Holy shit, Canada's having an election! But why?

[Jumpin]

Final tally:

Liberals - 169 - 8,560,882 - 43.7%

Conservative - 144 - 8,079,303 - 41.3%

Bloc Québécois - 22 - 1,232,513 - 6.3%

New Democratic Party - 7 - 1,236,525 - 6.3%

Green Party of Canada - 1 - 244,875 - 1.3%

 

While it's a good story to say Trump cost the Conservatives the election, it's inaccurate, or perhaps a better way to put it: not the full story. He was calling for tariffs and calling Canada the 51st state a whole month before the swing took place, back in mid-December 2024. Trudeau announced in January that he was stepping down triggering a swing, and Mark Carney was set to replace him later in the month. And immediately, the polls swung hard. While the Trump tariffs probably had some impact, that was a few weeks after the shift in polls.

 

I'm in agreement with Ford's campaign manager's take on the two major reasons why Conservatives lost such a dominant lead.

 

First, it's because they positioned themselves as the Alternative To Trudeau and Axe the (Carbon) Tax party. They focused on pumping a lot of rage and sloganeering into that. is that they positioned themselves as the not Trudeau and not Carbon tax party. When those two factors were removed, so too did their campaign. He pointed out about how that's why you can't have a campaign built on negatives, because if those negatives go away, you stand for nothing. That's why 10% of Conservatives flipped to Carney after polling .

 

Why did the NPD base switch? That's the second point, and that's where the Trump part comes in and the other stupid thing the Conservatives were doing: Making the face of their party a Trump Mini-Me - repeating MAGA fascistic sounding slogans like "Canada First" and "Woke-this, woke-that, we gotta end woke". That almost certainly scared the NDP into flipping to Carney's Liberals because they feared having a Vichy-MAGA government in power. But I'd personally add that the momentum shift really hammered home that NDP weren't the answer, and that's why their abandonment came a few weeks after (in early February) the Conservative flip. As NDP were still polling at 17-18% at the end of January and start of February, it was week 2 of February that they dropped off a cliff after the Conservatives dropped from 47% down to 41% in early to mid January.

 

As long as the Conservatives run easy to counter campaigns, they'll be easy to defeat like this. And frankly, their ad campaign was a fucking joke, literally a sitcom level joke. Their ads looked like this: