2025 Canadian Election Preview: As Our World Falls Apart

How We Got Here, And What Happens Next

“But only love can break your heart/Try to be sure right from the start/Yes only love can break your heart/What if your world should fall apart?”

Part of what makes this Canadian election so different is not the personalities, different though they are from 2021. It’s not the policy dynamics, different though they are from any time in the Trudeau era. It’s not even just that the NDP have collapsed, reorienting a 2 party politics last seen in the 70s. The biggest difference is that a core concept we’ve all taken for granted is at stake now.

My entire life, and the entire lives of most if not all Canadians, have been lived under the basic principle that the Americans are an ally. They might not be the most reliable ally, and there have been tensions, but there has been a basic understanding that they will not be openly antagonistic towards us. Even through Trump 1.0, we managed to survive mostly intact. Now, we’re here.

This is an election about vision, sure, and ideas for the future and all the things that elections are usually about. But the story of this election, and of this Parliament that is being mercifully put out of its misery tonight, is of wounded egos, bad decisions, betrayals, and what we were so sure of at the start falling apart as the world does too.

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The Convoy will be where many people start telling the story of this Parliament, but the story that defined this Parliament took place in March of 2022. The day Jagmeet Singh signed the Confidence and Supply Agreement with Justin Trudeau, the broad confines of attack were created. By tying the NDP so tightly to the Liberals, New Democrats in rural and regional seats were hung out to dry, and the NDP became unable to capitalize on discontent with the Liberals. And, over time, that built.

A spring wasted on (some true, some spurious) claims of foreign interference derailed the start of 2023 for the government, with stories focused on governmental connections to various people and little to no focus on what the government wanted to be talking about. The various scoops about who knew what and when, who spoke to who when, what translations of what conversations these leakers might have had access to, and then the decision (and subsequent controversy) to hire David Johnston as a Special Rapporteur distracted the government. Their eyes were off the ball.

The decision to hire Johnston, given both his connection to the Trudeau family and his role with the Trudeau Foundation was, with hindsight, the moment the government went off the rails. The death of Liberal governments historically is their arrogance, and the belief that any questions about Johnston’s objectivity were offensive claptrap should have been a bigger sign that this government was not going to turn things around.

The combination of rate rises, mortgage renewals, and the summer moving market led to the government’s tenuous polling collapsing that summer, as housing surged to the forefront of the mind and immigration policy reforms of 2022 started to bite. The decision to loosen Temporary Foreign Worker rules and the decision to continue to let the provinces pay for their post-secondary systems with foreign tuition dollars led to disaster for Canadians, one that Poilievre pounced on. The rise of housing as a front running federal political issue was a masterstroke for the Conservatives, and one that led to the continued sense that this government was on the back foot and dancing to Pierre Poilievre’s tune.

The 2023 Cabinet Shuffle didn’t do anything to raise the government’s political fortunes, even though it did get us a Housing Minister who knew his shit, and from there the next 15 months were a slow leak from the government. The government tried to make announcements, but every time - be it housing announcements or renter protections or school lunches or taxing the rich - the country didn’t care. Pierre Poilievre would do something batshit - like quoting Fox News‘ sole sourcing that the Buffalo near-bridge crash was terror related and then spending two days claiming it wasn’t just Fox reporting when it blatantly was - and people might care for a moment and then forget.

Every poll that showed any tightening was evidence of a rebound, but with a metronomic precision the government's polls kept finding new lows. They lost the Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection in June and then LaSalle-Emard-Verdun in September, and still the leadership maintained it was their right to contest the next election. A caucus rebellion was put down in October, but it was the decision of 5 Ministers to not recontest at the next election that changed history.

Before the caucus revolt in late October 2024, there were four Cabinet Ministers whose retirements were announced (read:leaked). That meant that the Cabinet would have to be shuffled, a decision leaked so that the prospect of cabinet seats would be available to those MPs that stayed loyal to the Prime Minister. What hasn’t been previously reported, I believe, is that those weren’t the only four Ministers who told the MPs their plans. I heard that day from a Senior Liberal in Ottawa that Sean Fraser was also out, not recontesting Central Nova.

Those seats were dangled in front of everybody, and it got the Prime Minister through the caucus meeting. And then Donald Trump won.

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The hope in Liberal land, that Trump’s election would jolt Canadians to their senses, never materialized, and the government got increasingly concerned. With another looming byelection disaster coming in the form of John Aldag’s Cloverdale-Langley City retirement coming, and their polls not getting any better, the government decided to finally shuffle the cabinet - and to remove Chrystia Freeland as Finance Minister. That decision, one that I wrote in 2023 was the only move short of a Prime Ministerial resignation that even had a hope of achieving any positive outcome, was hoped to be a reset. It turned out to be the end.

Chrystia Freeland is many things, and I know I’ve certainly said a lot of them on this site and on the Scrimshaw Show over the course of months and years, but she did what many Liberal politicians wanted to do but didn’t - she stood for party and country over loyalty to Trudeau. She saved the Liberal Party.

Make no mistake - this recovery in the polls would never have happened if Justin Trudeau had remained leader. We would not be in a place to potentially win this election under Trudeau. It’s worth appreciating how Trudeau handled his lame duck tenure and since - the lack of any pushback in either public or private from his or his circle as Carney throws the unpopular bits of the legacy aside is genuinely helpful. But this is only possible because Trudeau is gone.

How much of this is Trump related is impossible to say. There’s no way to game out all three scenarios - our current reality, Carney v Poilievre with no trade war, Trudeau stays on with a trade war - but it’s clear to me that both a trade war and Trudeau’s resignation were necessary conditions for this, but neither were sufficient in and of themselves. It’s also the case that the Liberals have been extraordinarily lucky.

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On Saturday, Danielle Smith decided to open her mouth and talk, a disastrous idea at the best of times made even better by the stakes of this campaign. She has issued 9 demands that must be met or else there will be an “unprecedented national unity crisis”. (Editor’s note: Insert the Jose Mourinho clip here so I don’t keep getting yelled at by Albertans.) But, apparently the real “unprecedented national unity crisis” is Danielle Smith’s actions taken so far.

“So I would hope that we could put things on pause is what I’ve told administration officials. Let’s just put things on pause so we can get through an election.”

Smith admitted to Breitbart that she has asked the Trump administration to alter policy for the explicit purpose of helping Poilievre in the polls. If you think that’s not going to be a slight problem in a country where the majority are deeply opposed to Trump, I don’t know what to tell you.

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There are, broadly speaking, 3 battlegrounds in this election. (There should be four, but the CPC gains from the NDP are so locked in that it barely counts.) The Liberals have to defend mostly suburban seats in Brampton, Mississauga, Halton, and BC’s Lower Mainland, seats that mostly trended left between 2015 and 2021 even as the national vote shifted rightwards. The second is Liberal seats in areas where the right have been newly ascendant in recent times - Windsor, London, Northern Ontario, Hamilton, and Atlantic Canada - and where Pierre Poilievre’s new “Boots Not Suits” messaging is designed to play well. And the third is Liberal-Bloc battlegrounds in and around Montreal, mostly in places that would get mad at you for calling them Montreal.

The first is complicated for the Liberals by crosspressures - voters in the suburbs have generally moved left in part because of their social liberalism, concern for climate issues, and fear that the right would go too far. In 2021, Conservatives weakness on vaccines and the fact they were too unclear on mandates hurt a lot in the Golden Horseshoe and the Lower Mainland, and climate change almost single-handedly cost Lisa Raitt her seat of Milton in 2019.

That said, minority communities have been swinging right since 2021 in both Canada and the US, and that has the potential to throw some results into flux. Poilievre seems well poised, at least theoretically, to do better than Scheer and O’Toole with non-white Canadians, which could throw up interesting problems for the Liberals in Surrey, Scarborough, Brampton, and Mississauga.

On the working class front, the underrated story of Doug Ford’s successful campaign was his lack of success at breaking the ONDP’s strongholds, some of which overlap Federal Liberal seats (Thunder Bay, Windsor, London, Niagara). If the Conservatives want to get to 145 seats, these kinds of seats are the ones they need to win on the path of least resistance. Throw in the right trends of Atlantic Canada - where some of the last rural, gun-toting Liberal ridings exist - and you have the places where the Conservatives need gains.

The third got profiled extensively last week, so I won’t repeat myself too much, but if the Liberals want to offset potential losses to the Conservatives or make the gains that could get them majority government, their best source of gains is Quebec. Alberta and Winnipeg have their sources of potential gains too, and maybe even a few NDP seats in BC, but Quebec is where the biggest tranche of seats to gain are.

Right now, if the polls were replicated at an election, the Liberals would win 185 seats, a majority on par with 2015. But that assumes the polls don’t move, which is a proposition I wouldn’t bet on.

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If you ask me who’s going to win, it’s hard. I know, at my core, that I am implacably biased, and more than that I am unable to be perfectly rational here. I have been incredibly charmed by Carney’s campaign, and even when I don’t love the policy mix I understand it. I think he’s running an incredible campaign so far.

I also know that I’ve been low on Pierre Poilievre before, writing him off as an irrelevance that could never win a general election in 2022. Whether he wins or loses this campaign, I was wrong to say he couldn’t. The reality is there’s a lot bigger constituency for Poilievre’s brand of Conservative than I used to think.

But what we don’t know is how Canadians will react to an election campaign in this national crisis. We are used to America loving us, or at the least being vaguely pro while ignoring us. This is not just a policy disagreement or a political crisis - it is a fundamental reassessment of who and what we are as Canadians. We have been betrayed. Our basic humanity as Canadians has been betrayed by people we believed to be neighbours in good standing. It’s a fundamental betrayal that goes further and deeper than spats around Iraq or whatever else.

We’re a country that has spent decades believing that we were doing the right thing, and now all of that work has left us exposed. It is a time of emotional reactions as much as rational ones, and it’s hard to know what an emotional people will do. And yet, having said that, I think we do know.

The Conservatives are acting scared. Danielle Smith admitting to asking the Americans to cool it on the tariffs until the election is borderline treason, sure, but it’s also a sign that Conservatives are as scared as they seem. Poilievre’s strategies have little coherence these days, they keep flopping to new strategies, and are generally a mess right now.

Carney, on the other hand, is confident and funny and in command. He is the one making the political weather, the one dictating terms. He is taking the battle to Poilievre and the Conservatives. His team also clearly know what they’re doing, navigating a leadership race well and effectively balancing regional and ideological concerns in the cabinet process. And this week - from the foreign trip to the defence announcement to the Oilers skate and now the Mike Meyers ad - has been a masterclass.

I don’t think this will be easy. I don’t think the Liberals will spend this entire campaign in a comfortable lead. I think this will be tough. But I feel in my soul at the end of it all Mark Carney will win. To quote Bourdain, I have come home.

• (With the election here, consider a paid subscription. All of my work will remain available for free, but whether it’s to shore up the Scrimshaw Strategic Booze Reserve or merely to show thanks will be appreciated as I transition to a two-a-day column schedule most days.)