redrew their maps, a process handled on a strictly nonpartisan basis.)

Struggling for air in this battle is Canada's left-leaning New Democratic Party, which, until recently, supported the minority Liberal government in Parliament under a "confidence and supply" agreement.

The NDP is desperately hoping to reelect its few remaining incumbents and maintain some degree of relevance in the next Parliament. The party, however, faces challenging headwinds in the polls, as many of its supporters appear to be switching to Camp Carney to prevent a Poilievre victory.

Liberals head into election night holding 153 seats to 120 for the Conservatives, while the NDP has just 24. The third-largest party is actually the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist left-wing party that runs candidates solely in the province of Quebec and has 33 members in Parliament.

Liberals are hoping that Trump's aggression will spark a rally-around-the-flag effect even in francophone Quebec, allowing them to peel off enough former Bloc voters to bolster their chances at another term. (It takes only a plurality to win each seat.)

The Liberals would need to gain 19 seats to secure a majority, though other outcomes remain possible. But no matter what happens on Monday night, this was not the election campaign that any observer expected when the year began.

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How to follow the results: The first polls close in Canada's easternmost province, Newfoundland, at 7 PM ET, while the last polls close out west at 10 PM ET. Most of the country's most populous province, Ontario, closes at 9:30 PM ET.

We recommend the CBC and Elections Canada (the country's official election administration agency) for live election results.