In January, Canadian pollsters and political pundits struggled to find fresh ways to describe the bleak prospects of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party, musing whether it would be a wipeout of existential proportions, or merely a catastrophic blowout.
But fresh polling released by three companies this week shows a stunning reversal of fortunes for the party: newly minted prime minister Mark Carney’s Liberals are projected to secure a majority government.
The outcome has little precedent in Canadian history, reflecting the outsized role played by an unpredictable US president, and it underscores the incentives for Carney to call a snap election in the coming days.
On Tuesday, the political analyst Philippe Fournier updated his closely watched website 338Canada, which tracks and aggregates national polls, converting those figures into projected election results.
For the first time, his projection showed the Liberals with a 55% chance of a majority government. In January, the odds stood at less than 1%.
For the last two years, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has used a controversial carbon levy and Trudeau, a deeply unpopular outgoing prime minister, to propel his Tories to what promised to be one of the most lopsided political wins in recent memory. Pollsters predicted his party would seize a commanding majority of seats. For more than a year and a half, the Conservatives’ win probabilities stood at more than 99%.
As recently as January, for example, the most sympathetic polling firm had Trudeau’s party trailing the Conservatives by 20 points. Others had the gap as high as 27 points.
But Justin Trudeau’s resignation days later, and Donald Trump’s threats to take over Canada, changed everything.
In a recent column for the Walrus magazine on the “stunning Conservative collapse”, Fournier warned the Tories, whose odds of winning stood at 15%, were “suddenly at risk of blowing one of the largest polling leads in modern Canadian history”.
Virtually all Canadian polling companies have shown a sharp trend towards the Liberals, at the expense of the Conservative party and the leftwing New Democratic party. If current polling predictions are reflected in the results of the upcoming federal election, the NDP would collapse and lose party status in the House of Commons.
“This shift would be among the biggest we’ve seen in such a short period of time in Canadian history,” said Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the Writ. Unlike other notable shifts in public sentiment, he says, the result is heavily skewed by threats from Donald Trump.
“It isn’t just a question of a leadership honeymoon … But that adds a level of volatility to the public opinion environment that makes things unpredictable.”
For Poilievre, who had harnessed a populist current in the country and drawn comparisons with Trump, the avenues forward are less clear after losing the easy political targets of Trudeau and the carbon tax.
While the Conservative leader’s combative politics have served him well as opposition leader, that same strategy appear to be faltering as nationalism supplants partisanship.
Poilievre this week held an event with an “Axe the Tax” sign – days after Carney had dismantled the consumer-facing carbon tax.
The political columnist Robyn Urback posted on social media that the Conservatives “are still waging the election campaign they never got to have”.
In more grim data points for the Tories, polling from the Angus Reid Institute released on Monday found Canadians preferred Carney over Poilievre on all questions relating to the ongoing trade war and the future of Canada’s economy.
“More bluntly, 41% now view Carney as best suited to be prime minister compared to 29% for Poilievre,” the company said in its new release. “At least measurement, with Trudeau sitting in the PM chair, Poilievre led the Liberal leader by 19 points on this question.”
If the polling holds, “what was a tired, discardable brand just three months ago would be on its way to a fourth term, this time with a majority”.
The firm notes the profound effect Donald Trump has had on Canadian politics. After staring down a US-led trade war and giving impassioned speeches about the need to fight for Canada’s independence, Trudeau left with the approval of 47% of Canadians – a 25-point jump compared with an all-time low of 22% just weeks before he announced his resignation.
