Election 2025

After taking part in many leaders’ debates during the 2015 federal election campaign, I may be in a unique position to comment on the Liberals’ refusal to participate in the now-cancelled TVA French debate.

When Canada’s main private French network said it wanted help in paying for its “Face à Face” leaders’ debate, there were some raised eyebrows. (Full disclosure: I work at TVA and its all-news channel, LCN).

TVA requested $75,000 from each of the four parties (the Greens have always been excluded from these debates for lack of any seats in Quebec).

Poilievre says he’ll pay broadcaster’s $75,000 fee for Carney if he’ll join French debate

OTTAWA — The NDP’s campaign launch, held in the eastern Montreal riding of Hochelaga-Rosemont-Est Sunday night, was as modest as its chances in the province.

The local NDP candidate, Julie Girard-Lemay, a spunky human rights lawyer and activist, was busy shaking hands with her fellow candidates and dozens of supporters huddled in her campaign office — a Mexican restaurant that recently closed — on Ontario Street.

Lucky for her, the walls of the restaurant were already painted orange.

No matter how the political experts want to slice it, there was a lot of energy around Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre on his first full day of campaigning.

Poilievre was on fire Monday, clearly hitting the ground running on what he knows is the opportunity of his lifetime to achieve what three Conservative leaders were not able to in prior federal elections.

Perhaps we should thank Alberta Premier Danielle Smith for being so clear. We are often told that this or that election is the most important in our lifetime; sometimes, it also has the virtue of being true.

And this Canadian election campaign is taking place in truly dangerous times. The Trump administration is an enemy of a free and sovereign Canada. The threats to annex our country, via economy-crippling tariffs or other cudgels, are real. Foreign interference has never been easier, with a more sinister goal.

If the last near-decade has proven any adage true, it’s that the Liberals are terrible at governing, but exceptional at campaigning. Campaigns are when you get to announce things; governance is when you’re supposed to follow through. Unfortunately for Canada, the Trudeau Liberals conflated the former with the latter, behaving as if announcing a plan – a framework for a plan, a timeline for a framework for a plan – constituted actual action on a promise. But when the time came to ask Canadians for their support, the Liberals managed to gloss over their failings by promoting a message that worked: Andrew Scheer is a shadowy social conservative; Erin O’Toole is a flip-flopper who would kowtow to anti-vaxxers; and now, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre can’t be trusted to stand up to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The first polls conducted since Prime Minister Mark Carney’s election as Liberal leader show voters warming to him, but pollsters say that those flocking to the governing party remain open to voting for other candidates.

“Everything right now is built on toothpicks and very dry sand,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs. “It’s not even as if people are looking at the Liberal Party, they’re looking at Mark Carney … the question is whether or not what they’re reading into him, what their expectations about who they feel he is, actually match up with who he ends up being, at least from a political perspective.”

Recently, Defence Minister Bill Blair announced that he had been tasked with reviewing the decision to purchase F-35 fighter jets to replace the Royal Canadian Air Force’s aging Hornets. Like all Canadians angry over the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to its closest ally, I would like to see us respond decisively. But any decision that would alter or cancel the contract to purchase a fleet of F-35s would be one that Canadians would rue for decades.