Kurl: Which leader can best harnass Canadians’ anger over tariffs?

Not even the cleverest show runners of the most binge-worthy series would be capable of inventing the tilt-a-ride-inducing whiplash this country has been experiencing.

It’s barely three months since a blow-up between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland over her ouster in favour of a putative new finance minister in Mark Carney. It was an affair so consequential it forced the former from officeand launched the latter two into a faceoff over who will succeed him.

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But consequential affairs seem to be the theme of the early months of 2025.

Strung out on the on-again off-again nature of those crippling Trump-imposed tariffs? You’re not alone. Polling from the Angus Reid Institute shows more than half of Canadians are literally feeling angry (55 per cent), betrayed (37 per cent) and anxious (29 per cent) about it. Never before have I seen domestic favourable sentiment towards the U.S. as low as it is now, at just 24 per cent. More than half now see America as either an enemy, or a potential threat to our national interests (only 15 per cent of Americans say the same about Canada). National pride has rebounded. Visceral emotion has Canadians wanting to go hard on the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs that include banning critical Canadian exports and stopping domestic sales of Teslas (seven-in-10 of us feel like sticking it to Elon Musk, too).

And now we stand on the edge of new Canadian leadership, one way or the other. Unless everyone is wrong, Mark Carney will prevail as the new Liberal leader. If he’s got the sense God gave a lemon, he’ll call a general election as soon as possible.

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Why? Because Trudeau’s departure and Trump’s tariffs have simultaneously displaced Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre as the main character in the looming electoral battle against the Liberals and trapped him into walking a careful line with his own base.

Where the Conservatives enjoyed a 20-plus point lead for most of 2024 by exhorting Canadians to look backwards and remember ALL the reasons they were annoyed with the Liberals (and there were many: scandal, cost of living, immigration, a housing crisis), left-of-centre voters are now freed of the chains of Trudeau.

In turn, they’re rallying around both Carney and Freeland, as viable non-conservative choices. Indeed, most (but not all) of the stunning Liberal polling surge of recent weeks is driven by NDP voters stampeding over to the current governing party. Make no mistake, the Conservatives were (and might still be) popular enough to form government, but this has never been about Poilievre’s personal popularity.

Meantime, the Trump tariffs have reframed the electoral ballot question. Rather than retrospect over a half-decade of dissatisfaction, voters are squarely facing forward, calibrating, at least for now, which federal party leader will best match their bloody-minded energy and take on the chaotic U.S. president and his gang of loyalists.

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As a result, the Conservatives’ massive lead in the polls has evaporated and the party would be right to be panicking. But instead, Poilievre appears to have been caught flat-footed. While he sounded some of the right notes in condemning Trump in a speech March 4, he also awkwardly pivoted to a laundry list of things he would do to fight … things he was always going to do anyway. Cancelling the carbon tax. Greenlighting pipelines. As he said himself, “all of these things were Conservative fixations before the tariffs.”

Further, having re-absorbed a small but crucial segment of voters who chose the hard-right People’s Party of Canada in the 2021 election back into the Conservative tent, Poilievre has to keep them onside. These voters are among the most likely to want to see Canada join the U.S. as a 51st state, and most likely to profess an admiration of Trump.

Still, the past teaches us that shiny new leaders placed atop old, bloated governments do not always prevail. John Turner surged, then crashed in 1984. So did Kim Campbell in 1993. The present tells us that Carney, for all his qualifications, is not nearly as effective a political communicator and campaigner as his opponents.

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Poilievre may get some of his mojo back. The Bloc Québécois’ Yves-François Blanchet is surely lying in wait. NDP voters, none too enamoured with their current leader, may decide after all that they don’t want a central banker who is on record with wanting to return to fiscal discipline.

Polling numbers have been up, down, sideways and diagonal. Perhaps the only predictable constant these days is volatility in the public mood. That, and the desire to bop Donald Trump in the nose. Elbows up, eh!

Shachi Kurl is President of the Angus Reid Institute,  a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation.

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