By Daniel Béland

March 17, 2025

Now that Mark Carney is Prime Minister, federal elections could be triggered very soon. Since Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on January 6 amid both a bilateral trade war and a deeply troubling questioning of Canada’s sovereignty from a rogue president of the United States, the Liberals have dramatically improved their standing in opinion polls.

This is so much the case that, if elections were held today, the Liberals would have a significant chance to win enough seats to stay in power, something that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

Much has been said about how the return of Donald Trump to the White House has helped the Liberals politically, even if it has presented unprecedented challenges from a trade and foreign policy standpoint. This positive “Trump effect” on incumbents is not unique to Canada, as world leaders as different as French President Emmanuel Macron, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky all seem to have gained more support at home because they are pushing back publicly against the Trump White House.

Even the approval rating of Trudeau, who was so unpopular late last year, bumped significantly. This is all bad news for the Conservatives, especially because Prime Minister Carney is more popular than his predecessor and, more important, he is seen as much less likely than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to “roll over and accept whatever President Trump demands.”

Clearly, the Trump effect benefits the Liberals and hurts the Conservatives, and an increasing number of commentators blame Poilievre at least in part for this situation. Perhaps one of the most provocative takes on this issue comes from physician and author Jillian Horton who, in an op-ed recently published in The Globe and Mail, claims that “There’s no Pierre Poilievre without Justin Trudeau.”

This is the case because “Mr. Poilievre has, in recent years, displayed a deeply personal obsession with Mr. Trudeau, one that became increasingly childish and sinister. It always reminded me of Sideshow Bob’s fixation with Bart Simpson.” According to Horton, “deprived of the object of his obsession, Mr. Poilievre seems to be misfiring,” a situation that prevents him from truly pivoting to defend Canada against President Trump.

While thought provoking, this explanation should be considered among other variables within the broader political environment and, especially, how electoral competition is framed and understood. In the Toronto Star, issues management and crisis communications expert Andrew Tumilty nails it. For him, if the Conservatives fail to win the next federal election it will “not be because the Liberals changed leaders” but “because the narrative of the election changed, and Poilievre couldn’t find the right role for himself in the new story.”

Until recently, the Conservatives proved successful because their leader told a story that resonated in the political environment of the time. As Tumilty writes: “Poilievre and his team have spent years honing the narrative that Canada is broken and that he is the hero to fix it. They cast Justin Trudeau as their villain, and like a comic movie franchise, they rolled him out over and over again as Canadians’ chief antagonist.”

While adapting his rhetoric to changing circumstances is the obvious thing for Poilievre to do, why is he unable to truly pivot in our crazy new Trump 2.0 world?

To Tumilty, the problem for Poilievre is that the return of Donald Trump to the White House and his adversarial actions and rhetoric towards Canada have dramatically and suddenly transformed our political environment, which led to the emergence and swift diffusion of a patriotic narrative about protecting Canada against President Trump that more and more Canadians find “more relevant than the story of a broken nation Poilievre had been peddling.”

As Tumilty continues: “In choosing to stick with partisan talking points about carbon taxes and crime, Poilievre appeared more interested in laying blame than in finding solutions.” It is very hard to argue with this diagnosis but the real question is whether Poilievre can profoundly change his tune and recognize that, for most Canadians today, the true villains are President Trump and his administration rather than the Liberals and their new leader.

More pertinently, can he do that without seeming opportunistic and disingenuous? Poilievre’s problem is not just that Trudeau is gone, but that Trump is back, and he’s a threat to Canada.

To be fair, Poilievre and the Conservatives have rallied around the flag but they waited far too long to take on President Trump directly, probably because they are afraid that the part of their base sympathetic to the MAGA movement might turn to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada.

Yet, in light of the recent polling numbers and Liberal attack ads that depict Poilievre as ideologically and rhetorically aligned with President Trump — now essentially our national nemesis — Poilievre needs to further alter his discourse and talk more about how he would handle the Trump administration and less about the carbon tax, a true obsession for him that, at least beyond Conservative circles, is less central in Canadian politics now than it was just a few months ago.

This is the case because the return of Donald Trump to the White House has dramatically reshaped Canada’s political agenda, but also because one of the first things Carney did after becoming prime minister was kill the consumer carbon tax.

While adapting his rhetoric to changing circumstances is the obvious thing for Poilievre to do, why is he unable to truly pivot in our crazy new Trump 2.0 world? Is it simply because, as Horton suggests, Poilievre is “broken” now that he has lost beating Justin Trudeau as a raison d’être?

Another possibility is that, as a former Conservative political advisor pointed out to me, Poilievre does not like to take advice from anyone, which would make it harder for him to change course while learning from his mistakes. In politics, even if too many political scientists largely ignore these topics, both narratives and personality matter, something that Trump’s second presidency, as well as Poilievre’s current predicament, illustrate perfectly.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.