Try as They Might, Conservatives Will Have Trouble Escaping Trump

By the close of the first week of the forty-fifth federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s rhetorical shimmy shake was well practised. The quips, carefully written, had been frequently used. The lost Liberal decade. A new Conservative government that will put Canada first for a change. A big bring-it-home tax cut.

The Conservative Party spent the last years of the Justin Trudeau government honing this appeal to change, affordability, and ambition. It had targeted a strange alliance of young men who listened to crypto podcasts, growing families priced out of the suburbs, anti-vaxxers who feared a one-world government, and working-class people more interested in work than collecting employment insurance. It was an incredibly useful alliance that, on paper, was enough to deliver Poilievre the election. These voters had been told incessantly that a vote for Poilievre was risky, dangerous, and counter to their values, and they were clearly fed up with hearing it.

Poilievre and his right-hand woman, Jenni Byrne, had designed his campaign to continue talking past Trudeau’s increasingly dire warnings about the dangers of the Conservative Party. He would speak directly to affordability, frustration, and the feeling that a decade of Liberal rule had slid the country backward. But he would also throw out plenty of symbols for the various constituencies behind his movement. For those who spent their time listening to The Joe Rogan Experience, he fought against Health Canada’s plans to regulate untested and unproven supplements and vitamins. To impress those who supported the Freedom Convoy, he opposed vaccine mandates. To win over conspiracy theorists, he railed against the World Economic Forum and declared, “We WON’T eat bugs.” He worked to impress crypto traders and anti-vaxxers, even if it made him look strange and unfamiliar to those who don’t spend their days online.

It was not a campaign designed to adapt to changing circumstances, because nobody could conceive of circumstances changing. When circumstances did change, the campaign’s leaders told themselves that Canada’s fundamental weaknesses had not changed; therefore, they didn’t need to change either.

It was only after Donald Trump’s inauguration and his sudden halt to global trade that the Conservatives began to consider a change in course, albeit a tiny one. When Trump promised automotive tariffs, Poilievre tried a performative tough-guy routine while touring a factory in Quebec. “Knock it off!” he exclaimed. When Trump said some nice things about Carney, Poilievre tried to spin it as an endorsement, suggesting that the Liberal Party and the Republican Party were cut from the same cloth. He would even tack toward fatalism, suggesting that Trump is impossible to control.

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These different tones made Poilievre a pathetic figure. Nobody bought him as a tough negotiator. Nobody believed Carney and Trump shared much at all. Nobody was much inspired by being told that a Canadian prime minister was just another suit, powerless against Trump. And perhaps it would have been more convincing if it hadn’t been so loosely and belatedly improvised.

It has been suggested that Poilievre’s predicament was unpredictable. That Trump’s return to office and his wrecking-ball routine were so unexpected that Poilievre and his team couldn’t have seen it coming. On the contrary, they had been warned about this for years, and they refused to wrestle with it. For years, I asked them, “What do you do if Trump wins?” The response was always some iteration of a shrug and a hope that things would work out all right in the end. Nobody, their thinking went, is going to conflate Poilievre and Trump. Everybody, I retorted, is going to conflate Poilievre and Trump.

It was no ordinary Wednesday when Trump sauntered to a podium in the White House Rose Garden. It was April 2 or, as President All-Caps had promised for weeks, “LIBERATION DAY.”

Trump was passed a giant cardboard prop. It was a list of countries—including Vietnam, Taiwan, and Switzerland—and the estimated tariffs and non-trade barriers they imposed on America. Highlighted in yellow was the new economic reality imposed on those states: a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam, 32 percent on Taiwan, and 31 percent on Switzerland. It would emerge later that these numbers were conjured up by a mix of guesswork and ChatGPT.

There was rampant confusion about the nature of the tariffs—they seemed to beguile even the White House. None of them hit Canada—Trump had already visited our aluminum, steel, and automotive sectors with sweeping duties. But Liberation Day made clear just how far Trump was prepared to go.

I watched Trump’s wild theatrics from a hotel room in Kingston, where I was nipping at the heels of the Poilievre campaign bus.

Just a few hours earlier, Poilievre had started the day in Toronto, outlining his counter-tariff plan. “Canadians feel angry and betrayed and anxious,” he said. “After the president’s unprovoked attacks on our sovereignty, we’re left wondering how we can end the paralyzing uncertainty and what the future holds.”

It felt like the nucleus of a message: the opening lines of a Conservative pivot to meet the moment. Poilievre had opted to deliver his remarks in a Bay Street ballroom, joined by a bevy of known Conservative names: Ontario Treasury Board president Carolyn Mulroney and Stephen Harper–era foreign minister John Baird among them. Gone were Poilievre’s folksy “boots not suits” sloganeering and his contrived human backdrops. Poilievre was here to portray himself as a statesman capable of managing economic calamity, a leader able to allay concerns, and a politician who knew when to drop the bluster.

But the specifics of what he was promising weren’t quite so serious. A temporary loan program for businesses to keep employees on payroll, even as customer orders dried up. A promise to renegotiate a whole new trade deal with America and to take all the extra revenue generated by that increased trade and blow it into rebuilding the Canadian military. He rattled off a series of “red lines” that he would never cross to appease Trump, including Quebec’s sacred supply management policies, access to fresh water, and the automotive industry. “We will protect our sovereignty, our laws, our currency, our dollar, our land, our waters, our sky, our culture, our official languages, our resources and Indigenous rights will not be under the control of any other country,” he said.

This bit of delusional optimism and the limp set of promises barely registered. It was an interesting illustration of Poilievre’s untenable position. He was slow to pivot to the threat posed by the Americans. When he finally did, his plan was meeker and his rhetoric duller than that of the Liberals. In trying to keep together his disintegrating coalition of farmers, francophones, union workers, and youth, he’d painted himself into a corner.

It got worse in the short question-and-answer period. One reporter asked Poilievre about his plan to cut funding to any post-secondary institution deemed “woke.” Canada, said the leader, should be earmarking money for research on diseases, not giving money to universities to push “radical political ideologies.” It was lost on no one that Trump and his quack health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., were promising similar policies and were already wielding the weight of the federal government to punish and defund prestigious institutions like Harvard and Columbia. The rabidly ideological White House was toxifying Poilievre’s talking points in real time.

Throughout the campaign, the Liberals would only gingerly approach the question of Poilievre’s ties—ideological, rhetorical, personal, and formal—to Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Where Trudeau’s Liberal Party would have hammered the notion incessantly, Carney’s Liberals were more restrained. The public was already noticing the links, subtle and overt, between Poilievre and Trump. They were already registering the discomfort with which the Conservatives were approaching the trade war. They had long seen the headlines about Poilievre’s love for the Freedom Convoy and his habit of echoing conspiracist talking points.

Poilievre’s apparent strategic pivot to Canada’s existential threat barely lasted the day. Trump and his tariffs would go back to being a minor aspect of the Conservative campaign. Poilievre returned to the old talking points—the ones that Canadians had heard before.

Mark Carney, personally, understood the moment.

A day after he stood at a podium outside Rideau Hall to call the election, he stepped off a plane into the sideways sleet coming down in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, and struck a powerful bit of symbolism. It was in Gander that scores of American passengers had landed on September 11, 2001, after planes slammed into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania. Carney’s press team took a video of his arrival at the Gander airport and overlaid it with sepia tones, as though it was shot on a digital camcorder. They spliced it into twenty-four-year-old footage of those terrified Americans landing and being greeted by hordes of friendly islanders.

In Gander, Carney met Beulah Cooper and Diane Davis, two locals who opened their homes to travellers on 9/11; they inspired characters in the Broadway hit Come from Away. While the two women epitomize the good-natured, welcoming aspect of our culture—the hospitality innate to Canadian identity—less often discussed is that Canada volunteered to accept the risk of having possibly hijacked planes at our airports. We did not know, as they approached, whether any of those planes might have terrorists on board or whether any were rigged to explode. We accepted the risk because our solidarity with America was automatic and absolute. It was inconceivable that we would deny those planes a place to land.

Of course, America would never care as much about our contribution on that day as we do. Nor would it necessarily be moved to tears by the enormous scale of the Canadian contribution to the mission in Afghanistan. Nor would it be expected to remember the depth of Canadian bravery in the two world wars or in Korea. But I think every Canadian expected that, when reminded of that century of collaboration and sacrifice, Americans would stand up and reject the man who threatened our nation like a mafioso. They didn’t, they still haven’t, and that stings.

Throughout the campaign, Carney took to repeating a handful of lines in just about every speech. He used this one almost every day: “We are over the shock of the American betrayal. But we should never forget the lessons.”

The thing is, I don’t think Canadians were over the shock. I don’t think they are now.

Carney dove into more tangible matters in the following days, visiting steel mills, auto plants, and aerospace factories. Canadians were clearly anxious and motivated, and Carney was capitalizing on that mood. It accounts for the unprecedented twenty-point swing in his direction, vaulting the Liberals from a distant second to first, in the weeks before the campaign began. The data from the first days of the campaign reinforced that trend.

But this sudden national solidarity and enthusiasm for the new Liberal leader papered over a massive crack in the foundation of Carney’s project. Carney was vowing to marshal all the power of the state to counter this existential threat and to get us rowing in unison. The trouble was, and is, that a huge number of Canadians had come to believe that the state was broken. From health care to immigration, government services had become unreliable and overburdened. Private sector insolvencies and mortgage foreclosures were increasing. High home prices and rents were siphoning take-home pay, pushing businesses to close, generating tent cities, and spurring crime of all kinds. A deadly drug epidemic, which Trump himself had become vocal about, turned whole neighbourhoods into hellscapes. Given all that, Canadians wondered how we could fight a trade war when we could barely stand.

By the third week of the campaign, however, a new binary became fairly obvious: one guy wanted to engage with the world and the other guy didn’t. Carney peppered his daily remarks with language about the need to find new trading partners, to consider new security arrangements, and to care about the world again. “As America retreats from the world,” Carney’s stump speech proclaimed, “Canada will lead it.” It remained to be seen how, exactly, he would do that and whether we had the capacity to turn ambition into reality, but it was a start.

Poilievre’s strategy was to create a coalition of voters who would stay under the Conservative tent and show up to vote. To keep his uneasy assembly of voters together, he hooked them into a shared information ecosystem that continually reinforced their decision to join Team Poilievre. The alternative influencers, in turn, would bask in the attention of the probable next prime minister of Canada. It became a symbiotic relationship.

On the campaign trail, Poilievre would insist that any comparison between his party and Trump’s cult-like movement was offensive and baseless. But on many fronts, whether in terms of their love for anti-globalist conspiracy theories or the overlapping strategies on how to weaponize a loyal media, both parties had a lot in common.

And Canadians noticed.

Adapted from The 51st State Votes: Canada Versus Donald Trump. Copyright © 2025 Justin Ling. Reprinted by permission of Sutherland House Books.