Blazingcatfur

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.