Independent.
Fearless.
Reader funded.
Analysis
Federal Politics

The Trumping of Canada’s Politics

Voters have a new common enemy. And Poilievre’s lead has ‘evaporated,’ says one pollster.

Michael Harris 30 Jan 2025The Tyee

Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist and documentary maker.

Donald Trump’s gaudy display of “shock and awful” in the opening days of his administration is now in the record books.

It makes one thing crystal clear in this country. The U.S. president is now the main preoccupation of Canadian politics and that means that everything is in play.

Take a look at the poll Ekos dropped on Jan. 29. The public opinion firm sums up its findings this way:

“Approximately a month ago, following [Chrystia] Freeland’s dramatic exit from the Liberal cabinet, the Conservatives opened up a seemingly insurmountable lead of 25 points. Since then, the entire complexion of what appeared to be an inevitable Conservative majority has changed. This massive lead has virtually evaporated over a one-month period.”

Credit Donald Trump and his bullying ways. With a federal election looming, he is doing his best to alienate and infuriate Canadians.

There is his threat of punishing tariffs, and even the unwanted and offensive menace of annexation. Right after he takes back the Panama Canal and buys or conquers Greenland.

Trump also says Canada has nothing that the U.S. needs. He has apparently forgotten about the 4.3 million barrels of oil a day that keep heavy oil refineries in the American west and south operating. Or that Canadian heavy oil is sold to Americans at a discount.

He has also forgotten about Ontario’s hydro power, and Quebec’s aluminum.

Trump’s insolent behaviour towards this country was most recently on display during his Big Brother remote presentation at Davos.

There he once again claimed that the U.S. trade deficit with Canada was between US$200 and US$250 billion. His facts, as usual, were all hooey and horse feathers.

According to a recent analysis by TD Bank the U.S. trade deficit with Canada is only US$45 billion — less than a quarter of what Trump claims.

But there is no denying one thing. This bizarre creature of populist politics, tawdry marketing, reflexive lying and really bad hair has had a high impact north of the 49th parallel.

At the federal level, Ottawa has had to spend a billion dollars to shore up border security in an attempt to appease Trump. Never mind that Mexico, not Canada, is his real problem.

Ottawa has also had to come up with a three-phase plan to retaliate against U.S. tariffs should Trump actually impose them. He did against Colombia, quickly forcing that country to accept deportation flights from the U.S. or live with a 25 per cent tariff.

The political tendrils of Trump’s predatory belligerence go everywhere. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has called an unnecessary election in Canada’s largest province. He is specifically seeking a huge mandate to fight Trump and his tariff threat.

Ford has shrewdly become the first major politician in the country to slip into his Captain Canada suit, wave the flag and vow to go toe-to-toe with Trump if he starts a trade war.

And that, according to the premier, includes turning out the lights on a lot of Americans who depend on Canadian power, if their president picks a fight.

What makes this so unusual is that Ford already has a mandate and a majority government.

Nor does he need to go to the polls for more than a year, according to Ontario’s fixed-date election legislation. (Liberal premier David Peterson tried jumping the gun back in 1990 and it didn’t work out so well. Ontario dumped the Grits and elected Bob Rae and the NDP.)

But Ford is no mere opportunist as Peterson was when he called his unnecessary election. The current premier knows that the political landscape in Canada is changing at warp speed.

Trudeau and taxes are old news. Suddenly there is a common enemy who used to be a good friend.

What does that mean? The time is now ripe for a strong leader ready to stand up for Canada and push back hard against the American bully. Trump has changed everything, and Ford gets it.

From Ottawa to city halls

Even at the municipal level, Trump has triggered a reaction in Canada. The mayors of border cities who would be hurt most by tariffs have formed a new group, Border Mayors Alliance, to come up with a unified response to a tariff war that may be just a few days off.

But the big story here is at the national level. The federal Liberals have been firm, but decidedly measured and moderate in their public statements about a possible tariff war — a fitting strategy from a lame duck PM and a minority government in the throes of a party leadership race.

The watchword for the Liberals has been caution rather than bombast; at least until Trump actually imposes tariffs, as he has threatened to do by Feb. 1.

The federal government is using that time to make their case directly to state governors and exploit other back channels with a single message: Trump’s tariffs would not just hurt Canada but badly damage the American economy too. Time will tell if that strategy works.

Where does this leave the Conservative Party of Canada? While the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario have moved quickly to counter Trump’s Sharpie attack on Canadian sovereignty, the CPC is suddenly and dramatically vulnerable.

Never one to be at a loss for words, Pierre Poilievre is looking oddly befuddled. Perhaps that’s why he’s writing letters to Mark Carney trying to dictate to him who should be in his cabinet.

There is good reason for the CPC to be feeling uneasy. As I recently wrote in these pages, Poilievre expected to be running against the carbon tax and Justin Trudeau. With a huge lead in the polls, the next election looked like a mere formality before Poilievre became prime minister.

Now, the ground is shifting. Trudeau is gone and his would-be successors have disavowed both the carbon and increased capital gains tax. That leaves the CPC and its leader in front of some prickly questions.

Does Poilievre back conservative Premier Doug Ford’s bellicose response to Trump’s economic bullying?

Or does he side with Alberta’s conservative Premier Danielle Smith, and her refusal to agree to export tariffs on her province’s energy? Who will be Poilievre’s favourite political cousin?

If he goes with Ford’s robust approach, the CPC will feel the pain in Alberta. If he endorses Smith’s “hands off” Alberta’s resources, his bona fides as a federal leader at a time of national crisis will be called into question.

And with Trump quickly becoming public enemy number one in Canada, Poilievre’s Trump-like agenda could persuade Canadians to consider other alternatives.

Like Mark Carney, a shoo-in to win the Liberal leadership and become, at least for a brief time, PM. That would put voters in front of an interesting choice. What will it be, slogans or substance? Trash talk or talking turkey?

Poilievre’s Trump mimicry

The latest Trump-like policy from Poilievre was his promise to fire thousands of civil servants if he becomes prime minister. He claims there are too many bureaucrats, put there by big spending Liberals.

Sound familiar? Donald Trump had this to say about giving as many as 50,000 federal civil servants their walking papers in the U.S., including federal prosecutors who investigated Trump.

“They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.”

Then there is the vision of the media that Trump and Poilievre share.

Trump has flatly called the media “enemies of the people.” He routinely trashes reporters as purveyors of “fake news,” and has threatened to remove the broadcast licenses of networks who don’t share Trump’s aversion to facts.

Like Trump, Poilievre is no fan of the press. He believes it is biased against Conservatives and slavishly supportive of progressives.

That’s why Poilievre relies on social media and folksy, apple-eating videos to communicate with Canadians, a strategy much admired by his mentor Stephen Harper, who also despised the news media.

Like Trump, Poilievre has routinely lashed out at reporters whose questions he doesn’t like.

Most telling of all, Poilievre plans to “defund” the CBC. That move alone would put almost 9,500 Canadians out of work, including a small army of journalists.

But what joins Trump and Poilievre at the hip is their shared enthusiasm for the fossil fuel industry, and their mutual aversion to environmental protection.

Trump’s motto is “Drill, baby, drill.” One of his first acts as president was to withdraw the U.S., the world’s second biggest polluter, from the Paris Climate Accords. He described that as part of his common sense, America First policy.

Speaking to supporters in Calgary, Poilievre laid out his Canada First, common sense plan that mirrored Trump’s.

“We are going to clear the way for pipelines. I am going to support pipelines south, north, east and west.”

This at a time when monthly global average temperatures exceeded 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels for 11 months of 2024.

Try as he might, Poilievre can’t deny Donald Trump’s shadow across his agenda.

Trump campaigned in the recent presidential election on an “everything is broken,” “crime is rampant” approach. As for Democratic leadership, it was the worst in U.S. history. Joe Biden, Trump claimed, was a hopeless incompetent.

Poilievre has been an echo chamber for that same approach. Canada is broken, politics is in chaos and PM Justin Trudeau was “wacko” and his ministers were “crazy,” “disastrous,” “incompetent and discredited.”

Like Trump, Poilievre preaches an anti-elite, anti-woke, populist message in language more fitting to locker rooms than parliament or public discourse.

President Trump has just ordered that any member of the U.S. military who was dismissed for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine can return to the military — perhaps with eight years of back pay.

Poilievre too was anti-vaccine, rejecting mandatory vaccines as a public health issue, the better to portray them as an invasion of personal freedom by an overreaching federal government.

The Musk factor

And there is one more thing that the loquacious Conservative leader can’t talk away that may get Canadian voters wondering: The kind of Americans who are endorsing Pierre Poilievre.

The most telling example is not Alex Jones, the deranged conspiracy theorist who is such a fan of Poilievre. It is Elon Musk.

For starters, at a time when Donald Trump is creating an existential crisis for Canadians, having the endorsement of his closest advisor is more of a curse than a blessing.

But it is Musk’s bizarre public behaviour that could be downright damaging for Poilievre.

Most recently at a public event for President Trump’s inauguration, Musk gave what many people took to be a Nazi salute. Defenders of Musk tried to soften the blow by putting the incident down to making an awkward gesture.

The president’s billionaire buddy then made a bad situation worse by publishing a series of bad puns using Nazi names, to poke fun at his critics.

The Anti-Defamation League and several Jewish groups denounced his posts. “The holocaust is not a joke.”

Musk then made a virtual appearance at a gathering of Germany’s far-right party, AfD. His address came just weeks before Germans go to the polls.

One of the tenets of some in the AfD is that Germany shouldn’t have a Holocaust memorial. Musk offered the group his support and implied that it also enjoyed the support of the Trump administration in doing so. Recall that three Conservative MPs had lunch with an AfD member — member of the European Parliament Christine Anderson. Anderson visited Canada as part of a tour organized by supporters of the “Freedom Convoy” protests in downtown Ottawa.

Surprising election polls

With every new excess of Donald Trump’s retribution binge in the opening days of his presidency, and given the obvious similarities between the agendas of Trump and Poilievre, it is no longer automatic that the CPC will win the next election in a cake walk.

The CPC is still the prohibitive favourite to form the next government. But for the first time there is evidence of slippage in their levels of support.

Add to the Ekos poll cited at the top of this piece the latest Mainstreet research survey for Ontario completed on Jan. 26. It showed a comfortable lead for the provincial Conservatives: 31 per cent for Ford, 24 per cent for the Liberals and 20 per cent for the NDP.

But included in the poll was the question, “If the federal election were held today, how would you vote?” The answer was a surprise. In vote rich Ontario, the Liberals with a new leader scored 36 per cent and the Conservatives under Poilievre 34 per cent. Jagmeet Singh’s NDP support was just 11 per cent.

Also this week, on Jan. 27, Angus Reid Institute published its poll showing renewed interest in the federal Liberals. The CPC still has a comfortable lead, but with Carney at the head of the Liberals, 29 per cent of Canadians polled would vote for the Liberals. Before his resignation Trudeau and the Liberals had fallen to just 16 per cent.

Game on.  [Tyee]

Read more: Federal Politics

  • Share:

Get The Tyee's Daily Catch, our free daily newsletter.

Tyee Commenting Guidelines

Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion and be patient with moderators. Comments are reviewed regularly but not in real time.

Do:

  • Be thoughtful about how your words may affect the communities you are addressing. Language matters
  • Keep comments under 250 words
  • Challenge arguments, not commenters
  • Flag trolls and guideline violations
  • Treat all with respect and curiosity, learn from differences of opinion
  • Verify facts, debunk rumours, point out logical fallacies
  • Add context and background
  • Note typos and reporting blind spots
  • Stay on topic

Do not:

  • Use sexist, classist, racist, homophobic or transphobic language
  • Ridicule, misgender, bully, threaten, name call, troll or wish harm on others or justify violence
  • Personally attack authors, contributors or members of the general public
  • Spread misinformation or perpetuate conspiracies
  • Libel, defame or publish falsehoods
  • Attempt to guess other commenters’ real-life identities
  • Post links without providing context

Most Popular

Most Commented

Most Emailed

LATEST STORIES

The Barometer

Are You Worried about Trump’s Tariffs?

Take this week's poll