2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Susan Delacourt)
Welcome to Election 2025 and the weekly campaign edition of On The Contrary, in which Susan Delacourt and Matt Gurney will be tracking the race by focusing on the five people who have made things interesting or game-changing. Susan Delacourt : Already, we have an election that isn’t exactly unrolling as we expected not so long ago. This week, we had lots of surprises.
So I’ll start with the first, and obvious name. U.S.
President Donald Trump Donald Trump: Anytime this president starts meddling in this country’s politics, it’s bad news, But I guess we’re coming around to the idea that Trump’s auto-tariff bombshell on Wednesday is turning out to be good for Liberal Leader Mark Carney and bad for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Is it that simple or clear-cut, Matt? Matt Gurney : I’m sorry to offer an unsatisfactory answer, but it’s too soon to say. I will absolutely grant that to date, Trump has been bad for Poilievre and the Conservatives.
The only time the CPC leader sounds like a Liberal, I told a Tory friend, is when he haltingly and awkwardly tries to criticize Trump. Voters can see that. They can also see that Carney has no such problems! So Trump has been bad news, across the board, for the Conservatives.
But — this is my only point of hesitation — ships turn slowly, right? The Conservative ship is turning. I noticed it over a week ago. It really has sped up this week.
They’re trying to pivot their campaign. I don’t know if they’ll stick with it or how hard they’ll try, but they are clearly changing course. We’ll see if it works.
Kory Teneycke, left. Now, my name for you. And a surprising one.
Kory Teneycke. SD : Oh, this was to me the bombshell story of the week . The guy who headed up Doug Ford’s successful election campaigns finally laid bare the deep rift between Ontario and Poilievre conservatives, in devastating fashion.
In one fell swoop, damning the Conservative campaign as tone-deaf and flailing, Teneycke gave us the story for why Trump is such bad news for Poilievre, why we’re seeing Carney climbing in the polls, and why we have a race we didn’t expect. You know, Liberals could have spent the entire campaign calling Poilievre “too Trumpy,” as Teneycke did, and it probably wouldn’t have moved the polls. Coming from a Conservative, whoa.
MG : It was definitely the stunner of the week, yeah. I don’t think it’ll move voters, so I might disagree with you on the electoral importance. But I took it as a huge signal of two things: first, the long-simmering split in Canadian conservatism is now boiling over in public view, and, second, Ford et al have written Poilievre off.
They may rue that. These guys don’t have a perfect track record of avoiding walking into dumb messes. But, still.
Yeah. That’s a signal. Nathalie Provost SD: Next name.
Nathalie Provost. When Carney mispronounced the name of his own Liberal candidate in Montreal and mistakenly said she was a survivor of gun violence at Concordia, not L’Ecole Polytechnique, he threw himself wide open to something else that’s simmering out there — doubts about whether Carney gets Quebec , or whether he really gets women and women’s issues. Like the Teneycke intervention, this moment was powerful because of all the threads it was gathering together.
Trump may have helped get this out of the news cycle for now, but Carney can’t afford any more mistakes on this score, in my view. MG : Hmmm. Interesting.
This wouldn’t have made my list, to be honest. I don’t reject your premise. It does indeed raise those issues.
Also speaks to his being a rookie. But this struck me as an internal gaffe. Something that’ll cause Liberals to wince and maybe even whisper a bit, but not likely to drive anyone from the red column into the blue, other blue or orange camps.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. SD : I’m going to leap here, out of order, to another woman who got into the campaign mix this week, again in unhelpful ways for Poilievre. I’m talking about Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who can’t seem to stop herself from being a provocateur in Canada-U.
S. relations . First there was her interview with Breitbart, in which she said Poilievre was “in sync” with Trump and then appeared to be asking for tariffs to be held off because they help the Liberals.
Smith said all the quiet parts out loud. Then she sauntered off to the U.S.
to talk to far-right commentator Ben Shapiro and babbled about the need for Canada to elect “solid allies” to Trump. I don’t know whether Poilievre talks to Smith often but I would imagine he might be saying to her: “Not helping.” Liberal Leader Mark Carney.
MG : It was pretty clear from rather defensive statements by Smith and her people this week that they were feeling the heat. Maybe just from the public criticism, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there were calls from inside the broader Conservative house, too. There’s one name I’m surprised has barely been mentioned.
Tell me how you think Mark Carney is doing. SD : That’s probably a good way to close this. Carney has had, on balance, a good week, in my view.
Certainly the Liberal leader has a lot working in his favour — the aforementioned Trump, as well as Teneycke and Smith. Trump even called Carney prime minister on Friday in his social-media post after the two leaders chatted and seemed to imply he would be working with him after the election. Last week, when we chatted here before the campaign launched, I said I was skeptical of the Liberal lead in the polls.
I still am — it feels to me that something that happens this quickly can disappear the same way. Carney didn’t have a perfect week, but he is looking increasingly prime ministerial and that’s a good thing for him right now. But again, this is just the first week.
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