Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during a news conference in Toronto on March 7. Ads for the Conservatives are inescapable on radio, television and online – the party spent at least $130,000 on Facebook ads alone between Feb. 28 and March 3.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre heads to London, Ont., on Sunday for a rally just hours before the Liberals elect their new leader.
It’s in battleground regions such as Southwestern Ontario where the Conservatives need to pick up seats to win government, a victory that this past fall seemed all but certain until a series of political dominoes fell over and created a whole new political game.
When Mr. Poilievre won leadership in the fall of 2022, the minority Liberals were propped up by the New Democrats and the next election was set for this October. For the first two years of his leadership, Mr. Poilievre drove the party to a double-digit lead over the Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
That all began to unravel in September. The Liberal-NDP deal was ripped up. Liberal MPs began agitating for Mr. Trudeau to quit. Chrystia Freeland, the Finance Minister, quit her post. Then, Mr. Trudeau declared his intention to resign, proroguing Parliament and in turn began the race to replace him.
Now, should front-runner Mark Carney be victorious on Sunday, an election call is expected by midmonth.
The campaign will take place against the backdrop of the trade war with the United States and polling that shows a bounce for the incumbent Liberals.
How the Conservatives will strategically navigate it all is how political parties always must grapple with things, said Garry Keller, a long-time Conservative strategist who is a vice-president at StrategyCorp.
“As political parties, when you’re working in a war room or working on a campaign, you deal with what you can control,” he said.
That’s why in the past week Conservatives began starting up their campaign war room, bringing in operatives and strategists to start laying the groundwork on day-to-day election plans and messaging.
And it’s also why ads for the Conservatives are inescapable on radio, television and online – the party spent at least $130,000 on Facebook ads alone between Feb. 28 and March 3. More ads are coming. The party raised $41-million raised in 2024, and will race to spend as much as they can before election spending limits kick in.
“The Conservative Party will be ready for whenever the election is called with a full bank account and a full slate of candidates,” said party spokesperson Sarah Fischer in an e-mail.
The Liberal race – along with Mr. Trump – has sucked up a lot of political oxygen. The tariff war in particular has seen the Conservative message often pushed aside for coverage of the power brokers of the day.
But the end of the leadership contest brings the next election into sharper focus, said Mr. Keller.
“It becomes a very clear binary choice for undecided voters, and I think in some ways, the Conservatives will welcome that, because it becomes very clear to the public what is being offered.”
With that battle expected to be with Mr. Carney, Conservative operatives have worked to amass research on him to deploy over the course of a general campaign as they seek to undercut Mr. Carney’s narrative of being a capable economic steward during difficult times.
One piece surfaced during the leadership race – documents showing Mr. Carney, in his capacity as chair of the board of Brookfield Asset Management, presided over that company’s decision to move its headquarters from Toronto to New York.
Mr. Carney had claimed otherwise after the leadership debate, but the next morning, the Conservatives popped up with a paper trail to say otherwise.
Mr. Carney’s campaign chalked the episode up to Mr. Poilievre being afraid of him.
That Mr. Carney can’t be trusted to do that will be a part of Mr. Poilievre’s message. Even as Mr. Carney is making promises similar to Mr. Poilievre’s – the end of the consumer carbon price and a rollback of capital gains changes – Mr. Poilievre will make the case that Canadians can’t believe he’ll follow through.
Another key message: Mr. Carney isn’t a change.
“After three terms in office and 10 years of making Canada weak, the Carney Trudeau Liberals want us to give them a fourth kick at the can. Sorry, three strikes and you are out,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters at a news conference on Friday.
“We need someone else to hit the ball, and we need to take back control of our economic destiny.”
To that, Mr. Carney is planning to answer: That person, at this time, is not Mr. Poilievre.
Joseph Lavoie, a partner at Crestview Strategy, recently watched 65 of Mr. Poilievre’s speeches over a two-year period to analyze his communications strategy.
He said he took away was the themes of Mr. Poilievre’s core messages on the economy, affordability and public safety are flexible enough to adapt – even with a new Liberal leader and in the Trump tariff era.
“Core to the themes that Pierre Poilievre has focused on since he launched his leadership is the concept of self-resilience and making Canada stronger. On a fundamental level, the values driving that focus have not changed in the face of Trump’s tariffs,” said Mr. Lavoie, who worked for the last Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper.
As Canadians have rallied around the flag in the wake of those tariffs, Mr. Poilievre has too, reframing his message under the banner of “Canada First,” Mr. Lavoie noted – it just might take a couple of weeks for voters to connect those dots.
“As he starts to fill in the colours of his refreshed outline, I suspect he will recapture some of the swing voters who may have had a temporary reaction to the tariff issue.”