Pierre and Ana Poilievre at the Conservative leader’s ‘Canada First’ rally on February 15/Pierre Poilievre X

By Geoff Norquay

February 20, 2025

The most important task of a party leader in the run-up to a national election is defining the ballot question. It’s each leader’s key differentiator from the others; it seeks to match the policy alternatives the party has on offer with what the voters want. It’s also the strategic phrase that features the “big issue” of the campaign and frames the choice the voters will make on election day.

For the past 12-18 months, the Conservatives thought they had a killer ballot question for this year’s federal election. October 2025 (or sooner) would be the “carbon tax election” and the opportunity for Canadian voters to send Justin Trudeau packing.

By reaching out to the casualties of Trudeau’s economic policies – those hurt by the affordability crunch and those who feared they would never afford a house – Pierre Poilievre’s ballot question had all the ingredients for a smashing victory. It enabled the bundling of the one big issue with all the others: “Axe the tax. Build the homes. Fix the budget. Stop the crime.”

These messages were instantly recognizable and understandable: high interest rates and the affordability crisis afflicting millions of Canadians had made the carbon tax everyone’s bête noir. Trudeau, as its initiator, was unrepentant in its defence, and over the past 18 months, became hugely and irretrievably unpopular with Canadians. Poilievre and the Conservatives rode public concerns over the tax, the housing crisis, unrestrained spending, and community safety, plus the antipathy towards Trudeau, to, at one point, a 25% polling lead over the Liberals.

Four recent events have upset the Conservatives’ ballot-question applecart: Justin Trudeau’s resignation, the resulting Liberal leadership race, Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 25% tariff on all Canadian exports to the U.S. and his continuing and aggressive trolling of Canada to become the 51st American state. These factors have completely redrawn the Canadian political landscape in a matter of weeks and pushed the reset buttons for all parties’ ballot questions, but particularly the Conservatives. The surge of Mark Carney’s numbers, both in the Liberal leadership race and on the larger question of who is best equipped to take on Trump, hasn’t helped.

With Trudeau’s announcement that he would vacate the leadership, Poilievre not only lost his principal political target, but it also took Trudeau’s resignation and the leadership race to reveal just how much the public anger against the Prime Minister was costing the Liberals in public support. Making a series of deathbed repentances, the three top contenders have promised to scrap, modify or pause the carbon tax, take down interprovincial trade barriers, and advance realization of the 2% NATO defence spending target. And meanwhile, several key ministers are talking about resurrecting the Energy East pipeline to move Canadian oil through Quebec to Atlantic Canada.

Suddenly, the prospect of a Liberal party led by someone other than Justin Trudeau has made the Liberals more attractive to voters. As of February 18, Angus Reid has the Conservatives and Liberals in a virtual dead heat, with the Tories at 40% and the Liberals at 37%.

But there’s another factor that has entered the mix. The aggressive start to Trump’s second presidency has influenced public opinion in other ways:

• Canadians have responded to Trump’s tariff threats and his questioning of our nationhood and sovereignty not only with calls for swift retaliation, but also with a groundswell of nationalistic fervour and popular mobilization efforts to “buy Canadian”. You could call it the end of Justin Trudeau’s “post-national state”.
• A new Leger poll released February 18 shows the Conservatives nationally at 41% and the Liberals at 33%, with the NDP slumping to 11%. The good news for the Conservatives is that the shifting allegiances of voters appear to be stabilizing, but the collapsing NDP vote is distinctly bad news for them. The reason is that Conservative electoral success in many ridings depends on a strong NDP (18% to 22%) splitting the progressive vote; in other words, a weak NDP favours the Liberals in close head-to-head battles with the Conservatives.
• The political tides are moving even more so in Quebec, where the pan-Canadian solidarity movement is also growing as a result of the Trump threats. For more than a year, the Bloc Quebecois has been leading the Liberals, particularly among French-speaking voters, but the new Léger poll shows that the Liberals, at 34%, (with Trudeau as leader) have now moved ahead of the Bloc, who are polling at 28%.
• None of these changes have escaped the notice of Poilievre and the Conservatives. In recent weeks, he has upped his game with detailed policy releases on Canadian sovereignty and supporting Canadians hurt by possible tariffs, tightening border security, interprovincial trade barriers, and Canada’s northern presence.

The party is also sharpening its attacks on Carney, the self-proclaimed “outsider” candidate for the Liberal leadership. Nothing says “outsider” like being the former central banker of two G7 countries. Carney recently said at a leadership rally in Kelowna that “Fentanyl is an absolute crisis in the United States. It’s a challenge here, but it’s a crisis there.” That’s a strange and unfeeling dismissal, describing a street drug that has already cost close to 50,000 Canadian lives as a mere “challenge.”

It’s going to take some time to see whether Carney can develop the retail politics chops necessary to succeed and avoid mistakes in the day-to-day of political discourse, but one thing is certain. With Donald Trump setting the economic agenda, Canadians are beginning to see something to trust in Carney’s resume and experience. A Nanos poll published February 7 found that 40% of Canadians believe Carney would do the best job in negotiating with Trump, with Pierre Poilievre at 26%.

When he took the stage at Ottawa’s Rogers Centre on February 15, Poilievre had several objectives. The first was to prove that he “gets” the seriousness of the Trump threats and what they mean to Canada. He took this challenge head on, with promises to retaliate against both specific and general tariffs, the latter with dollar-for-dollar tariffs. And he pledged to steer 100% of the proceeds from counter-tariffs to businesses and workers directly impacted and to tax cuts: “This cannot be a tax grab.” That’s an essential message for the Liberals, who never miss an opportunity to see a revenue windfall as an excuse to spend.

On Trump’s threats against Canada’s nationhood and sovereignty, he was equally forthright: “Sometimes, it does take a threat to remind us what we have, what we could lose and what we could become. The unjustified threats of tariffs and 51ststatehood of Donald Trump have united our people to defend the country we love…Let me be clear. We will never be the 51st state. We will bear any burden and pay any price to protect our sovereignty and independence.” He also had a sharp warning to the United States if it proceeds with the threatened tariffs: “You will turn a loyal friend into a resentful neighbour, forced to match tariff for tariff and to seek friends everywhere else.”

After that strong start, Poilievre turned to what it will take for Canada to survive and thrive – to be truly strong and free – and the different kind of leadership that will take. Canada needs policies that “allow us to be self-sufficient”. “To restore the promise of Canada”, we must “unleash production of our resources”, repeal Bill C-69 and replace the Impact Assessment Act “with a new law that gets projects approved within a year of an application”, and “support resource projects by letting companies pay a share of federal corporate taxes to local First Nations.”

Poilievre closed his speech with a stirring set of commitments to “end cancel culture and stop the war on our history.” For those Canadians who value the contributions of past generations to what this country is today, this was a necessary rebuttal to the incessant virtue signalling and cultural condescension of the Prime Minister and the Liberals of the past nine years. As he said, “The goal is not to erase our differences but to bridge them. We will strengthen bonds of common country between Canadians of different regions, race, background and birth.”

As a reset, Poilievre’s speech worked strongly and positively. It’s far from the final word on what the Conservatives may need to offer Canadians in the next election, but it was more than enough.

Canadians now can be assured of a Conservative leader who will stand for Canada in the face of the American threats. Besides, with the potential calamities that could be confronting us by the time the election writs are dropped, it’s highly prudent to be cautious until we see the specific challenges we are facing.

But if the ballot question is Donald Trump, Canadians now know there’s more than one answer.

Geoff Norquay is a principal with Earnscliffe Strategies in Ottawa. He was a senior social policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office from 1984 to 1988 and director of communications to Stephen Harper when he was leader of the official Opposition.