Election 2025

Trump has inverted every issue that the major parties expected to talk about, and inadvertently pushed a new main player onto the stage. On Monday, we will see how the drama ends

This is the election campaign that wasn’t.

Everyone knew what this thing was going to be; it had been building forever.

It was going to be a reckoning on 10 years of Liberal government, a volcanic vent for the public’s exhausted fury with the party and Justin Trudeau, who, to some, had become a walking expletive. We were going to have a referendum on affordability and wokeness and whether Canada had gone off the rails.

Pierre Poilievre is trying to win over young people when he says he needs the “biggest voter turnout in Canadian history” to reverse a Liberal victory some polls suggest is a foregone conclusion, political experts say.

Newly eligible voters, specifically men, are most likely to support Poilievre’s Conservatives — but they’re also the least likely demographic to vote according to historical trends, said David Coletto, founder and CEO of Ottawa-based polling and market research firm Abacus Data.

“He needs, I think, an extraordinary level of turnout,” Coletto said.

Young Canadians favor Conservatives in election despite Trump threat

At a rally in London, Ontario, on Friday, the crowd booed as Mark Carney delivered his core campaign line about the existential threat Canada faces from its neighbour.

“President Trump is trying to break us so that America could own us,” the Liberal leader warned.

“Never,” supporters shouted back. Many waved Canadian flags taped to ice hockey sticks.

Similar levels of passion were also on display at the union hall where Pierre Poilievre greeted enthusiastic supporters in the Toronto area earlier in the week.

If the polls are correct, Mark Carney and the Liberals will win yet another mandate. Many Westerners are mystified as to why Eastern Canada would want to rehire the same Liberals who have spent the last decade making us poorer and defenceless, but that’s exactly what they appear to be about to do.

Great scoop. Looks like @RosieBarton @davidcochrane84 @CBCNews may need to invite @ezralevant @lincolnmjay on show after-all. Unless they don’t want this blockbuster story. There was no @MarkJCarney grant to CBC of $150-million to @RebelNewsOnline 4 investigative report on an… https://t.co/Z8I31FrLlT

— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) April 26, 2025

With the end of the election campaign in sight, I asked David Coletto, the head of the polling firm Abacus Data, what stood out for him. His answer, given the exceptional political and economic turmoil in Canada, was a bit surprising.

“As much as this election has been interesting,” he told me, “not a lot has happened during the election — which is really interesting.”
There were no moments of drama as in 1984, when Brian Mulroney challenged Prime Minister John Turner over making a raft of political appointments. (“You had an option, sir, to say no,” Mr. Mulroney said, jabbing his finger, in a debate that many believe brought him to power.) Nor was there anything like the rerun between the two men four years later, when Mr. Turner said of Mr. Mulroney’s free trade deal with the Reagan administration, “You have sold us out.” (That time Mr. Turner was the one to jab his finger.)

This way Carney and his Eco-Loon Wife Leads …