Canada’s 45th general election looks to be a two-horse race between Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
It’s a far cry from the situation at the beginning of the year, when the Conservatives looked poised to win a sweeping majority.
Two factors turned Canada’s political landscape upside-down ahead of the election: Justin Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister and Liberal leader and U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats.
Since then, the Liberals have picked Prime Minister Mark Carney as their new leader and have experienced a remarkable resurgence in public opinion polling. The Liberals went from trailing the Conservatives by more than 20 points in January to a dead heat.
“The story so far is a pretty dramatic rebirth for a party that was left for dead six weeks ago,” said Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group.
Liberal strategist Zita Astravas, vice president at Wellington Advocacy, said she expects Canada-U.S. relations will be top of mind for voters
Astravas said that as Canadians ask themselves which leader is best equipped to deal with Trump and his trade war, the Liberals will try to contrast Carney’s experience as former business executive and central bank governor with Poilievre’s experience as a career politician.
“Just putting one leader next to the other leader, if you look at who Mr. Poilievre is, the experience that he brings and the experience that Prime Minister Carney brings, it’s a pretty clear contrast in and of itself,” she said.
While the Liberals are enjoying a polling upswing, Lyle said the Conservatives' strongest voting block remains the same group that sent the Liberals back to government in 2015: younger people.
“This time, young people are just a lot less focused on what’s going on with Trump, and a lot more focused on, ‘Why is my rent so high and why can’t I afford a home?’ And so for them, that fundamental, growing dissatisfaction with their standard of living ... remains,” Lyle said.
Conservative strategist Kate Harrison, vice chair of Summa Strategies Canada, said that’s why she doesn’t think Poilievre needs to change his overall message despite the dramatic shift in the political landscape.
“I think for the Conservatives, the key is to link the issue of tariffs and the threat that poses to the economic policies of the last nine years,” she said.
“This is not something that happened overnight. We have been left vulnerable from years of lack of focus on the economy and inability to get energy infrastructure built.”
Poilievre spent the days leading up to the campaign launch unveiling policy planks focused on speeding up approvals for resource projects and infrastructure, including pipelines.
Pollster David Coletto said the threat posed by the Trump administration is the sort that tends to create a “binary” choice for voters — and could squeeze out the Bloc Québécois and the NDP this time.
“I recall in 2011, Stephen Harper repeating over and over a ‘strong, stable Conservative majority government.’ You can imagine the same kind of language being used both by the Liberals and the Conservatives in this campaign to encourage that consolidation,” he said.
Coletto said that desire for stability is “a deadly cocktail for the NDP.”
Mélanie Richer, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s former communications director, said that while affordability is still likely to be a top campaign issue, the job-killing potential of U.S. tariffs has shifted the conversation.
“So when we talk about affordability still being the most important thing to people, you just kind of have to reframe it a little bit to affordability from the attacks from Trump. I think there’s a good opportunity for Jagmeet to take up the space in that conversation,” Richer said.
Election campaigns always come with their own surprises and Lyle said he sees a “wild card' emerging on April 2 — the day Trump is expected to launch his next wave of tariffs.
Canada already has hit the U.S. with counter-tariffs on roughly $60 billion worth of U.S. goods and has threatened to expand them to cover $155 billion in U.S. products if the tariffs are maintained.
“So if (the U.S. puts) serious tariffs on, and those tariffs include the auto sector, then we’re going to see layoffs, we’re going to see factories shut down. we’re going to see truckers having to stay home. We’re going to see a cascade of very real, very personal economic consequences,” Lyle said
“People will start by getting angry. If this stuff doesn’t go away in three weeks, they may at that point start saying, ‘Maybe the Liberals aren’t the right people here.’ And so that’s a very hard thing to game out.”
With files from Kyle Duggan and Sarah Ritchie.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 22, 2025.
David Baxter, The Canadian Press
