Election 2025 Prognostications

 

Canada's Federal Election will be held on April 28th, 2025.

Until a couple of weeks ago, it seemed the Conservatives would win a majority.  Actions by the American administration have turned that on its head.

My plan is to update this blog twice.  Once around mid-April and again after the election results are in.

Polls vary widely, but indications at this point (March 28th) seem to indicate the Liberals winning a majority.  This article seems to be the most optimistic.  I haven't tried to find countering views.  As a former PM once said, "Dogs know what to do with poles".... (or polls, whatever).  So for what it's worth, this is one prognostication as of 2 days ago.

Read Canadian Poll Shocker for the full article.  Here is the very brief summary.

According to EKOS:

📊 Liberals: 50% popular support
🧌 Conservatives: 35%
🟠 NDP: 7%
🟢 Greens & Bloc: somewhere between “meh” and “microscopic”

Seat-wise? It’s an absolute obliteration:

🟥 Liberals: 251 seats
🟦 Conservatives: 90 seats
🟠 NDP: 12 seats
🟩 Bloc: 24
🌱 Greens: 1
🪦 Poilievre: zero charisma, zero seat, zero plan

This appeared in Social Media around April 16th....

By Scott Harradine

“Poilievre is beloved by his people. He has somewhere near 40 per cent of the electorate locked down. It’s just that that the other 60 per cent are finally getting a good look at him and it turns out a lot of them don’t like what they see.”

++++++++++

If Pierre Poilievre was a hockey player instead of a politician, he’d be a pest — the kind of guy you hate to play against but love to have on your team. He’d be Sean Avery or Brad Marchand: making life miserable for the other team’s best player while driving opposing fans up the wall. He would, in other words, be exactly what he is on the campaign trail: loved and loathed, irritating and inspiring, as polarizing as cilantro or blue cheese.

With just over two weeks to go in the campaign, Poilievre’s Conservatives are trailing in every major opinion poll. At the same time, Poilievre himself continues to draw large crowds to rallies from coast to coast. I was at one, in Brampton, last week. I can confirm his celebrity isn’t fake. Poilievre is a real star to his base.

For weeks now, there have been whispers in Conservative circles that all that visible enthusiasm must mean the polls are wrong somehow, that they are fake or biased, that Poilievre must be winning after all. But spend even a couple of days following the Conservative leader around and it becomes obvious that something much less nefarious is going on.

For weeks now, there have been whispers in Conservative circles that all that visible enthusiasm must mean the polls are wrong somehow, that they are fake or biased, that Poilievre must be winning after all. But spend even a couple of days following the Conservative leader around and it becomes obvious that something much less nefarious is going on.

The evidence is in the polling, and not just the national horse race numbers. Survey after survey has found that more voters dislike Poilievre than like him. The Conservative leader's net-negative favourability rating is minus 6 according to a recent poll by Abacus Data, and minus 26 according to Angus Reid.

Poilievre’s problem is that the very things his base loves about him seem to be the same ones turning the rest of the country off. Supporters adore the fact that he’s an unrepentant attack dog. They love that he’s spent years opening the Conservative tent up to the further fringes of the right. They cheer his sloganeering and his sneering and his general treatment of the news media as an infectious plague.

He isn’t Donald Trump. If anything, in attitude, philosophy and demeanour, he’s closer to Ted Cruz. But he has been happily surfing on the same waves that brought Trump to power a second time: rage over COVID lockdowns; rejection of “woke” ideology; a generalized hatred and disgust for the status quo. His base loves it. But a lot of other Canadians are looking at it, looking at him and looking south and thinking: "do we want to bring all that here?”

Against a deeply unpopular Justin Trudeau, having the Conservative base locked down would probably have been enough. Stephen Harper won a majority government in 2011 with less than 40 per cent of the national vote. But against Mark Carney, it’s been clear for months that he was going to need more.

The strange thing is, on the campaign trail, Poilievre genuinely doesn’t seem interested in attracting new voters. He is quite literally preaching to the converted, night after night. The crowd in Brampton Wednesday night wasn’t huge; organizers walled off the back of the venue at one point and there was still plenty of room to walk around. But it was big, and it tilted visibly toward the diehard fans.

In the parking lot before the event, a woman walked by a large pickup truck with three identical stickers on the back window. “Yeah, F**k Trudeau!,” she said, reading one. Inside, another woman was handing out copies of a newspaper dedicated to spreading COVID vaccine conspiracies. For a while, I stood in the pen near the door where Poilievre was set to appear. One man in front of me had scribbled “you can’t cancel all of us!” twice in blue ink on his white Poilievre hat. Across the aisle, a man wearing a Canadian flag cape was showing off a picture on his phone of a black F**K CARNEY flag. All around him, people were taking pictures of his phone with their own phones and cheering him on.

When Poilievre did appear, it wasn’t pandemonium, but there was a real surge. The Conservative leader grinned and shook hands. (That smile, always slightly forced, has been his one concession to change on this campaign. You can almost see the thought bubble above his head at every rally: “See! I’m not so mad.”) At one point, he stopped, turned around and posed for a picture with a woman wearing a sweater that read, in massive letters, “Do you believe the polls?”

I don’t know what Poilievre’s team thinks about the public polling. I have no idea what their own numbers are telling them. All I can say is that, from the outside, it looks like they don’t particularly care.

It might be that Poilievre would rather lose than change — that he sees himself more as Barry Goldwater than Ronald Reagan, the pure, doomed warrior who will pave the way for another’s victory down the road. It could also be that his team believes they still have time knock Carney down with a few more weeks of attacks and the Liberal party's own gaffes.

I don’t think that instinct is wrong, exactly. There are some signs the wheels are coming off the Liberal campaign. (Witness the party's clueless and arrogant "Stop the Steal" button prank in Ottawa.) But I also think there’s something stranger and more personal at play here.

Put simply, I’m not sure Poilievre has anything to pivot to. He can seem so artificial when he talks — with his quacking voice and his endless slogans. But I don’t think he is artificial. I just don’t think there’s anything else there. The affected persona Canadians have seen on the campaign trail isn’t just who he is, it’s all he is. He doesn’t have another side to show.

So, if Poilievre can't close the deal now, against a rank rookie politician in Mark Carney, it won't be because of Trump — not entirely, or even especially. It will be because too many Canadians looked at him — the real him, the one he's been showing off in all his rallies — and decided “That guy’s not for me.”

He destroyed Justin Trudeau. He eviscerated Jagmeet Singh. He should have walked to victory. Instead, he seems to be grinning his way, every day, closer and closer to defeat.

April 22nd, 2025 - Earth Day, and the CBC's Poll Tracker is saying this:

These are screenshots taken in the morning of April 22nd, 2025. Unfortunately, they are updated every day so a link to a website isn't what I'm looking for.

Only 7 days to go.