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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Business
- Telegraph
‘British families, not recent arrivals': Farage's strategy to win the next election
Shortly before the 2024 election, two of my opinion research team returned shocked from a trip to Portsmouth, where they had been speaking to working-class swing voters. Local people were planning to vote Labour and the Tories were dismissed out of hand. So far, so predictable. But the researchers heard something new and surprising: people were explicitly saying this was their last throw of the dice for mainstream politics. If Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street off the back of big promises to change the country for the better – and then failed to deliver – they vowed they would defect to Nigel Farage. Back then, there was a giant mismatch between focus groups and national polling. While every poll suggested Labour had irresistible momentum, talking to people in detail revealed the opposite: that there was no enthusiasm at all for Starmer or his team. Any enthusiasm seemed to be with Reform. Yet Reform too had a problem at the ballot box in 2024, which was that voters just wanted the Conservatives out. Putting a cross next to Reform risked complicating matters, while choosing Labour would do the job, so Reform won fewer seats that they otherwise might have. Given that Labour were set to inherit the same problems that the Conservatives had struggled with, Reform's true victory seemed likely to emerge after the election. A high-wire act And so it has turned out. Polls move all the time, but Reform are now polling in the high 20 per cent mark, with Labour polling in the low 20s and the Tories a little lower. This combination of perceived Labour failings on issues like immigration, growth and the NHS, and continued Reform popularity, has propelled Farage for the first time into position as the country's potential next prime minister. It is unfamiliar territory. Successfully evolving from a party of protest to a credible party of power will be a titanic job. And while the prize is enormous, the risks involved in building and sustaining a broad and often contradictory electoral coalition are also huge. It was a conundrum that Farage appeared to address this week, when he made what was essentially his first speech as a possible future prime minister. Ostensibly, Farage was announcing a mini-policy package. But what the speech most clearly revealed was the high-wire act Farage must now embark upon as he appeals to a broader public rather than a minority – even a significant minority – of voters. As a political strategist who has pored over electoral data for 25 years, I have seen how Farage's primary following has been made up of 'upwardly-mobile', lower-middle-class, ex-Tories who revere Margaret Thatcher. But for the last few years, they have been joined by a mass of poorer, working-class voters who have expectations of state support that simply are not shared by Farage's first followers. So while most of his prospective voters are provincial and on lower incomes, they increasingly pull in different directions. This week showed Reform will struggle to please both sides. In truth, the policy package Farage announced was a dog's breakfast. It will confirm to many in Westminster that they are miles away from being ready for government. Breezily reassuring everyone that cutting waste will pay all the bills is already attracting ridicule. For the scale of the proposals was vast. On the one hand, Farage pledged to protect winter fuel payments for older voters and to scrap the two-child benefit cap. On the other hand, they pledged to raise the personal allowance for income tax. Concerns raised about Reform's credibility on the public finances will not yet have seriously registered among the party's supporters – and most will be enthused at the prospect of Reform channelling Elon Musk and taking a chainsaw to public spending. And on the substance, none of these policies will have alienated any part of their coalition. Accusations of nativism However, their more affluent, Thatcherite voters will have raised an eyebrow at least at their pledge to remove the two-child benefit cap. A year ago, polls showed voters backed the cap by two-to-one as people tired of seeing neighbours using welfare to sustain lifestyles that full-time workers are struggling to match. Farage says removing this cap will boost the domestic workforce and reduce firms' reliance on migrant labour. The policy, he said, 'is aimed at British families. It's not aimed at those that come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children.' This will be enough to reassure Reform's coalition that he was not in the process of selling out. He will not mind that such policies will inevitably bring accusations of a 'Britain-first' nativism, reflecting his closeness to President Trump's Maga movement in America. Farage knows exactly how to walk that fine line between hard-edged rhetoric and offensive speech; he will be able to justify his comments as reflecting public concern about migrant workers. Reform wants to replace the Tories initially, and they are on track to do so. Instinctively, they know their approach speaks to the mass of lower-income white voters. It would be absurd to suggest that Reform is trying anything more electorally sophisticated than that. However, Farage knows more about Trump's campaigning than even most American politicians. He will be aware that Trump's second campaign managed to attract many ethnic minority voters whose parents and grandparents moved to the US. Trump did so by appealing to these communities' American patriotism and their belief that citizenship and prosperity is hard-earned and hard-won. Just as these communities were hostile to illegal and 'non-conventional' immigration, because it provided short-cuts their families never enjoyed, so Farage might, in time, find that his rhetoric on work, welfare and citizenship plays well with some minority groups too. After all, many ethnic minority voters have chosen the Tories in recent elections, for similar reasons – above all, the party's (previous) emphasis on lower taxes for workers. In any case, Farage will also be able to point to Labour's recent form here. Last week, The Telegraph reported on a memo sent by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, in which she suggested restricting benefits to recent migrants. Above all, what unites the two sides of Reform's coalition is anger with the status quo. Farage came of age, politically, 20 years ago, just when working-class anger was building. He knows better than anyone how to tap into it. Tapping into extreme discontent I got my first taste of this anger in 2004, working on the successful 'North East Says No' campaign against a regional assembly. Our brutal anti-politician message ran like a hot knife through butter. 'Politicians talk, we pay' was our slogan. We were no geniuses; we merely tapped into extreme discontent that was building. Farage's Ukip played a supporting role in this victory. The mainstream parties have never understood Farage because they have never understood the scale of working-class rage. Because the main parties kept winning general elections, they told themselves that the increasingly-common voter revolts were never serious. But these mainstream politicians were not listening to what voters were really saying across England. I ran an in-depth study of the most disaffected voters in the late 2000s – people who said they were openly tempted to junk the main parties or not vote at all. I remember listening to completely furious voters in Stoke, convinced that the country was run by an elite that neither listened to nor cared about them. Moderate political leaders at the time never knew it, but they were effectively running a country made of revolutionary voters who had simply calculated that the mainstream parties offered the best opportunity for actual change in the short-term – above all, from 2010, on immigration. This is something Farage always understood, and which Labour is now slowly realising (hence Rayner's suggestion to restrict migrant benefits). Political failure on immigration Immigration has never been the only driver of working-class discontent. In 2024, the state of the NHS and the legacy of the cost-of-living crisis loomed large. But opposition to large-scale immigration has always been the issue where political failure and hypocrisy have been starkest and most consistently felt. It was the Tories' pledge in 2010 to cut immigration to the low tens of thousands that secured them so many working-class votes and ultimately a chance to run government. Later, it was Boris Johnson's proposed 'Australian-style' points system which helped give them an 80-seat majority in 2019. It is hard to appreciate the popularity of the points policy. It remains the joint-most popular policy I have tested in 25 years (alongside making new arrivals pay for NHS care). Partly explained by reality TV shows they had seen about Australian border police, people thought it offered the perfect solution: a system to allow useful workers in, keeping out those that could not or would not work. When immigration rose dramatically after the 2019 election, working-class voters who backed the Tories for more than a decade felt sick with betrayal. It was this broken promise that led directly to the rise of Reform. Starmer's continued failure on immigration explains why Reform tops all the polling charts. Recent polling by Ipsos showed Reform is more trusted than either the Conservatives or Labour on immigration policy. All this takes us back to Farage's speech this week and his position as a prime minister in waiting. How likely is it that Reform will form a government? Thatcherite history To answer this, we should first consider how 'sticky' their voters are likely to be. It is one thing to tell a pollster you will vote Reform – or vote for Reform in the local elections – but another thing to put a cross next to a Reform candidate in a general election. But Reform's provincial electoral base has lost all trust in the main parties. While Starmer might be able to bring immigration down significantly, and reduce the flow of small boats, it is unlikely that he will manage to do so on the scale required to soothe Reform voters. Hopes that economic growth will return or that the NHS will see a step-change in performance also seem unlikely. You must still doubt whether Reform can sustain their poll lead in the face of a massive establishment backlash. As I wrote in these pages recently, if public sector unions, the civil service, the legal profession and even the police all line up to suggest that life in Britain will grind to an unpleasant halt with Farage as prime minister, you must assume that many voters will not have the stomach for such a fight. That said, Reform are still heading to secure many dozens of MPs at the next election. At the heart of a much-needed perfectly-run campaign must be a manifesto which emphasises their strength on key issues of immigration and crime, and which reassures voters they are not about to mess everything else up (above all, the NHS). If you were creating a populist party from scratch, polls and focus groups would dictate the design of your manifesto. You would start with the absolute non-negotiables for the public and work from there. But Reform's manifesto cannot be purely determined by opinion research. Farage entirely defines Reform and he has a clear ideological history as a Right-wing Thatcherite. Reform cannot therefore just say whatever voters want to hear. As we saw this week, the nature of Reform's coalition makes policy design hard. Their immigration policies only need refinement and defensive lines, mainly to reassure voters that NHS and care workers will still be able to move to Britain. The same is true of their policies on crime and justice, which pledge a shift of policing towards serious offences and an expansion of prison capacity. Winning over Right- and Left-leaning voters Three things should inform their approach to the rest of their manifesto. Firstly, they should ramp up those micro-policies that they know the public care about deeply, but which tend to be written off by other parties as parochial. For example, Reform could pledge to make driving 'like it used to be'. Filling in potholes is already a Reform priority. They could also scrap most 20mph zones and reduce the number of cycle lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, they could scrap demands for people to have multiple bins. They could force public-facing public bodies like HMRC or the DVLA to start taking phone calls again properly. They could elaborate on their pledges to cut government waste – which appear to be a crucial element of their financial plans – and force all public sector bodies to conduct and publish reviews into the management of their services. These sorts of small-time policies attract derision from commentators but they are exactly the sorts of things that voters bring up unprompted in focus groups. Critically, they would carry no ideological baggage and irritate neither Left- nor Right-leaning voters. They would also provide simple talking points for Reform candidates on the door step. Secondly, and the mess of their policy package this week confirms a need for this, Reform should study the Conservative Party manifesto of 2019 and unashamedly rip off a series of policies from this document – particularly on those areas where a huge amount of technical knowledge is required, which Reform cannot easily access having never been in Government. On education, the Tories said they would back Ofsted inspections, expand the free schools and academy programme and increase the number of 'alternative provision' institutions for those excluded from schools. On transport, the Tories said they would invest in railways in the Midlands and North of England, re-open lines that had been closed in the past, and expand contactless payments across the transport network. On the workforce, the Tories committed to training up hundreds of thousands more apprentices and creating a National Skills Fund to enable individuals and small businesses to undertake skills training. Reform should adapt and market these policies as their own. There is no point Reform re-inventing the wheel on a lot of areas, when the hard work has been done already. Thirdly, Reform should say they are going to trust the experts. The party is already committed to a Royal Commission to look at the future of social care. Reform should take the same approach to the wider NHS and commit to a serious review – led by clinicians – on the future of the NHS, while promising that it will always be free at the point of use and held in public hands. Voters will not care that there have been other recent reviews; Reform's review can make a virtue of being led by those that deliver the services on the ground. Embracing the free market The NHS is the area where Reform are most vulnerable. In the past, Farage has said that Britain should move to an insurance-based system. Given the US has an insurance-based system, it is easy to see why opposition politicians suggest the NHS is not safe in Reform hands. If the NHS is Reform's greatest vulnerability, their greatest choice comes on the economy. Here, their best bet is to embrace the free market in its purest form. This means, for example, bolstering consumer rights against big businesses, encouraging the creation of new businesses by cutting taxes on small firms and their founders, and easing planning restrictions for businesses. This is serious free-market economics, but for ordinary voters. While the public have little sympathy for big businesses, even their working-class base loves small businesses and holds respect for entrepreneurs and the self-employed. No party has yet articulated an economic policy primarily through the prism of these sorts of risk-takers, preferring to talk about abstract macro-economics. Reform should do things differently. Whether Reform can form a government or not, nobody should be under any doubt that voters are in the mood to tear things up. Those people that suggest the British electorate somehow turned in a different direction to Right-moving voters in the US and Europe are not listening. The public did not vote for technocratic competence under Starmer; they voted to guarantee idiotic Tories got the boot. For the foreseeable future, rage will determine British politics.
The Independent
an hour ago
- Business
- The Independent
Stark poll shows Nigel Farage could become Prime Minister
Electoral Calculus forecasts Nigel Farage would secure a 74-seat majority if an election were held tomorrow, as Reform UK gains traction. The forecast indicates Labour would drop to 136 seats, while the Conservatives would plummet to 22. A Techne UK poll for The Independent shows Reform at a record high of 31 per cent, surpassing Labour at 22 per cent and nearly doubling the Conservatives' 16 per cent. Experts caution against over-interpreting polls, noting that geographical vote distribution is crucial, but others suggest Reform has reached a critical point. Keir Starmer has intensified attacks on Farage, warning his policies would be as damaging as Liz Truss 's, while Reform dismisses these claims as 'project fear 2.0'.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘British families, not recent arrivals': Farage's strategy to win the next election
Shortly before the 2024 election, two of my opinion research team returned shocked from a trip to Portsmouth, where they had been speaking to working-class swing voters. Local people were planning to vote Labour and the Tories were dismissed out of hand. So far, so predictable. But the researchers heard something new and surprising: people were explicitly saying this was their last throw of the dice for mainstream politics. If Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street off the back of big promises to change the country for the better – and then failed to deliver – they vowed they would defect to Nigel Farage. Back then, there was a giant mismatch between focus groups and national polling. While every poll suggested Labour had irresistible momentum, talking to people in detail revealed the opposite: that there was no enthusiasm at all for Starmer or his team. Any enthusiasm seemed to be with Reform. Yet Reform too had a problem at the ballot box in 2024, which was that voters just wanted the Conservatives out. Putting a cross next to Reform risked complicating matters, while choosing Labour would do the job, so Reform won fewer seats that they otherwise might have. Given that Labour were set to inherit the same problems that the Conservatives had struggled with, Reform's true victory seemed likely to emerge after the election. And so it has turned out. Polls move all the time, but Reform are now polling in the high 20 per cent mark, with Labour polling in the low 20s and the Tories a little lower. This combination of perceived Labour failings on issues like immigration, growth and the NHS, and continued Reform popularity, has propelled Farage for the first time into position as the country's potential next prime minister. It is unfamiliar territory. Successfully evolving from a party of protest to a credible party of power will be a titanic job. And while the prize is enormous, the risks involved in building and sustaining a broad and often contradictory electoral coalition are also huge. It was a conundrum that Farage appeared to address this week, when he made what was essentially his first speech as a possible future prime minister. Ostensibly, Farage was announcing a mini-policy package. But what the speech most clearly revealed was the high-wire act Farage must now embark upon as he appeals to a broader public rather than a minority – even a significant minority – of voters. As a political strategist who has pored over electoral data for 25 years, I've seen how Farage's primary following has been made up of 'upwardly-mobile', lower-middle-class, ex-Tories who revere Margaret Thatcher. But for the last few years, they have been joined by a mass of poorer, working-class voters who have expectations of state support that simply are not shared by Farage's first followers. So while most of his prospective voters are provincial and on lower incomes, they increasingly pull in different directions. This week showed Reform will struggle to please both sides. In truth, the policy package Farage announced was a dog's breakfast. It will confirm to many in Westminster that they are miles away from being ready for government. Breezily reassuring everyone that cutting waste will pay all the bills is already attracting ridicule. For the scale of the proposals was vast. On the one hand, Farage pledged to protect winter fuel payments for older voters and to scrap the two-child benefit cap. On the other hand, they pledged to raise the personal allowance for income tax. Concerns raised about Reform's credibility on the public finances will not have seriously registered among the party's supporters – and most will be enthused at the prospect of Reform channelling Elon Musk and taking a chainsaw to public spending. And on the substance, none of these policies will have alienated any part of their coalition. However, their more affluent, Thatcherite voters will have raised an eyebrow at least at their pledge to remove the two-child benefit cap. A year ago, polls showed voters backed the cap by two-to-one as people tired of seeing neighbours using welfare to sustain lifestyles that full-time workers are struggling to match. Farage says removing this cap will boost the domestic workforce and reduce firms' reliance on migrant labour. The policy, he said, 'is aimed at British families. It's not aimed at those that come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children.' This will be enough to reassure Reform's coalition that he was not in the process of selling out. He will not mind that such policies will inevitably bring accusations of a 'Britain-first' nativism, reflecting his closeness to President Trump's Maga movement in America. Farage knows exactly how to walk that fine line between hard-edged rhetoric and offensive speech; he will be able to justify his comments as reflecting public concern about migrant workers. Reform wants to replace the Tories initially, and they are on track to do so. Instinctively, they know their approach speaks to the mass of lower-income white voters. It would be absurd to suggest that Reform is trying anything more electorally sophisticated than that. However, Farage knows more about Trump's campaigning than even most American politicians. He will be aware that Trump's second campaign managed to attract many ethnic minority voters whose parents and grandparents moved to the US. Trump did so by appealing to these communities' American patriotism and their belief that citizenship and prosperity is hard-earned and hard-won. Just as these communities were hostile to illegal and 'non-conventional' immigration, because it provided short-cuts their families never enjoyed, so Farage might, in time, find that his rhetoric on work, welfare and citizenship plays well with some minority groups too. After all, many ethnic minority voters have chosen the Tories in recent elections, for similar reasons – above all, the party's (previous) emphasis on lower taxes for workers. In any case, Farage will also be able to point to Labour's recent form here. Last week, The Telegraph reported on a memo sent by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, in which she suggested restricting benefits to recent migrants. Above all, what unites the two sides of Reform's coalition is anger with the status quo. Farage came of age, politically, 20 years ago, just when working-class anger was building. He knows better than anyone how to tap into it. I got my first taste of this anger in 2004, working on the successful 'North East Says No' campaign against a regional assembly. Our brutal anti-politician message ran like a hot knife through butter. 'Politicians talk, we pay' was our slogan. We were no geniuses; we merely tapped into extreme discontent that was building. Farage's Ukip played a supporting role in this victory. The mainstream parties have never understood Farage because they have never understood the scale of working-class rage. Because the main parties kept winning general elections, they told themselves that the increasingly-common voter revolts were never serious. But these mainstream politicians were not listening to what voters were really saying across England. I ran an in-depth study of the most disaffected voters in the late 2000s – people who said they were openly tempted to junk the main parties or not vote at all. I remember listening to completely furious voters in Stoke, convinced that the country was run by an elite that neither listened to nor cared about them. Moderate political leaders at the time never knew it, but they were effectively running a country made of revolutionary voters who had simply calculated that the mainstream parties offered the best opportunity for actual change in the short-term – above all, from 2010, on immigration. This is something Farage always understood, and which Labour is now slowly realising (hence Rayner's suggestion to restrict migrant benefits). Immigration has never been the only driver of working-class discontent. In 2024, the state of the NHS and the legacy of the cost-of-living crisis loomed large. But opposition to large-scale immigration has always been the issue where political failure and hypocrisy have been starkest and most consistently felt. It was the Tories' pledge in 2010 to cut immigration to the low tens of thousands that secured them so many working-class votes and ultimately a chance to run government. Later, it was Boris Johnson's proposed 'Australian-style' points system which helped give them an 80-seat majority in 2019. It is hard to appreciate the popularity of the points policy. It remains the joint-most popular policy I have tested in 25 years (alongside making new arrivals pay for NHS care). Partly explained by reality TV shows they had seen about Australian border police, people thought it offered the perfect solution: a system to allow useful workers in, keeping out those that could not or would not work. When immigration rose dramatically after the 2019 election, working-class voters who backed the Tories for more than a decade felt sick with betrayal. It was this broken promise that led directly to the rise of Reform. Starmer's continued failure on immigration explains why Reform tops all the polling charts. Recent polling by Ipsos showed Reform is more trusted than either the Conservatives or Labour on immigration policy. All this takes us back to Farage's speech this week and his position as a prime minister in waiting. How likely is it that Reform will form a government? To answer this, we should first consider how 'sticky' their voters are likely to be. It is one thing to tell a pollster you will vote Reform – or vote for Reform in the local elections – but another thing to put a cross next to a Reform candidate in a general election. But Reform's provincial electoral base has lost all trust in the main parties. While Starmer might be able to bring immigration down significantly, and reduce the flow of small boats, it is unlikely that he will manage to do so on the scale required to soothe Reform voters. Hopes that economic growth will return or that the NHS will see a step-change in performance also seem unlikely. You must still doubt whether Reform can sustain their poll lead in the face of a massive establishment backlash. As I wrote in these pages recently, if public sector unions, the civil service, the legal profession and even the police all line up to suggest that life in Britain will grind to an unpleasant halt with Farage as prime minister, you must assume that many voters will not have the stomach for such a fight. That said, Reform are still heading to secure many dozens of MPs at the next election. At the heart of a much-needed perfectly-run campaign must be a manifesto which emphasises their strength on key issues of immigration and crime, and which reassures voters they are not about to mess everything else up (above all, the NHS). If you were creating a populist party from scratch, polls and focus groups would dictate the design of your manifesto. You would start with the absolute non-negotiables for the public and work from there. But Reform's manifesto cannot be purely determined by opinion research. Farage entirely defines Reform and he has a clear ideological history as a Right-wing Thatcherite. Reform cannot therefore just say whatever voters want to hear. As we saw this week, the nature of Reform's coalition makes policy design hard. Their immigration policies only need refinement and defensive lines, mainly to reassure voters that NHS and care workers will still be able to move to Britain. The same is true of their policies on crime and justice, which pledge a shift of policing towards serious offences and an expansion of prison capacity. Three things should inform their approach to the rest of their manifesto. Firstly, they should ramp up those micro-policies that they know the public care about deeply, but which tend to be written off by other parties as parochial. For example, Reform could pledge to make driving 'like it used to be'. Filling in potholes is already a Reform priority. They could also scrap most 20mph zones and reduce the number of cycle lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, they could scrap demands for people to have multiple bins. They could force public-facing public bodies like HMRC or the DVLA to start taking phone calls again properly. They could elaborate on their pledges to cut government waste – which appear to be a crucial element of their financial plans – and force all public sector bodies to conduct and publish reviews into the management of their services. These sorts of small-time policies attract derision from commentators but they are exactly the sorts of things that voters bring up unprompted in focus groups. Critically, they would carry no ideological baggage and irritate neither Left- nor Right-leaning voters. They would also provide simple talking points for Reform candidates on the door step. Secondly, and the mess of their policy package this week confirms a need for this, Reform should study the Conservative Party manifesto of 2019 and unashamedly rip off a series of policies from this document – particularly on those areas where a huge amount of technical knowledge is required, which Reform cannot easily access having never been in Government. On education, the Tories said they would back Ofsted inspections, expand the free schools and academy programme and increase the number of 'alternative provision' institutions for those excluded from schools. On transport, the Tories said they would invest in railways in the Midlands and North of England, re-open lines that had been closed in the past, and expand contactless payments across the transport network. On the workforce, the Tories committed to training up hundreds of thousands more apprentices and creating a National Skills Fund to enable individuals and small businesses to undertake skills training. Reform should adapt and market these policies as their own. There is no point Reform re-inventing the wheel on a lot of areas, when the hard work has been done already. Thirdly, Reform should say they are going to trust the experts. The party is already committed to a Royal Commission to look at the future of social care. Reform should take the same approach to the wider NHS and commit to a serious review – led by clinicians – on the future of the NHS, while promising that it will always be free at the point of use and held in public hands. Voters will not care that there have been other recent reviews; Reform's review can make a virtue of being led by those that deliver the services on the ground. The NHS is the area where Reform are most vulnerable. In the past, Farage has said that Britain should move to an insurance-based system. Given the US has an insurance-based system, it is easy to see why opposition politicians suggest the NHS is not safe in Reform hands. If the NHS is Reform's greatest vulnerability, their greatest choice comes on the economy. Here, their best bet is to embrace the free market in its purest form. This means, for example, bolstering consumer rights against big businesses, encouraging the creation of new businesses by cutting taxes on small firms and their founders, and easing planning restrictions for businesses. This is serious free-market economics, but for ordinary voters. While the public have little sympathy for big businesses, even their working-class base loves small businesses and holds respect for entrepreneurs and the self-employed. No party has yet articulated an economic policy primarily through the prism of these sorts of risk-takers, preferring to talk about abstract macro-economics. Reform should do things differently. Whether Reform can form a government or not, nobody should be under any doubt that voters are in the mood to tear things up. Those people that suggest the British electorate somehow turned in a different direction to Right-moving voters in the US and Europe are not listening. The public did not vote for technocratic competence under Starmer; they voted to guarantee idiotic Tories got the boot. For the foreseeable future, rage will determine British politics. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Toronto Star
an hour ago
- Politics
- Toronto Star
Donald Trump turned Canada's predictable election into a chaotic race. Behind the scenes, Pierre Poilievre was struggling to adapt
The story so far In Part 1, we followed Mark Carney's unexpected rise and the unravelling of Pierre Poilievre's once-inevitable campaign — a race reshaped by the return of Donald Trump. In Part 2, the campaign kicks off, the ballot question shifts, and the stakes for Canada escalate. It was now clear to Poilievre's campaign that there would be 'dueling ballot questions.' Carney was positioning himself to run against Trump, portraying himself as a serious man with a serious plan who would 'never ever bow down to a bully.' And Trudeau, who was still the prime minister, was helping lay the groundwork for that message and carving out his own legacy by announcing that Ottawa would fight back with escalating tariffs. He called on Canadians to stand up for their country. On Feb. 7, he went further, telling a group of business leaders that Trump was serious about making Canada his country's 51st state because he wanted its vast mineral resources. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The Conservatives needed to pivot. Star Exclusive: Part 1 Analysis Trudeau was done, Carney was new, but Poilievre made a critical mistake. Here's how the Conservative's set themselves up to fail Althia Raj Star Exclusive: Part 3 Analysis We talked to 106 political insiders. Here's why Pierre Poilievre lost his seat and Mark Carney couldn't land a majority in Canada's surprising election Althia Raj 'We at least needed to play enough defence on the Trump issue that we could take that off the table for as many Canadians as possible,' said a Poilievre adviser. Days after launching a new ad that made no mention of Trump, the Conservatives opened a new message track. On Feb. 15, caucus members, staff and their families were invited to dress in red and white for a 'Canada First' rally in Ottawa. The party planned to record an ad that showed Poilievre could stand up to Trump too, that he also had a plan, and that the Conservatives would defend the country just as vociferously as the Liberals — 'that, in many ways, we were better prepared to take on that challenge,' one adviser explained. Pierre Poilievre at the 'Canada First' rally on Feb. 15 in used his 66-minute speech at the rally to reframe some of his long-standing policies. His pledge to 'axe the tax' was now 'an even bigger issue,' he insisted, because combined with Trump's tariffs, it would 'decimate' Canadian industries and jobs. His tax cuts were branded 'patriotic,' and his pledge to scrap Liberal environmental regulations that blocked oil and gas development, he argued, were more necessary than ever. It had taken the Conservative leader a while to get to this point. Pundits suggested the party's base was split; polling suggested a slight majority of the party's supporters preferred Trump to his Democratic challenger, Kamala Harris. But the Liberals would not let Poilievre rebrand himself as 'Captain Canada.' Ads released that day highlighted Poilievre's claims that Canada was 'broken' and that Canadians were 'stupid,' and juxtaposed his words with similar MAGA talking points from Trump. They stressed that the Conservative leader was the 'wrong choice' at the 'wrong time.' ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The Liberals felt their ' Made in America ' ad was one of their most successful efforts at hardening their support. Some organizers wondered whether it should have been broadcast for longer or brought back at the end of the election campaign. The Conservatives fought back with a contrast ad of their own, suggesting Trump wanted Canadian jobs and Carney would help him ship them to the U.S. 'It was a constantly changing environment,' noted one Conservative. 'And because of that, we had a plan that was sort of constantly getting updated.' Public opinion polls were tightening up. A February survey from Leger suggested the Conservatives would be in a dead heat with the Liberals if they were led by Carney. Angus Reid suggested that public support for the Liberals, with Carney as their presumed leader, had increased 21 points in two months, with New Democrat and Bloc Québécois voters flocking to them, and the Conservatives dropping five points. Carney's leadership team felt momentum too. Earlier that month, so many people showed up to a meet and greet at Joe Kool's pub in London, Ont. that they couldn't all fit in. A week later, the same thing happened in North Vancouver when an event booked at a Milestones restaurant had to be moved to a rented ballroom to fit 1,000 people. Even in the Conservative heartland, Carney packed the Flying Monkeys craft brewery in Barrie, Ont. on a weekday, during working hours. They were so confident that planning for the general election was now fully underway. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Not that there weren't hiccups. Carney visibly struggled during the Liberal leadership candidates' French-language debate in Montreal, when he couldn't tell the moderator how much it cost a family of four to fill their weekly grocery cart. In earlier interviews, he'd mistakenly suggested in French that he wanted to cut federal transfer payments to the provinces and individuals. Now he was saying that he 'agreed with Hamas.' 'We do not agree with Hamas,' Freeland interrupted. 'Against Hamas,' Carney clarified. Just as Trudeau's unpopularity masked Poilievre's mistakes, Trump's unpopularity seemed to mask Carney's weaknesses. But many voters had already concluded they liked what they saw. Dismissive, prickly and condescending On the morning of March 14, Mike Myers called. Carney was about to be sworn in as Canada's 24th prime minister. He had won the Liberal leadership five days earlier on the first ballot with 85.9 per cent support. It was more than Trudeau received in 2013 (80 per cent), more than Poilievre received from Conservative members in 2022 (68 per cent). Freeland had come in a distant second with eight per cent. On the back porch of the Governor General's residence, Jane Deeks, Carney's director of digital strategy, took a video call from Myers on her phone. Huddled beside her were Mike Maka, deputy campaign manager for the upcoming Liberal election tour, Thomas Pitfield, who would be the campaign's executive director, and Gerald Butts and his wife, Jodi. Days earlier, Maka had emailed the Scarborough native after his March 1 appearance on Saturday Night Live, where he'd worn a 'Canada is not for sale' T-shirt and mouthed 'elbows up' during the show's closing credits. Myers had called back that afternoon, enthusiastically. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The Mark Carney-Mike Myers ad. While they were brainstorming ideas for a Carney ad — one that would focus on Canada, and try not too hard to be funny, out the window Justin Trudeau could be seen, with Katie Telford at his side, walking out of Rideau Hall after resigning as prime minister. That afternoon, the new prime minister's first move — designed to show he was a change from Trudeau — was a theatrical signing of a document that ordered the 'carbon tax' reduced to zero. As Conservatives quibbled over whether the Liberal photo-op carried any regulatory weight, Carney flew to Europe to present himself the way he wanted Canadians to see him — in touch with Canada's traditional values in a meeting with King Charles, and at home on the international stage, being warmly embraced by French President Emmanuel Macron. The trip was not entirely smooth. Carney demonstrated that he could be dismissive, prickly and condescending — something his staff and some cabinet ministers had already noticed — when he snapped at journalists during a news conference. An adviser suggested that was a useful learning moment for the new prime minister. If he hoped to contrast his demeanour with that of Poilievre, Carney needed to always act like the adult in the room — he could not afford to be anything but calm, composed, and patient during the election campaign. Back in Canada, Poilievre was still leaning into his 'axe the tax' pledge, unwilling to shed a policy that had already delivered so much for the Conservatives. ('It was such an unbelievably effective wedge against the Liberals, it was hard to let go of,' a Poilievre adviser later noted.) Not only would he scrap the consumer carbon tax, Poilievre said, but he would also scrap the industrial price on carbon, which he billed as a 'shadow' tax that increased the cost of all goods. wedge (The carbon tax) was such an unbelievably effective wedge against the Liberals, it was hard to let go of Carney, meanwhile, set out to further distance himself from Trudeau, and to demonstrate his pragmatism. He announced he would eliminate the GST on new homes costing up to $1 million for first-time homebuyers — a proposal very similar to one made earlier by Poilievre. Then he reversed the previous Liberal government's increase in the capital gains tax. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW He would make more promises that were similar to previously announced Conservative pledges: an income-tax cut for all Canadians; cutting municipal development charges to spur home construction; buying new icebreakers for the North, investing in the Canadian Rangers program, and fixing the Canadian Armed Forces recruitment process; allowing workers who travel far for work to deduct their expenses, boosting apprenticeship grants in the skills trades and increasing funding for the Union Training and Innovation Program. By echoing promises that Poilievre had been making for months — and, in some cases, years — Carney was trying to move the conversation away from the two rivals' policy differences, and towards what he wanted to focus on: leadership. 'He's Mr. Business' On the eve of the election call, Maka and Deeks walked into their respective offices at the Liberal party's Ottawa headquarters. Maka wrote on a white board for his team, 'He's not a rock star, he's Mr. Business.' This wasn't another Trudeau campaign. Carney's personal appearances, rallies and media events all needed a different vibe. Deeks, now the Liberals' deputy campaign manager for digital, pinned a piece of paper to a bulletin board, on which she had written for her team, 'Stand up to President Trump and build the economy.' Every ad, every message from the campaign, would need to come back to those two ideas. On March 23, a day before MPs were set to return to the House of Commons, Carney went to Rideau Hall and asked Gov. Gen. Mary Simon to call an election for April 28. It would be a 37-day campaign — the shortest legally possible. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW When he emerged, Carney asked Canadians for a strong mandate to deal with Trump. He framed the coming election as one to decide who could best deal with a crisis, calling Trump's 51st state rhetoric and the tariffs he was promising existential threats to Canada. Across the Ottawa River, Poilievre made the case for why the Liberals should be sent packing, and why his Conservatives could be trusted to make the big changes Canada needed. Poilievre had started trying to distance himself from Trump, jumping on the U.S. president's comment that he thought it would be 'easier to deal, actually, with a Liberal' heading the Canadian government, and that 'the Conservative that's running is, stupidly, no friend of mine.' In response, the Conservative leader posted on X, 'it is true, I am not MAGA. I am for Canada First. Always.' Mr. President, it is true. I am not MAGA. I am for Canada First. Always. Canada has always been America's best friend & ally. But we will NEVER be the 51st state. — Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) February 28, 2025 But comments made weeks earlier by an ally were coming back to haunt him. In an interview with the right-wing website Breitbart, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had said she not only asked Trump administration officials to 'pause' tariff threats to help the federal Conservatives, but also had described Poilievre as a better partner for the Americans, sharing her view that the 'perspective that Pierre would bring would be very much in sync with, I think … the new direction in America.' When the campaign began, the Liberals had overtaken the Conservatives in public opinion polls. 'It was an extremely productive call' The Liberal leader's campaign did not get off to the smoothest start. After leaving Rideau Hall, Carney flew to St. John's, Newfoundland for a rally. He was nervous. The crowd wanted to support him. He was serious. The crowd wanted to cheer. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Then, midway through a stump speech from which he would not deviate much throughout the campaign, Carney declared that the Americans wanted our country. Someone in the crowd yelled back, 'They can't have it!' Carney smiled. 'They can't have it,' he replied. His advisers, who had worried about how their neophyte candidate would fare under the pressure and scrutiny of running for the highest office in the land, breathed a sigh of relief. Liberal Party of Canada Leader Mark Carney with a supporter at his campaign kick-off rally in St. John's on March 23. Frank Gunn/ The Canadian Press Several thousand kilometres away, the Conservatives were trying to project a different image of Carney. They suggested the Liberal leader had profited off sick coal miners in the U.S., describing the company he chaired, global investment firm Brookfield Asset Management, as 'Carney's company.' Poilievre suggested Carney was corrupt. He accused the Liberal leader of using his position as an adviser to Trudeau to obtain a multimillion-dollar loan for Brookfield from Chinese bankers. He accused Carney of refusing to disclose his conflicts of interest, of not divesting of all of his assets, of engaging in improper tax dodging practices while at Brookfield. Some of those allegations were repeated in 'Sneaky Mark Carney ' ads. But the attempt to brand Carney as 'sneaky' didn't bother the Liberals. To them, the bigger threat was that the Conservatives would try to convince voters that the Liberal party was trying to pull a fast one on the country — that 'it wasn't that Mark Carney was sneaky, it was that the Liberals were,' in the words of one Carney adviser. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW 'That's what they f- - -ed up,' the Carney adviser continued. 'Had they started with 'sneaky Liberals trying to give you Mark Carney,' that … would have been a different campaign.' Liberals also say they found the Brookfield allegations weren't much of a concern. In nightly focus groups, 'People were like, 'Oh, he's a business guy. He did business-guy things. I don't care',' said the same adviser. They f'd up That's what they f- - -ed up. Had they started with 'sneaky Liberals trying to give you Mark Carney,' that … would have been a different campaign Poilievre's team had hoped that one allegation they'd dug up would cause serious damage — not at the level of Trudeau's history of dressing up in blackface, but a significant blow. They believed they'd uncovered evidence that Carney had plagiarized parts of the doctoral thesis he submitted at Oxford University, and leaked the information to the National Post. A categorical denunciation by Carney's doctoral supervisor, that there was 'no evidence of plagiarism … nor any unusual academic practices,' laid the story to rest. The Liberal leader, however, had other problems. During a campaign stop in Nova Scotia, Carney mispronounced the name of a star candidate in Quebec, Nathalie Provost, and mistakenly described her as a victim of 'the shootings at Concordia.' Provost had been shot during the 1989 massacre at École polytechnique, the engineering school at the Université de Montréal where 14 women were murdered. As some Quebecers wondered whether Carney knew anything about their province, the Liberals announced he would shun a leaders' debate organized by TVA, the French-language private broadcaster. Carney gave different reasons why he didn't want to do it — the $75,000 participating fee, the exclusion of the Greens. Pundits speculated that the real reason was his French wasn't strong enough. Carney was struggling to find his footing. Meanwhile, Poilievre packed rallies with thousands of supporters in North York and Hamilton. The Conservatives were projecting momentum. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Pierre Poilievre at one the many packed rallies he held during the campaign. Cathie Coward/The Hamilton Spectator Then Donald Trump swooped in. On March 26, the president signed an executive order that would impose 25 per cent tariffs on all automobile imports to the U.S. the following week. When the news broke, Carney happened to be meeting with Lana Payne, the president of Unifor, the union that represents Canadian autoworkers. 'You know, this will hurt us, but through this period by being together, we will emerge stronger,' he told reporters in Kitchener, Ont. Then he suspended his campaign and headed to Ottawa. (Later, Carney would suggest to Radio-Canada that he enjoyed governing much more than campaigning, which he summarized as, 'We give speeches, we shake hands, we look at cows.') In Toronto that evening, Premier Doug Ford's campaign manager told an Empire Club audience that the federal Conservatives were going to lose the election if they didn't pivot quickly and address the main ballot question on voters' mind: Trump. 'You gotta get on that issue, and you might not totally win, but you can't lose by 20 points on it,' strategist Kory Teneycke told the crowd. 'You've got to have a pivot that is taking some of the momentum of that issue shift and directing it towards things that are yours.' The next morning, Poilievre offered his response. Speaking directly to autoworkers who were at risk of losing their jobs, he said his message to Trump was, 'Knock it off.' ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW President Trump's unjustified tariffs on our auto sector are an assault on our economy and workers. The Americans will soon see how the pain will be felt on both sides of the border. Canada First Conservatives will build a Canadian economic fortress to protect our affected jobs… — Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) March 27, 2025 Carney, by contrast, met with his Canada-U.S. cabinet committee, then addressed the nation with a sombre warning. 'The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation, is over,' he declared. The next day he spoke on the phone with Trump, then held a virtual meeting with the premiers. The phone call had gone well. Carney had taken the long view, concluding that if he won the election, he'd need to deal with Trump. He told the U.S. president the two could work together. The tone was respectful. The president did not antagonize Carney by referring to him as 'governor,' the way he had with Trudeau. But Trump made his pitch for Canada to become the 51st U.S. state; Carney, according to two sources, responded, 'We can talk about a lot of things, but not that.' After the call, Carney's team waited nervously for Trump's inevitable post on social media. It was a glowing review. 'I just finished speaking with Prime Minister Mark Carney, of Canada. It was an extremely productive call, we agree on many things, and will be meeting immediately after Canada's upcoming Election to work on elements of Politics, Business, and all other factors, that will end up being great for both the United States of America and Canada,' Trump wrote. 'Thank you for your attention to this matter.' A Conservative adviser wondered if the cordial tone of the conversation 'slightly limited (Carney's) ability to talk as harshly as he had been.' But Carney appeared relaxed as he confidently swatted away reporters' questions about the call at a news conference that afternoon. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The political rookie had survived his first week. He had a bounce in his step. According to their own internal polling, the Liberals were about to cross into majority territory, on track to win between 182 and 187 seats in the House of Commons. Those projections would remain there for most of the campaign. 'We were all flustered' As Donald Trump's April 2 'Liberation Day' tariff announcement loomed, Carney paused his campaign — and Poilievre prepared a big strategic pivot. 'There were constantly tensions on the campaign between how much we should talk about Donald Trump — because we didn't have a choice and it would look incredibly unserious and tone-deaf if we didn't mention him — and how much we could get away with not talking about Trump, because it just wasn't helpful for us,' said a Conservative adviser. trump There were constantly tensions on the campaign (about) how much we should talk about Donald Trump That day, Poilievre spoke to a roomful of partisans designed to look like an Economic Club gathering of business leaders, in an attempt to address that tension. He outlined the Conservatives' plan to deal with the Trump White House. Poilievre and his strategists would see how the speech landed — if he needed to keep talking about Trump or whether these comments would suffice — and adjust if necessary. Poilievre looked the part of a prime minister, standing behind a podium adorned with a red maple leaf. A blue backdrop with the slogan 'Canada First, for a change' signalled another message shift. That afternoon, Trump unveiled his list of countries targeted for 'reciprocal' tariffs. Campaign workers in the Liberal and Conservative war rooms watched attentively. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW 'We were all flustered around a TV trying to pause it at the right freeze frame so that when he held up his stupid chart high enough we could actually see if Canada was on there,' recounted one Conservative staffer. Canada was not on the list. President Donald Trump announced widespread reciprocal tariffs on April 2. Canada was not on this list. Mark Schiefelbein/AP Carney had flown to Ottawa to meet with his Canada-U.S. cabinet committee. The following day, he would speak with the premiers. Although Canada had been spared new tariffs, previously announced auto tariffs were scheduled to come into effect at midnight. The 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum remained, as well as tariffs on softwood lumber. And there was talk of other tariffs coming on pharmaceuticals, copper, and semiconductors. The next day, Carney announced new reciprocal tariffs, and measures to aid Canadian businesses and help Canadian workers access Employment Insurance more quickly. Trump was again dominating the conversation. 'It was loud and clear in my riding' By the third week of the campaign, public polling suggested the Liberals had the support of 44 per cent of voters nationally — putting them on track for a solid majority government. Internally, riding forecasts were full of opportunity, with 14 seats potentially up for grabs in Quebec, and another eight in Alberta. Across the country, Liberal candidates were recounting stories of people they'd never seen before stopping by their offices to drop off cheques or to volunteer. As the campaign reached the halfway point, the Conservatives were balancing aggressive pitches in NDP-held ridings in B.C. and Liberal ridings in the GTA, with efforts to shore up their traditional support. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Poilievre held a rally near Edmonton, where the Liberals hoped to make inroads. Before a crowd the Conservatives claimed was 15,000 strong — police pegged attendance at closer to 9,000 — Poilievre was endorsed by Stephen Harper, his former boss. That endorsement would later be highlighted in an ad with the former prime minister saying he was uniquely qualified to compare Carney and Poilievre since the two men had both worked for him. Former prime minister Stephen Harper endorsed Poilievre. Harper said he was uniquely qualified to compare Carney and Poilievre since the two men had both worked for him. JASON FRANSON THE CANADIAN PRESS The Conservatives also started to shift their message, making a more forceful case for change, that Canada could not afford another four-years of Liberal government. Elsewhere on the campaign trail, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet continued to struggle to insert themselves into the conversation. Singh was pleading with voters to send New Democrats to Ottawa to cap grocery prices, ban corporations from buying affordable homes, invest in health care, and expand pharmacare. "We got this, we got this, let's go!" Singh cried out during a campaign stop in Saskatoon that sounded more desperate than enthusiastic. On the other side of the country, Blanchet was arguing that a vote for the Bloc helped ensure Quebec ridings had a more powerful voice in Ottawa. But most Quebecers seemed to agree with former Bloc MP Kristina Michaud, who told the Star's ' It's Political ' podcast, that with Trump at the door, many voters felt the Bloc was 'a luxury that people cannot really afford right now.' While the wind seemed to be at the Liberals' backs, their candidates in the GTA, Alberta and B.C. were encountering a worrisome trend as they knocked on doors: Their voter coalition seemed to be changing, and long-time supporters were abandoning the party. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Even before the campaign began, the Liberals were concerned by softness in their support in the GTA, especially in York Region, and within the South Asian community. 'We had a problem but we didn't know how acute that problem was,' said one Carney organizer. Candidates were reporting that second-generation Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Italians — and especially young men — were shunning the Liberals. 'There was a generational difference between parents and their children,' added another staff member. Some Liberals felt they had to play catch-up in a race the Conservatives had started running years ago. 'They've done a really good job convincing a lot of diaspora communities that they are Conservatives, and that crime is the number-one ballot box issue,' said a GTA incumbent. It was a race they were bound to lose. 'There's not a lot you can do in a 30-day campaign to fix two or three years of non-stop Conservative attacks on immigration, on public safety,' explained the Carney organizer. Crime and immigration were coming up a lot. 'It was loud and clear in my riding, it was loud and clear in York Region, and it was loud clear in Brampton,' said another Toronto-area MP. acute problem We had a problem but we didn't know how acute that problem was The Liberals had leaned hard into the threat Trump posed to Canada as they tried to shift the ballot-box question away from 10 years of Trudeau. And for many voters, it was the driving factor for their vote. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW But for a lot of voters from South Asian backgrounds, it was not. 'They did not buy that premise,' said a Liberal organizer, who said many of them felt the Trudeau government had failed to adequately respond to concerns they had raised about immigration and crime. 'They still really cared about their issues and not Trump.' Speaking in Brampton on April 10, Carney finally made a crime announcement: a 27-point plan that was never raised again on the campaign trail. Although the Liberals pledged to make bail conditions stricter and to hire thousands more officers for the Canada Border Services Agency and RCMP, the messaging leaned heavily on firearms regulations. Back at Liberal headquarters, the campaign discussed whether an ad could help neuter the immigration issue. There was strong pushback, with some fearing it would backfire and draw attention to allegations that the Liberal government had bungled the file. Instead, Carney's team decided to focus on crime. Bill Blair, then the defence minister and a former Toronto police chief, was asked to voice a community safety ad focused on guns. Blair had performed this role during the 2021 campaign, and the ads were seen as crucial to propping up Liberal support the in 905 area. But this time, using gun control as a wedge issue seemed to misdiagnose the problem. These voters weren't worried about guns — they were worried about criminals out on bail, their homes being invaded and their cars being stolen. Although the ads tested well, Liberal candidates were not impressed. 'We went to that well one too many times,' said another Carney adviser. In response, Blair was tapped to do another ad on bail reform which was placed in ethnic media. Several other ads, in Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu, were made to address crime concerns. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW But there would be no further crime announcements. 'We were winning on the main message,' explained one team member. 'Why would we try to fight on an issue we probably won't win on, where the Conservatives are seen as stronger than us?' Main message We were winning on the main message. Why would we try to fight on an issue we probably won't win on? 'We just ran out of time' It was week four, and with another week and a half to go, Carney was hunkered down in Montreal, preparing for three crucial events: an appearance on the Quebec TV talk show 'Tout le monde en parle,' then the French- and English-language leaders' debates. Carney had spent two and a half days preparing for the debates — about the same as Poilievre. Steven MacKinnon, the Liberal incumbent for Gatineau, played the role of Poilievre, outgoing Toronto MP Arif Varani played Singh, Sen. Pierre Moreau played Blanchet, and Quebec-area incumbent Joël Lightbound played Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault. Carney had also spent two weeks preparing to be interviewed and to debate in French — for which a mistake could easily cost the Liberals their majority — with Andrée-Lyne Hallé, the other national campaign co-director. The two had spent close to an hour each day, often discussing on the plane. 'She didn't just speak French to him,' a colleague explained. 'She taught him how to be a Quebecer.' The debates, a Carney adviser had told the Star weeks earlier, would 'only matter if he loses his cool and snaps at someone.' He did not. The Conservatives hoped the debates would provide a moment — a knockout punch or an error in French — that could change the course of the campaign. They did not. But they gave Poilievre a platform to show Canadians — critically, the ones whose support he was losing — that he could shift his tone. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The problem was that he'd waited too long. 'The leader during the debates was the best version of him that I have ever seen,' said a Poilievre adviser. 'We just ran out of time.' Public opinion surveys suggested the Conservatives were starting to narrow the gap with the Liberals. An Abacus Data poll, from April 14 and 15, found support for the Conservatives had increased six points over two weeks. More voters were now saying change was needed. The Conservatives leaned more forcefully into that message in the campaign's remaining days. The Liberals believed that waiting so long had been their rivals' biggest mistake, and were grateful the pivot hadn't come sooner. 'They caught on to the thing that worked too late,' said one adviser. They had anticipated the Conservatives would get on the change message about two weeks earlier. 'Our argument would have been, 'Change can be many things. In the United States, change is Donald Trump. We're both change. What kind of change do people want?'' No longer running to win Advance polls were held on Easter weekend. The Liberals had debated whether to extend the writ by a week to avoid the holiday but Carney, a devout Catholic, had given his approval and they now felt they had made the right choice. Their voters showed up in droves. Some believe the election was won that weekend. Remarkably, one fixture of election campaigns was still missing by the time Canadians started to vote: none of the major parties had released a platform. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Carney, who was greatly involved in writing the platform and made changes until the last moment, had wanted to release it the morning of the French-language debate. But the Liberals had gotten word the Conservatives wanted to wait to see their numbers before releasing their own, so they waited. On April 19, the Liberals finally released their costed platform: 'Canada Strong, Mark Carney's plan to unite, secure, protect and build.' (Carney polled ahead of the Liberal brand.) It booked a lot of spending: $129 billion over four years. There were few details on savings the Liberals would find, as Carney tried to tell Canadians that the government would be spending less and investing more. It sounded a lot like Trudeau in 2015 — but Carney was a highly regarded economist, so perhaps voters would give him a pass. Liberal Leader Mark Carney at the release of his party's election platform in Whitby, Ont., on April 19. Christinne Muschi/ The Canadian Press The Conservatives, now under pressure, released their numbers after the advance polls had closed. They also booked a lot of spending: $154 billion over four years. But by using a different accounting method — including the revenue from the projected economic impact of government spending — Poilievre was projecting much smaller deficits. Few seemed to care. Standing before his candidates in an empty hall in Woodbridge, Ont., Poilievre also didn't appear to care. The morning he released the platform that he and his party had worked on for a year and a half, he was more interested in discussing a report from an obscure government branch known as Policy Horizons. Poilievre mischaracterized the report to suggest the government was predicting a future where upward mobility was unheard of, where owning a home was an unrealistic goal, and where people needed to hunt, fish and forage on public lands to feed themselves. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW While the Conservatives had shifted their communications strategy to appeal to older voters by removing Poilievre's name and image from a campaign ad featuring golfers, the leader now appeared to be pandering to a narrower base by flirting with conspiracy theories. For three days, Poilievre talked about the report — much to the bewilderment of many on his campaign staff. It was a strange move for Poilievre, who is described as a 'workaholic' and a micromanager 'who reviews basically everything that goes out personally,' and is known to message employees at 2 a.m. with policy questions, speech suggestions or even requests to change the font colour on digital products. Some Conservatives concluded he was no longer running to win the election, and was only trying to maintain his grip on the leadership of his party. By then, the Liberals and the Conservatives knew how many of their identified supporters had voted in the advance polls. The Liberals felt confident. The polling had not significantly changed, and it looked — to everyone — like they were going to win again. But some felt a majority government was not a lock. Conservative support was growing in some quarters, and the Liberal field team worried about tight numbers in Ontario. Poilievre's base was motivated, and was expected to show up and vote. The Liberals weren't sure if many of the new ridings that appeared to be in play had the ground game required to turn out their vote. In places like Victoria, they had twice thought they could pull it off and had come up short. Would the same thing happen again? 'Do you trust your ground game … in those ridings that don't have as much of a history of, you know, executing really good local campaigns?' asked one organizer. 'It's not a slight against the locals, but it's not like a battleground GTA riding that's used to very competitive and sophisticated campaigns.' ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW This would prove to be an interesting observation one week later. For now, though, Trump had receded from the news cycle, and voters were turning their attention back to affordability concerns, crime and safety. Carney was starting to sound a little stale. The Conservatives were slowly increasing their support. Ground game Do you trust your ground game … in those ridings that don't have as much of a history of, you know, executing really good local campaigns? The Liberals, who had plotted out a few paths to victory — a repeat of the 2015 campaign, or if they lost ground in the GTA, different options that focused on pickups in B.C., including Vancouver Island, more in seats in Quebec, and in the Prairies — were now deciding where to shift resources. They based those decisions on information gleaned from nearly daily focus groups, phone polls and riding surveys, by aggregating existing public data, by factoring in anecdotal feedback from the field and weighing how well their fundraising was going, and by absorbing all the voter identifications from candidates knocking on doors across the country. The result was a rating for each riding on a sliding scale: diamond, platinum, gold, silver, bronze, steel or wood. Where a riding stood on that scale usually determined which resources — if any — would be allocated there. They were paying particular attention to one riding — as were the Conservatives, who had realized that Poilievre might actually be in trouble in Carleton, which he'd represented in Parliament for more than 20 years. They rounded up party staff and called for volunteers to knock on doors there. So did the Liberals. Bruce Fanjoy, Liberal Party of Canada candidate for Carleton, right, ran against Poilievre and ultimately won. Spencer Colby/ The Canadian Press Their local candidate, Bruce Fanjoy, had been pounding the pavement in the riding for more than two years, but his campaign really gained momentum after Carney became leader. 'I'm 60 years old. I've never voted anything but Conservative,' a man named Bob Neske told the Star outside a Liberal rally in Nepean, Ont., on April 20. 'I am actually out canvassing for … the Liberal guy to try to get Pierre Poilievre out of politics because I think he's a horrible leader.' The number of people identifying as Liberal voters in the riding had jumped. Fanjoy's fundraising numbers were impressive, and a phone poll of the riding suggested he actually had a shot at unseating Poilievre. Jamie Kippen, the Liberals' deputy campaign manager for national field, sent more than 20 staff members to the riding. 'Most ridings get one. A riding we are really targeting gets two or three central staff,' explained a field organizer. 'Kippen threw everything including the kitchen sink at that riding.' Up Next Read Part 3: The last days on the trail, the election night surprises — and what comes next for both leaders. Star Exclusive: Part 1 Analysis Trudeau was done, Carney was new, but Poilievre made a critical mistake. Here's how the Conservative's set themselves up to fail Althia Raj Star Exclusive: Part 3 Analysis We talked to 106 political insiders. Here's why Pierre Poilievre lost his seat and Mark Carney couldn't land a majority in Canada's surprising election Althia Raj Politics Headlines Newsletter Get the latest news and unmatched insights in your inbox every evening Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. Please enter a valid email address. Sign Up Yes, I'd also like to receive customized content suggestions and promotional messages from the Star. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Politics Headlines Newsletter You're signed up! You'll start getting Politics Headlines in your inbox soon. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page.
Vancouver Sun
9 hours ago
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
Farce in legislature as B.C. Conservatives seek a provincial election over a blurred Zoom call
VICTORIA — The legislature descended briefly into farce this week in a dispute over a cabinet minister who blurred the background behind him while voting online on a key piece of legislation. Opposition leader John Rustad argued that 'blurgate' — as one of the New Democrats called it — was serious enough to have led to the defeat of the NDP government. The alleged infraction happened Wednesday night, as the New Democrats pushed through Bills 14 and 15, increasing the cabinet's power to fast-track approvals for energy projects and infrastructure. Several New Democrats exercised the option of casting their votes using the Zoom online platform. One who did so was Rick Glumac, the junior minister of state for trade and NDP MLA for Port Moody-Burquitlam. A daily roundup of Opinion pieces from the Sun and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Informed Opinion will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. When Glumac voted in support of Bill 14 shortly after 7 p.m., he did so with a blurred background. When he voted on Bill 15 an hour later, he'd abandoned the blurring and changed to a clear background. The B.C. Conservatives pounced on the distinction, arguing that the blurring violated the guidelines for voting by Zoom issued by Speaker Raj Chouhan himself. 'A quiet, private location with good lighting should be selected,' said MLA Peter Milobar, quoting from the rule book. 'The backdrop must be neutral, free of political or partisan images or slogans. Zoom virtual backgrounds must not be applied. 'The only way to have a blurred background is by electronic means, which would be virtual,' Milobar continued. 'That is the only possible way the technology happens, for the minister of state for trade to have a blurred background on one vote and an hour later a clear background.' Then the Opposition pitch to Speaker Chouhan: 'We would ask for a reconsideration, based on the Speaker's own rules, that the minister of state for trade was not eligible to have his vote cast on Bill 14.' If Glumac's participation were disallowed, Bill 14 would have been defeated 46 votes to 45. The Speaker had already ruled that there was no specific rule against use of a blurred background. Now, pressed by the Conservatives, he did so explicitly a second time. 'The chair has already ruled on this issue earlier,' Chouhan advised the house. 'The chair does not consider a blurred background to be a virtual background.' The Conservatives protested angrily, whereupon the Speaker reminded the house: 'Members, no argument with the chair.' He was citing a rule adopted after the Solidarity protests against the 1980s Social Credit government. Those protests spilled over into the chamber and the house was paralyzed by constant challenges to the chair. Under the new rules adopted 40 years ago, challenges were no longer allowed: 'The Speaker delivers rulings through a statement to the house and the matter is no longer open for debate or discussion.' Following the current Speaker's warning, the Conservatives stormed out in protest. As they left, one of their number, Kelowna Mission MLA Gavin Dew, snarled an insult, which the Speaker took as a direct attack. 'The member for Kelowna-Mission has left by making a very disparaging remark to the chair,' ruled Chouhan. 'He will not be allowed to return to the chamber until he comes back and apologizes.' A half-hour later, Dew obtained permission to return and said, 'I made an inappropriate remark, and I withdraw.' Though not strictly an apology, it was sufficient for a Speaker determined to lower the temperature in the room. 'Thank you, member, you now have permission to sit,' said Chouhan. 'But I remind all members, you can disagree with each other but never question the chair's ruling (and) never be disrespectful to the chair.' The matter should have ended there, with the Conservatives cooling down and the house winding down for the night. But, next day, Rustad escalated the attack on Chouhan. 'He has seriously shaken our confidence in his ability to carry on with that job,' the Conservative leader told reporters. 'There is no mechanism that we can do, unfortunately, to be able to voice that displeasure in the confidence we have with the Speaker.' Yet with the house not scheduled to sit again until October, Opposition tempers should have cooled by then. NDP house leader Mike Farnworth dismissed the notion that the NDP could have fallen on the issue. There's a recognition in B.C. that governments aren't defeated by accident and the government always has the option of scheduling an explicit confidence motion to clarify the support of the house. The blurring was an 'accidental technicality,' argued Farnworth, not evidence that the minister was gallivanting where he had no business to be. 'He was clearly in a room in a house. 'Blurring is not a virtual background,' continued Farnworth. 'Maybe a member of the Opposition, sitting on a beach with half a coconut, with an umbrella in it and palm trees — that would be a virtual background.' That left only the hapless Glumac. He's toiled mostly in obscurity through his eight years in the legislature. After this week, he risks being remembered mainly as 'the blurred guy' at the centre of a ridiculous standoff. vpalmer@
