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

[EricHiggin]

Jumpin said:

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:

It was mostly Trump.

When he first started trolling, it was framed as just Trump being a jerk for the most part. It wasn't until the media started to turn on Trudeau, and whispers started about him stepping down, with Trump turning up the heat, until the framing changed to, 'Trumps going to annex Canada, elbows up'.

The top priority polls even showed this. Canada has an older pop, so the boomer vote is extremely important, and the polls showed they only really cared about healthcare a fair amount, and A LOT about fighting back against Trump. When it came to things like affordability, the economy, crime, jobs, the older generation didn't seem to care.

NDP votes further show this. They purposely switched to Libs because they knew if they didn't, it would be too close to call and the Cons might win. This isn't normal, and the reason those NDP voters did this, is because they were under the impression that Trump was too much of a threat and that Pierre would just hand Canada over to Trump, which was ridiculous if you actually had any idea what Pierre's campaign was about.

Even more pointing to Trump, as you said, negatives, and taking them away leaving your competition with nothing, is what happened with Trump going quiet in the later weeks of the election. The polls showed the high the Libs hit, dropped during that timeframe, to put them neck and neck basically with the Cons. As soon as Trump seemed to back off, the Lib lead started to wane.

Trump was never going to take Canada. 51 was only ever going to possibly happen, eventually, if Canada stayed on the same track and kept weakening itself, which is exactly what the Lib voters have now continued, which they clearly didn't realize. Which isn't a surprise, because most boomers I know, including one of my parents, don't have a clue about politics or how the Gov works, and believe most of what the CAN or USA media says without question.

If the media hadn't pushed the Trump narrative so hard, the election would've remained about Canada and the last decade of Lib Fed Gov. That's the reason the Country is so weak and why Trump is able to totally get away with this, because we can't do squat in the grand scheme of things. Pierre would've won if Trump would've gone quiet soon after Trudeau stepped down, but the step down probably wouldn't have happened (as soon) without the Trump trolling opportunity arising in the first place.