We’re a little over two weeks into the election campaign. Between a snap call and a brutal ice storm that knocked out my power and Wi-Fi for nearly a week, I had to step back, recalibrate, and take stock.
I’d been knee-deep in a federal bill tracker — a side project mapping how Canadian legislation actually serves (or fails) the public. That work will continue with weekly thread updates.
But for now, it’s time to shift gears. It’s election season. And it’s déjà vu all over again.
Not long ago, the Conservatives looked poised to cruise to a majority. Poll after poll showed them pulling ahead, while the Liberals floundered under low approval ratings and a mountain of broken promises.
Then came the U.S. election — and like déjà vu wrapped in a nightmare, Donald Trump clawed his way back into the White House.
Almost simultaneously, the Liberal establishment pushed Justin Trudeau out the door, claiming he had taken the party “too far left” — which is hilarious, considering Trudeau never governed that way for a single day.
But then something strange happened.
As Trump took office in January 2025, Trudeau’s numbers began to rebound — even in resignation. Liberal support surged. And their handpicked successor, Mark Carney — a LinkedIn profile come to life — started getting the full astroturf push.
NDP voters began drifting Liberal in the polls, paralyzed by fear of another far-right wave.
You’ve seen this movie before. You know how it ends.
So what’s driving this shift? One word: fear.
Fear of Poilievre. Fear of Trump. Fear of “what comes next if we don’t act now.”
And I get it — fear is a hell of a drug in politics. But it’s not a plan. It’s not hope. It’s not a vision. What we’re being sold is not leadership — it’s political hostage-taking.
And we’ve seen this tactic fail — over and over again.
Democrats tried it in the U.S., running on anti-Trump vibes and pro-genocide foreign policy. Spoiler: it didn’t work.
Macron’s centrists tried it in France — and keep losing ground to the far-right.
In Germany, the same song plays while the AfD keeps rising.
You can’t fear-monger your way to a better world. You can’t scare people into supporting a hollow centre that never delivers. You have to give them something real.
That’s what makes this moment so damn frustrating. Every time liberals say “just vote for us one last time, then we’ll rebuild the left,” they’re kicking the can down a dead-end road.
Nobody’s rebuilding anything. People cast their ballot, hope it’s enough, and when things fall apart, the blame falls — predictably — on the most vulnerable.
Just look at Democrats blaming Muslims, the left, or Bernie supporters for their collapse instead of engaging in honest self-reflection. It’s scapegoating dressed up as strategy.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I voted Liberal in 2015. Back when Trudeau promised big things: real climate action, electoral reform, justice for Indigenous communities. He said he’d end first-past-the-post.
What we got was a couple selfies, a pipeline, and a slow-motion betrayal of those promises.
That win wasn’t an endorsement of Liberal ideology. It was a rejection of Harper-era austerity and a desperate hunger for change.
But instead of rising to the moment, the Liberals misread it — mistaking relief for approval, and flowery rhetoric for a mandate to carry on with Bay Street business as usual.
Ask a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal and they’ll still insist Trudeau delivered on most of his promises. Some even cling to La Presse’s 92.5% fulfillment stat — a number puffed up by “partial delivery” and footnotes that collapse under actual scrutiny.
But if you’ve followed my legislation threads, you know the pattern: campaign from the left, govern for capital.
Trudeau’s 2015–2019 term was a masterclass in performative progressivism. Behind the scenes, the Liberals rammed through omnibus bills dressed up in progressive buzzwords, while the guts of the legislation remained pure neoliberal fluff.
One bill that was supposed to address corporate diversity ended up being a playground for Bay Street — the word “diversity” barely made it past the title. The rest? Window dressing. Empty calories.
Then came 2019 — a minority government. A chance to work with the NDP, push bold policy, and actually deliver for working people.
The left held the balance of power. Instead, the Liberals dragged Jagmeet Singh into a confidence-and-supply deal and used it as political cover to stall, water down, or bulldoze anything that might threaten the neoliberal consensus.
Pharmacare? A pathetic half-measure in “phase one” of its rollout.
Climate action? A patchwork of tax credits and greenwashing, while emissions soared, only for Carney to later axe the carbon tax altogether.
Dental care? Sure — if you like bureaucracy and fine print.
The NDP handed them leverage and got saddled with Liberal failures. Their base eroded. Their political identity blurred into irrelevance.
And now, as Liberal support climbs again — propped up by fear of Poilievre and polished by Carney’s technocratic sheen and a few semi-charismatic words along the way, the pundit class is whispering: Is this the comeback? They’re clutching their polling crosstabs like gospel.
But as my distant relative, former PM John Diefenbaker once said: “Polls are for dogs to pee on.”
We saw polling overstate Kamala Harris’s strength in the U.S. We saw tactical voting in France mask the deeper rot. And we’re seeing the same mistake made in Canada — mistaking a bump for a mandate.
Polls don’t vote. People do. And people are exhausted. Fed up with being told that the best we can hope for is another four years of stalling. And if there’s one thing polling misses — it’s anger. Real, boiling, under-the-surface resentment.
There are dynamics no poll can predict:
- Voter fatigue — especially after a decade of Trudeau.
- Young men entering the electorate, many of whom have only ever known Liberal government and are sick of it.
- Methodological flaws — outdated phone surveys, corporate media biases, and questionable funding sources that make poll results feel more like vibes than science.
Don’t get me wrong — polls can be useful. But far too many seem convinced the Liberals already have this thing locked up. That Carney is the chosen one.
But nobody’s asking the obvious question: How the hell did we even get here?
How did a faux-populist career politician like Pierre Poilievre end up leading the polls for months? How is he even viable? And how are far-right parties around the world gaining ground while liberal democracies crumble?
It’s the populist era. And liberals — obsessed with preserving the status quo — still haven’t figured that out.
You can’t beat faux-populism with LinkedIn technocrats and PR-tested soundbites. You beat it by offering real populism. Left populism. Economic populism. Something that speaks to people’s pain and offers a vision bigger than “we’re not the other guy.”
Instead, we’re getting Carney — a conservative in a blue tie — who already scrapped the carbon tax and reversed capital gains hikes.
His rhetoric on immigration is starting to sound like Biden’s — who tried to outflank Trump by proposing a far-right immigration package that would have violated international law, only to soften the blow for Trump’s mass deportations.
We’ve seen this playbook before. You can only run this con so many times before people start to notice.
So stick around. In my next post, I’ll break down some of the major party platforms for what I’m calling the “Three Stooges Election”, and we’ll see what shenanigans Larry, Curly, and Moe have in store for us this time.
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