Politicians say every election is the fight of our lives. This time, it is

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Expect to hear about the high stakes. The cliché politicians peddle in nearly every election campaign is that it will be the fight of our lives. Often, it’s more the fight of their lives than a clash of ages for Canadians.

This time, Canadians are already in a fighting mood. They’ve booed the U.S. anthem and cheered boycotts. They’re fretting over the stakes.

A trade war might cost Canada 100,000 jobs this year and upend the economy for longer. U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened Canada’s sovereignty and undermined the Western world’s alliances. There’s a big issue before voters, with concrete consequences for their livelihoods and their country.

This campaign had better be the fight of our lives.

We should expect leaders to wrestle over who can live up to the moment.

“A great fight needs strong and roughly equal antagonists,” the late Liberal strategist John Duffy wrote in his lively 2002 history of federal election campaigns, Fights of Our Lives.

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Those ingredients seem to be there. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Leader Mark Carney are roughly at parity in polls. Mr. Poilievre is a killer political pugilist who honed plain-folks messaging over a lifetime in electoral politics; Mr. Carney, a globally known technocrat who marshalled more than one financial system through crisis.

They will face challenges from other party leaders trying to lay claim to a spot in a who-can-save-Canada campaign, such as the Bloc Québécois’s Yves-François Blanchet and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who could be squeezed out of the main debate or land a sideswipe on the contenders.

It was evident in the first moments Sunday that Mr. Carney is eager to focus on the issue of handling Mr. Trump’s threats to Canada, while Mr. Poilievre wants to amalgamate that issue with the time-for-change and high-cost-of-living themes that had him ahead in polls till a month ago.

Mr. Carney insisted he entered electoral politics because the country needed to take action. “We needed to act to fix our economy. We needed to act to fight the Americans. We needed to act to fight Donald Trump’s tariffs.”

Mr. Poilievre stood in front of a podium with a new, hybrid slogan – Canada First For a Change – and issued reminders that the Liberals are asking for a fourth term in power. Mr. Trump, he said, has “been very blunt that he wants a weak Canada that he can target, and Liberals, after a lost Liberal decade, have made our economy and our country weaker and more divided, just like Trump wanted.”

Pierre Poilievre kicks off Conservative election campaign under shadow of Trump’s trade war

The last time a prime minister went to Rideau Hall to trigger an election campaign, Justin Trudeau walked out to speak to reporters, took off his mask, spoke first about the Taliban takeover of Kabul, then talked about the 17 previous months of the pandemic.

If that seems like an eon ago, just try to recall the big issues of the 2021 election campaign. Mr. Trudeau insisted then that the choices would “define the future your kids and grandkids grow up in.” But neither he nor Conservative leader Erin O’Toole could define those choices clearly for voters. The campaign devolved into vaccine-mandate wedge politics and niche issues. Voters cast ballots much as they had two years prior.

Now there’s the kind of central issue not seen since 1988, when Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney ran on a free-trade agreement with the United States that the Liberals under John Turner pledged to blame for “every sparrow that falls.”

“Historically, the ballot question is often a source of debate. Liberals will try to force an issue, they’ll say this is about climate and child care, and Conservatives will try to say, ‘No, this election is about competitiveness and crime,’ " said former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore.

“Voters have made it crystal, crystal clear that the next four years and the threat that Donald Trump poses to our economic sovereignty, and perhaps our physical sovereignty, is the number one issue of the country.”

It’s not yet clear how wide a difference the leaders will offer.

Jagmeet Singh says NDP is best positioned to champion Canadians through trade war

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Mr. Carney has sought to mute the criticisms Liberals suffered under his predecessor and lean into his stature and experience as an economic technocrat. It is Mr. Poilievre who has hinted he will offer a bolder model with “massive” tax cuts and broad environmental deregulation to spur resource development.

The Liberal Leader moved so quickly away from Mr. Trudeau, and to the centre, that Conservatives post social-media complaints that he’s stealing their policies.

For more than a year, Mr. Poilievre has repeated a four-part mantra: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime. On March 14, Mr. Carney killed the consumer carbon tax. On March 20, he promised to eliminate the GST for some first-time homebuyers, as Mr. Poilievre did last year. The Liberal Leader is halfway through his opponent’s slogans, trying to blunt Conservative attacks in a bid to focus the campaign on his perceived ability to manage Mr. Trump’s threats.

On Sunday, Mr. Carney promised a middle-class tax cut that he said could save a two-income family as much as $825 a year.

But if Mr. Poilievre lives up to his own rhetoric, a bigger divide will come. He has talked about massive, game-changing tax cuts. The Liberal Leader would use the proceeds of Canada’s retaliatory tariffs for programs to aid affected workers; Mr. Poilievre has said he would put that money into tax cuts.

That opens the possibility of marrying a trade-war response with the still-bubbling frustrations about the cost of living and economic prospects, especially among men under 40, that pushed Mr. Poilievre into a commanding lead – before Mr. Trump came back and Mr. Carney came along.

Mr. Poilievre will argue that tax cuts can stimulate an economy threatened by a trade-war recession – and can do it fast – but just how bold he will be depends on his willingness to propose budget deficits after years of criticizing them. Mr. Moore thinks it would be a winning idea: “The tax side is in my view the secret weapon we have not deployed yet.”

There are broader questions about their prognosis that Canadians should hope to hear their leaders address – if the campaign doesn’t descend into a flag-waving contest. Is it worth doing any deal with the unreliable Mr. Trump? Do they expect this trade war to last four months or four years or 40? How far can Canada go to rewire its economy away from the U.S.? Will the U.S. remain an ally?

And the supposedly crisp, clear ballot questions about Canada-U.S. relations still leave room for twists. The free-trade election that Mr. Mulroney won decisively in 1988 followed a roller-coaster campaign that raised many similar questions about Canada’s prosperity and sovereignty – and two weeks before voting day, it was Mr. Turner’s to lose. This one is shaping up as the fight of our lives.