John Ivison: Conservatives used a meat grinder on the Liberals. They needed a wooden stake

Ottawa Citizen

01-05-2025

The Liberal party was all but buried in early January, a stake driven through its heart by Conservative attacks.
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The Tories thought their job was done, prepared themselves for government and took off the cloves of garlic round their necks.
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But they underestimated the Liberal party's ability to come back from the dead, impelled by an insatiate thirst for power.
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There's no doubt that President Donald Trump's intervention about the need for Canada to become the 51st state was the catalyst for the Liberal victory on Monday night.
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But the conditions for that win were created long before the campaign started.
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At the turn of the year, internal party polling showed that, were an election to be held, the Liberals would find themselves as the fourth party in Parliament.
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That was an unacceptable prospect for the great, heartless machine that has governed Canada for much of its history.
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The impediment to Liberal recovery in the polls was Justin Trudeau. Voters were sick of the sight of him, so there was no option: he had to go.
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That fatigue and hostility didn't just happen organically; it was fomented by a bombardment of anti-Trudeau Conservative rhetoric and apocalyptic ads that pushed the idea it was time for change.
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The campaign was successful, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, achieved at such cost it was rendered meaningless.
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The Conservatives pursued a similar scorched-earth approach to Jagmeet Singh, spending millions to persuade Canadians that the NDP leader was propping up the Liberals so that he could reap a lucrative parliamentary pension. They discarded the hard-won lesson that a healthy NDP was essential to Conservative success.
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Gerald Butts, the backroom strategist who crafted the narratives that brought former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty to power in 2003 and then repeated the feat with Trudeau in 2015, said that Pierre Poilievre and his campaign director, Jenni Byrne, appear to have only one mode of operating. 'They're like the Russian army. They pick a target and then grind them down with deeply personal attacks,' he said.
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Mark Carney had been biding his time in the wings of the Liberal party, after his return from his tour of duty as governor of the Bank of England. He had long harboured ambitions to be prime minister — perhaps the only thing he has in common with Poilievre. But Carney was aware of the old political adage that he who wields the knife rarely wears the crown, and was wary of pushing too hard for Trudeau to go. As late as Christmas, friends say it was still unclear whether Carney was going to commit to politics.
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Events could scarcely have worked out more neatly in his favour.
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Carney announced his candidacy for the Liberal leadership in unremarkable fashion in mid-January in his hometown of Edmonton. The Conservatives still held a 20-to-25 point lead in most polls at the time, but Carney is never short of self-belief. He told me then he thought he had a chance of holding the Conservatives to a minority.
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The NDP had an opportunity to present itself as the option to replace Trudeau, just as Tom Mulcair had done in 2015 with regard to then prime minister Stephen Harper. But Singh and the NDP were too beaten up by Poilievre's attack ads and failed to make a serious pitch to voters as a governing alternative.
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He was condemned as an environmental radical and an elitist who was more used to global boardrooms than shopping at Loblaws.
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But voters gave Carney the benefit of the doubt.
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While Trudeau (and Poilievre) are purely political animals, Carney is more complex.
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The stylistic differences with Trudeau were reinforced by Carney's decision to cancel the consumer carbon tax and the capital gains tax hike.
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Carney was able to offer stability with change, a seemingly oxymoronic proposition that met the moment for many voters.
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The pivot away from Trudeau-era policies reshaped the agenda and asked questions of the Conservatives.
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The Liberals lacked credibility, but Carney lent them his own. He came across as more relatable than Trudeau — and Poilievre.
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The Conservatives failed to establish the new leader's vulnerabilities and wasted the January to March period in terms of recasting Poilievre as a more prime ministerial figure.
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That misstep was to have dramatic consequences. Carney consistently polled above his party, which is why he featured so prominently in all its advertising; Poilievre consistently polled below his party, which is why he didn't feature at all in the last two ads of the campaign.
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One mid-campaign Abacus Data poll suggested that nearly half of all women voters had a negative impression of Poilievre, while a similar number had a positive impression of the Liberal leader.
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The Conservative campaign also ignored warnings that it needed to be prepared to respond to the unpredictable new resident in the White House, given the visceral dislike of Trump among Canadian voters.
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The Conservative war room had a narrative crafted when Trudeau was still prime minister and was loath to pivot.
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'They fell in love with their strategy so much that they wouldn't move off it. It was an effective strategy to bulldoze opponents between elections, when they had a lot of time and money. But they weren't agile,' charged Butts.
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By the time Carney won the Liberal party leadership in early March, Trump had mused about Canada as the 51st state and the Liberals were neck and neck with the Conservatives in the polls.
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By the time he was sworn in as prime minister on March 14th, the Liberals were ahead in almost every poll. It was a lead they never relinquished.
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Carney ran a solid, disciplined campaign, mostly avoiding controversy.
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The candidate was not a rousing orator and the rallies were never as large or enthusiastic as those of Poilievre. But he was a quick study who improved his French, his ability to read a teleprompter and his timing.
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The Conservatives did their best to undermine Carney, accusing him of being a plagiarist who simply appropriated Trudeau's playbook and his campaign team. It's true that many of the key players worked on previous campaigns, including executive director Tom Pitfield and co-campaign directors Andrew Bevan, Braeden Caley, Andrée-Lyne Hallé and Butts, who, remarkably, has never lost an election he's worked on.
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But the ideas that formed the basis for the Liberal platform are mostly taken from Carney's book Value(s), which had input from Butts and policy advisor, Tim Krupa.
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As the prospect of a trade war with the United States crystallized, Butts began crafting the narrative that became 'Trump wants to break us so he can own us.'
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But the central concept of the Liberals' 'Canada Strong' slogan— that the country has to build a single market and explore trading opportunities elsewhere as a means of increasing leverage for a trade negotiation with Trump — is all Carney.
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It was Butts's job to turn that into a campaign narrative. He said he attended dozens of focus groups where voters rejected Poilievre, not because he was too like Trump, but because he was too inexperienced.
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That formed the basis for the ballot question the Liberals pushed: 'Is Pierre Poilievre the person you want sitting across the table from Donald Trump?'
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People who were motivated by their anxieties about a trade war invariably answered in the negative.
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But the Conservative agenda, as represented by its anti-establishment, pro-worker 'boots not suits' policy, resonated with people who were unhappy with the status quo and the prospect of a fourth Liberal term.
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They saw Poilievre as someone who would disrupt a system that wasn't working for them. The resilience of the Conservative vote on election night, particularly in blue-collar towns that hadn't voted Conservative in years like Sudbury and Stoney Creek in Ontario, suggests that the strategy wasn't entirely wrong.
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But even senior Conservatives concede that you can't build a winning coalition if you alienate women, boomers and university-educated voters.
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The Liberals succeeded in neutralizing many Conservative initiatives by adopting similar positions when it came to income tax cuts or promising more timely approvals for energy projects.
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By the time the campaigns hit Montreal for the leaders' debates, the election had settled into an uneasy stalemate. The Conservatives began to whittle away at the Liberal lead in steady increments, but one pollster estimated that at that rate, it would take until May 8th before they would catch up, well after election day.
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Poilievre needed an incendiary moment to blow up the Liberal trajectory and it looked as if he had one with Carney's platform, which promised $129 billion in new measures and deficits as far as the eye could see.
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Poilievre's problem was that he had yet to release his own platform, and when he did, it was almost as profligate, with $109 billion in new measures.
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The only other occasion that threatened to derail the Carney Express was the horrific car-ramming attack in Vancouver. The incident opened the door for the Conservatives to talk about their safe-streets policies, but all sides were aware that politicizing the tragedy would result in a backlash.
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In the event, Caley, the campaign co-director, and former Vancouver mayor, Gregor Robertson, now a Liberal MP, were able to arrange for Carney to visit the site, alongside community members and B.C. Premier David Eby.
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The Liberal campaign ended in Victoria, B.C., on Sunday night, three minutes before the election day cut-off.
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The result has proven to be much closer than the Liberals thought it would be. Internal projections were in the range of high-180, mid-190-seat range. It now looks like the Liberals have fallen short of 172 seat majority status, though recounts may take them above the current count of 169.
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There were Liberal reversals in places where the received wisdom suggested there would be successes because of the collapse of the NDP vote.
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In the Niagara region, for example, when Carney visited at the start of the final week, there were hopes the party would pick up an additional seat in Niagara Falls. On the night, they failed to win that seat from the Conservatives and lost Vance Badawey's seat of Niagara South to the Conservatives. This was the type of border community that 'should' have voted Liberal.
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The Liberals gained 2.8 million new voters in this election, while the Conservatives added 2.2 million.
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The national turnout was nearly five percentage points higher than the last election, adding two million voters from 2021.
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But one of the stories of the night was the demise of the smaller parties. The NDP lost 1.8 million voters, the Greens lost 158,000 and the People's Party a whopping 702,000, compared to 2021.
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Voters, it turns out, have minds of their own and a large number of former NDP supporters appear to have switched to the Conservatives.
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The collapse of all the minor opposition parties, bar the Bloc Québécois, will have serious implications for future elections, particularly for the one party that needs smaller, progressive parties to draw votes from the Liberals.
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Poilievre and his team ran a disciplined and well-oiled campaign. But voters ultimately rejected the Conservative leader (literally, in the case of his former constituents in Carleton), while buying Carney's pitch for stability with moderate change.
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But in large part, the 45th general election was over before it started, with the demolition of Trudeau and Singh.