When you are going through hell … keep going
‘Mr. Carney has been in power now a year. When will groceries be affordable? When will the pipeline be under construction? When will that famous deal with the United States actually happen? … I think it’s going to be time for him to deliver,’ Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said this week. / CANADIAN CLUB TORONTO PHOTO
This is the end of a very bad week in what has been a very bad year for the Conservatives and the NDP.
On Monday, the political juggernaut of Prime Minister Mark Carney rolled through Scarborough Southwest, University-Rosedale and Terrebonne, leaving a Liberal majority in its wake, the Conservative vote in free fall and the NDP still firmly mired in a kind of political purgatory among progressive voters.
But it was so much worse for the Conservatives than for the NDP.
The NDP seemed resigned to an impending pulverization in the April 2025 election. Plus, they have just elected Avi Lewis as their new leader, so they can take some comfort in higher hopes for the future. A rebuilding mindset can bind discouraged party members together around a common cause.
For Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, however, in addition to watching the party’s core vote collapse in all three ridings, there is the bitter knowledge that Carney’s majority has, in reality, been built on the defection of four Conservative MPs; one of whom, Marilyn Gladu, was widely perceived to be one of the hardest of his hard right-wing MPs. The fact that she seemed so comfortably ensconced within the party base that gave him such a ringing endorsement in January must have been deeply troubling to him.
To top it off, the Prime Minister ended the week by rubbing salt in Poilievre’s festering political wounds, stealing another of his most recent economic proposals by announcing a temporary suspension of the federal excise tax on gas and diesel to provide relief to Canadians struggling with recent Trump-fueled price hikes at the pumps.
What goes up must come down
It is a truism in politics that governments defeat themselves over time through the sheer accretion of unavoidable, hard, controversial, or ill-judged choices, by out-of-their-control events, by economic downturns, or by scandal. Carney is governed by the same law of political gravity that any other is: what goes up must come down.
The task for opposition parties, so clearly on the back foot, is to keep their eyes peeled for the strands of weakness and use them as the basis of a constructive argument for change.
For the reasons stated above, this will be easier for the NDP, if only because snagging the six seats they need to regain official party status in the House of Commons is not a high bar for success in the next election. The fact that the House's Board of Internal Economy decided to grant them an additional $670,000 in funding should make this easier still. What’s more, there’s a yawning opening on the left of the Canadian political spectrum just waiting to be filled.
Conservatives have to snap out of it!
For the Conservatives, seeking to vie for power, the road to recovery begins by clearing their bitter palette from the last election. To the seasoned political eye, the steady drip, drip of defections to the Liberals speaks less of principle than of buyer's remorse about the leader they chose to run under last spring.
Opposition leaders are primarily judged by whether they become Prime Minister. Having lost four consecutive elections since Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped down in 2015, it is not surprising that they are now on their third elected leader since then.
True, Poilievre’s seeming to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory last April must have been incredibly hard to swallow. But a year on, the Conservatives have to snap out of it. Another defection, and this will start to look like a slow-motion coup, a maneuver to force Poilievre to step down without the spectacle and bitterness that would follow a vote under the Reform Act to remove him. After all, those who left could always return under a more electable leader.
Those of us who, like me, are long in the tooth remember a similar dynamic that played out in the early 2000s, during the short-lived Canadian Alliance party, which eventually forced then-leader Stockwell Day to step down. It took a brilliant new leader in Harper and two elections for the wounds from this political psycho-drama before the party was judged fit to take office.
Conservative MPs who are still thinking of defecting to destabilize Poilievre would do well to remember that other Canadian political truism: if you can’t govern yourselves, voters are unlikely to think you are up to the job of governing the country.
Plenty of material for a smart opposition to work with
Besides, now that the Prime Minister has his sought-after majority, he can start the time-honoured process of defeating his government all on his own.
Carney now has the numbers in the House to force through controversial legislation like the proposed cybersecurity bill, or the digital surveillance and criminal enforcement bill. C-9, the hate crimes bill, is still languishing in the Senate. The civil rights concerns raised on the left, and the right, make all or some of these bills prime fodder to paint the Liberals as acting like “Big Brother.”
Of course, the state of the economy drives the ballot question in most elections. While the Prime Minister has, for now, staked out almost proprietary political control of the economy, he will be the lightning rod for voter discontent should his bold nation-building agenda come a cropper.
A case in point is the Build Canada Act, which is still stuck in the House. This is among the most important economic items on the Liberal agenda. It is a $20 billion bet that the government can mainstream a modular housing industry that has never succeeded at scale on its own. Jobs, affordable housing, innovation, skills development and economic growth — all of these Liberal economic roads lead back to Build Canada Homes. If it fails, the opposition will have a field day on affordability.
Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “If you are going through hell, keep going.” The message is that tough times can be overcome if you keep moving forward.
This may seem like cold comfort, especially for the Conservatives. Carney is not Superman. He will fall back to earth, as has every Prime Minister. The trick is to have enough vigour, self-confidence, and focus to be ready when the inevitable thud happens.
