Will the Carney Coronation stick?
Canada's upcoming April 2025 federal election and how the Conservative campaign has collapsed by choosing to talk about nothing
Election day is a week away in Canada, early voting has already started.
The first major meme of the election has dropped: a stereotypical Liberal Carney supporter flashing the boomer salute at younger generations who can’t easily buy a home, get a high paying job, nor plan for retirement under boomer supported mass immigration policies & NIMBY zoning practices.
The first election fight between the generations is well underway. It won’t be the last.
While many are still in denial, the race is now a nail-biter with Conservatives and Liberals consistently both within the margin of error, and on seat count Liberals even seem to be pulling away.
A lot has changed politically since December when Conservatives could gloat about their 99% likelihood of victory in an election against Trudeau. But fate and the Liberal Party had different plans.
This post covers the successful Carney Coronation, the collapse of both Conservatives and leftist NDP since January, and what comes next under the probable election result of a new Carney mandate & 4th consecutive term for the Liberals.
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The Carney Coronation: Complete
As noted in the Canada Outlook 2025 post, PM Justin Trudeau resigned in January kicking off a leadership race within the Liberal Party for a new leader to take over as Prime Minister, and lead the party into the next election.
Despite being behind former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in initial polls, my bet was on Carney from the beginning.
If I had to place my bets, it would be on Carney, who despite not holding a seat in Parliament, has been courted by the Liberal Party for the position multiple times since 2012, and has been waiting in the wings for the right opportunity. He is a smooth operator who performed competently as head of Canadian and then British central banks, and amidst various roles across banking and international policy.
[...]
Despite Freeland polling slightly ahead in initial polls, I still give Carney the edge.
Sure enough, by a kickoff on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, backroom party machinations disqualifying two fast-rising Indian candidates, Chandra Arya and Ruby Dhalla – only after they had already paid their 6-figure non-refundable deposits to the party, and a slick campaign run by none other than Trudeau's long time handlers Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, the Carney coronation was completed on March 9, 2025 when he secured 85% of the vote.
To rub salt in the wound, the Liberal Party even disqualified sitting MP Chandra Arya from even running for re-election in order to forcibly vacate his seat so Carney could run in the Ottawa riding of Nepean.
Nothing was ever going to stop Carney's coronation.
To any readers here or on X (formerly Twitter), this will not have come as any surprise, though it is a sharp contrast to the roller coaster that most Canadian commentators took their followers on for months claiming it would be a close leadership race.
Snap Election & Poll Swings
Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister on March 14, quickly appointed a near identical cabinet to Trudeau, and then called a snap election on March 23, with election day set for April 28, 2025.
As Carney’s coronation as party leader approached, Conservative poll numbers under leader Pierre Poilievre started to deflate, in line with the previously shared theory that many swing voters were polling against Trudeau, not for the Conservatives.
Many voters currently polling for the Conservatives put the blame for Canada's current demise rightly at the feet of Trudeau, but would be willing to consider a new candidate leading the Liberals, given the longstanding strong reputation the Liberals have especially among immigrant groups as the party that brought them in to the country.
[...]
If Liberals can successfully further tar Conservatives with the deportation and perceived anti-immigrant policies of the American MAGA movement, polls could swing quickly back to a tighter race, especially given the fast growing recent immigrant vote.
This played out exactly as predicted, with the race tightening and even now flipping to the Liberals, far from the 99% likely Conservative majority that polls were predicting in January. The seat projection is even more dire given the popular vote is not distributed uniformly by riding, and shows the Liberals pulling away.
To say the Liberals may have just perfectly executed a last minute leadership switch to now cinch a majority government after almost a decade already in power is not an understatement.
Clearly, the Canadian public can still be played like a fiddle by Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, who by ratcheting up the Trump threat – through retaliatory tariffs & COVID-level mass propagandized hysteria ("elbows up", American product boycotts) – swung the narrative for the election away from a referendum on the "lost decade" under Trudeau to a "war time leader" election against Trump.
Carney's grey hair, more serious demeanor, lower pitched voice, intelligent sounding answers at press conferences, and decades long history acting on the world stage through central bank and UN positions stands stark against the sometimes perceived unseriousness of lifelong smug political quick talker Pierre Poilevre, who has served as a Conservative MP since he was 24 years of age, and became leader largely on his viral social media clips dunking on Trudeau & his cabinet ministers during Question Period in the House of Commons to rowdy applause from Conservative back benchers. While his critiques may well have been correct, the difference in optics could not be more stark.
Conservatives Choke
The Conservative campaign under Poilevre has floundered for months since the 2 legs of their unstable stool of a platform were kicked out by Trudeau's resignation announcement and Carney's cancelling of the carbon tax upon becoming Prime Minister. This was called out back in January as a major risk to the Conservatives.
With Trudeau out, much of the Conservative messaging over the past year solely focused on him starts to sound a bit stale, and their strategic reluctance to commit to major drastic policy reforms and plan to coast to victory on anti-Trudeau sentiment may not be a winning strategy anymore.
With Trudeau & his carbon tax gone, the Conservatives have simply pivoted to update all their fear mongering ads from the Trudeau Liberals to the Trudeau-Carney Liberals, without pivoting to materially address any of the most pressing issues to voters, like the rampant and destructive mass immigration since 2021 of now 2-3 million per year into a population of 40 million – far above the long term average of 250k annually.
Or while accusing the Liberals of being soft on crime and touting mandatory minimum sentences, the Conservatives fall short of actually offering any protection by giving Canadians the right to use firearms for self-defence in their own homes, leaving them the Sophie’s choice options of being ravaged by criminals for 40 minutes until the police finally show up, or use their licensed firearms in self-defence but then risk bankruptcy on lawyer fees and jail time if the criminal is justly injured, maimed, or killed.
The Conservative campaign has seemed intent on refusing to actually grant any policy concession which might persuade a marginal cohort of swing voters to join their side.
The low hanging fruit remains plentiful, ripe, and unpicked by Pierre the apple eater.
Canadians vote on rule by China, or rule by India
While this election isn’t a formal referendum on Canada’s re-colonization, more reporting has revealed that foreign influence in Canada is rampant across recent decades of governments & current leadership of the major parties.
The Liberals have long been suspected of being under strong influence from China, with one candidate being forced to resign after announcing a bounty on his Conservative opponent's head if he's delivered to the Chinese consulate, initially defended by PM Carney before days later accepting his resignation.
Meanwhile, it's now been reported that during Poilevre's 2022 Conservative leadership campaign, there was significant funding and influence applied by Indian government affiliated groups. Campaign stops at temples, ethnic media, and diploma mill community colleges have confirmed the suspicions of many that Poilevre has no plans to address the over-representation of immigration from India or reverse Trudeau’s mass migration since 2021.
The Liberals themselves have by their policy shown to be under major Indian influence as well since they removed per country caps and expanded immigration from 250k per year to now 2-3 million across all immigration programs, with India dominating the per country charts.
Though notably, the Indian immigration ushered in by the Liberals has not been uniformly distributed across all 36 states and territories of India. Instead, since 2021 it has been dominated with Sikh immigration from the northern Punjab region, with significant numbers of supporters of the Khalistan separatist movement, now actively agitating in Canada for their cause, their flags now frequently found flying across Toronto and Vancouver suburbs. Khalistan parades and protests, as recently as April 19 in Surrey, British Columbia, have drawn over 600k Sikhs to the streets, and clashes with Hindus and other groups have continued to increase.
The Canadian & Indian government has threatened multiple times as recently as October 2024 to mutually sever diplomatic relations given the Canadian accusations of Indian government agents orchestrating assassinations of Sikh leaders on Canadian soil.
The last stretch of the horse race
Support has consolidated behind the Liberals and Conservatives, with all other parties reduced to single digits.
The Liberals in their fully costed plan released last week admit no timeline to balance the budget and incredibly a $130 billion increase in spending – which Carney has rebranded as "investments" – from the already nauseating Trudeau baseline high deficits which saw the national debt double in under a decade.
The Conservatives continue to say nearly nothing new. And like the Liberals, have a myriad of near identical, completely infeasible campaign promises like immediately doubling the rate of housing starts from the multi-decade long term average of 250k/year up to ~500k/year, and sustaining that rate for a full 5 years to build 2.3m (Conservatives) or 2.5m (Liberals) new housing units.
Beyond the two major parties, the further left New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Jagmeet Singh, is also deep in the Indian influence controversy, himself a Punjabi Sikh who has been accused his entire career for sympathies for Khalistan separatists including refusing to condemn the Sikh terrorists who executed the Air India bombing of a flight from Canada in 1985 that killed over 300 on board. Since January, NDP support has collapsed to single digits as left wing protest votes unhappy with Trudeau have happily returned to the Liberals now under Carney, unimpressed with Singh's leadership seen increasingly out of touch and ineffective, especially with the traditional blue collar labor NDP voters.
Given the speed at which demographic replacement has happened in Canada, even the right wing People's Party of Canada (PPC) hasn't gone further than advocating an immigration moratorium – or a freeze on new immigration, falling far short of the mass deportations and cancelling permanent residency for millions which would be required to fix the well-documented and fatal imbalances in real estate and labor markets, collapse of education and healthcare systems, rise in crime, and loss of national cohesion.
The PPC has continued to poll in the single digits – still unlikely to even win one seat despite having the policy platform which would have the best shot at solving voters' top problems. Alas, citizens being coerced to vote against their own interests would not be a shock, but simply be inline with the results of the democratic experiment in most countries.
The Green Party (leftists with an environmentalist bent), Bloc Quebecois (Quebec separatists), and other fringe parties have continued to hemorrhage support and remain inconsequential in the single digits.
What happens after Election Day
Given the nature of Canada's parliamentary constitutional monarchy, the winning party may only have a third of the popular vote yet still win the most seats, which is a bit shocking compared to countries like the US where the winning party routinely has almost 50% or much higher support.
This exact outcome happened in the 2021 election where the Liberals under Trudeau lost the popular vote with 32.6% to the Conservatives 33.7% support, yet won the most seats and managed to form an informal coalition with the NDP which let them govern aggressively like a majority government for 4 years.
Consider just how far the Conservatives have collapsed from their previous 99% odds in January. Analysts now have the odds of the Liberals winning the most seats at 90%, with a full 68% likelihood of a Liberal majority government.
At this point a 4th Liberal term is not only in the cards, but looks nearly guaranteed.
As outlined in January, even if the Conservatives pull out an unlikely win, the proposed changes are likely to be "too little, too late" for a country already a decade into accelerated decline. "Progressives driving the speed limit" is an apt description of current Conservative platform ambitions and leadership team.
A Carney victory would extend the Liberals decade-long reign for another 4 years, and the status quo rate of accelerating decline will likely continue in every category that matters from real estate, to the broader economy, to education, healthcare, crime, the Canadian dollar, and more.
With a week left, a lot could still change. But, whether Liberals or Conservatives win, it appears little will be done to pull Canada out of its current national nose dive.
Of course, there is one party with much bolder policy differences that would set Canada on a different trajectory, but they have no current hope of ever being elected by the easily propagandized "elbows up" Canadian electorate.
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