Bullshit Bulletin, Week 6: Back to normal, we guess

With sadness, the time has come for us to put the bulletin back into mothballs. Until next time ... whenever that may be.

As promised, Line readers, we’re doing one more of our fan-favourite bullshit roundups to mark the end of the federal election campaign. Thanks to everyone who read and shared them over the last five weeks, and thanks to our readers who sent us ideas/suggestions. Not all of them made it in, but some did, and The Line salutes you. You make our lives easier.

We also want to give a huge thank you to our friends at Ipsos, who helped us fight bullshit with the best possible remedy — facts. Ipsos has provided us one more snapshot of the electorate, and you’ll find it below. We know our readers appreciated these contributions, and your Line editors did, too. Thank you to the team at Ipsos, and especially Mike and Greg.

And now, one more time for this campaign, here’s the bullshit.

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But first, the final update from the team at Ipsos (which is not bullshit!).

For our final campaign contribution to The Line, Ipsos has compiled measures — including some fresh data never released before — on the challenges facing Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new minority Liberal government. Carney faces multiple headwinds as he begins his first mandate.:

• A global decline in positive U.S. influence, with Canadians seeing the biggest drop of all​

• A profound lack of trust in America and majority belief that we can never trust the Americans the same way again​

• Multiple competing priorities — like health care, housing and the economy — that rank ahead of Canada-U.S. relations​

• A general lack of faith in government and public services to help people in the years ahead​

• Declining pride in Canada for younger generations and risk of a Canadian brain drain of our youngest talent​

Mark Carney sailed into office positioning himself as "the man for the moment" — a crisis manager extraordinaire. What he's inherited is a perfect storm of converging challenges that would test any political navigator's skill. ​

The Trump hurricane rages from the south while domestic tempests in health care, housing, and affordability persist unabated. Young Canadians are eyeing foreign shores as lifeboats, while Alberta threatens to chart its own course entirely. ​

Many of these were the very issues that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has been talking about over the past two years, and which were responsible for a significant proportion of Canadians voting for him. In the end, the Conservatives maintained most of their support throughout the campaign, dropping only slightly from their January high, according to Ipsos polling. Carney benefited from support shifting from other parties, particularly the NDP, and inherited their voters' expectations as well.​

The American threat has only layered onto what was already a complex policy environment for Canada. Do we think any of these will be solved a year from now? Where should Carney begin? Eventually Canada will need to sign a deal with the U.S. How will Carney reconcile this with broken trust and his own comments that the old Canada-U.S. relationship is “over?”​

Regardless of who won on April 28, these problems were waiting for Canada’s new prime minister, at a time when close to three quarters of Canadians (72 per cent) say they are worried that government and public services in Canada will do too little to help people in the years ahead.​

Carney now faces the ultimate test of his crisis management credentials. He must balance the immediate threat of deteriorating U.S. relations with the slow-burning crises that were already eroding Canadians' faith in their institutions and future. The clock is ticking in a minority government where political capital is limited and public patience will very quickly wear thin. His honeymoon may be brief.​

The question isn't whether Carney is truly "the man for the moment" — it's whether any single leader could possibly be the right captain for so many simultaneous storms. Carney will now have to prove himself with the Conservatives waiting should he fail.​

We close with tremendous thanks to The Line for the partnership during this campaign. We hope our data-driven analysis added nuance to the many issues at play and gave you — the readers and listeners — additional insights. Click here to find out more about our ongoing measures of the health of Canadian society.​

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We want to start by addressing a notion that has been floating around in recent days. With the Liberals being very close to a majority — only four seats off, and that will likely be the final — there is speculation that they could find a way to get themselves over the top by enticing a handful of opposition MPs to cross the floor. Perhaps in exchange for a cushy job — maybe a cabinet post?

This would be legal. This would also be bullshit. And we really hope that this doesn’t happen.

It has always been ugly to see a recently elected MP bolt for a better gig elsewhere. Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it’s not grubby.

And that’s especially true now. Take a look at some of those Ipsos numbers above. It’s already a pretty surly electorate out there. And as we’ve been noting for weeks, the anger out west is real, and powerful. We don’t think any of our problems would be solved by some post-election shenanagins.

And frankly, there’s no need. The Liberals will have the runway they need for at least the foreseeable future. The Bloc is already signalling that it is willing to play ball with the Liberals. What’s left of the NDP will have no real choice but to keep this government alive, even if they just have to call call in sick the day a major confidence vote happens. We also don’t think that the Tories are going to be in any rush to race back to the polls.

Prime Minister Carney has the room he needs to manoeuvre. He has a functional, viable mandate from the people to govern. He has opposition parties that are willing to cooperate or at least unable to resist. This may change in the future, and if it does, we’ll be a little less precious about the idea of poaching MPs — we think there is a real moral difference bolting 12 months onto a dysfunctional stalemate, compared to say, a week or two after a free and fair election.

But for now, it would be bullshit. Disruptive bullshit, harmful bullshit and, if that wasn’t enough, unnecessary bullshit. Don’t do it, guys. Just govern.

One specific exception: the Liberals can have Liz May. We don’t know if they’re crazy enough to take her, but if they did, and we could finally stop pretending the federal Greens are a thing, we’d count that as a win. Honestly, at this point, May not joining the Liberals might be the greater bullshit. Let’s just make it official.

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We want to now offer some advice to Pierre Poilievre: grow up.

Seriously. Because not calling your opponent to congratulate him is bullshit.

We don’t mean Mark Carney! We do think Poilievre should call Carney and offer congratulations and also test the waters to see what extent, if any, there is room for cooperation. We aren’t naive idealists. We know neither man is going to want to hop into the sack — politically speaking — with the other. But there are still norms in a democracy, and they should be observed. Poilievre did congratulate Carney in his remarks on election night, and did so with professionalism and grace, and that’s good.

But we’re actually talking about Bruce Fanjoy, the newly elected Liberal MP for Carleton, the riding that had been held for many years by … Pierre Poilievre. Fanjoy defeated Poilievre on Monday, and by a decisive margin. In an interview with NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto, Fanjoy said that he hadn’t received a call from Poilievre to congratulate him. Calls to the winners of a riding race by the opponents in that riding are routine. Fanjoy doesn’t seem much fazed by the lack of a call, but still. It’s not a great look.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that not making a call will be seen as confirmation in the eyes of some voters of what they already thought about Poilievre. We aren’t the first to note that the Conservative leader is polarizing and has high “negatives” — Canadians tell pollsters that they dislike him. We understand that congratulating the guy that beat you must be like pulling your own teeth out. We also think we have a good enough read on Poilievre’s personality to know why this is particularly difficult for him.

Too bad. A would-be national leader is expected to sometimes do unpleasant things. And we’re calling about a two-minute phone call here, not making a decision to send troops into battle (some of whom will die) or a decision that will alter the trajectory of our national history.

Make the call, offer congratulations, wish him well, offer any cooperation you can, and get it over with. And if you don’t, Canadians will be right to call bullshit on that.

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While we’re on the topic of Carleton, two other little notes of bullshit.

First: we have seem some conspiracy mongering among some of the more right-wing parts of social media that the changes to Carleton’s electoral boundaries in recent years was somehow nerfarious, intended to harm Poilievre. Every expert we’ve checked with says this is the purest bullshit imaginable — to the extent that the ridings changed, they changed in ways that ought to have favoured Poilievre. This is apparently partly why even the CPC HQ was surprised to find themselves losing it. So knock that shit off right now.

Second: we’ve seen some pouting among CPC partisans who are unhappy that the Carleton ballot was almost a hundred names long. We get it! And we agree that that was clearly intended to disadvantage Poilievre. It’s juvenile and stupid and we don’t like it — we’d be open to legal or regulatory changes to make such theatrics harder to pull off. High deposits that can only be refunded if a candidate clears a certain threshold strike us as a reasonable answer here. (We know that the courts have weighed in on this before — we still think we should do what’s possible.)

But. That being said. Like, come on. Despite the ginormous ballot, Poilievre was still able to amass almost 40,000 votes. Fanjoy was just able to do even better, and voters had to find his name on the ballot, too. And it wasn’t close. Fanjoy won with more than half the total ballots cast, ahead of Poilievre by more than 4,000 actual votes.

We agree that gigantic ballots are stunts. We agree we should find a way to do something about this. But hinting this is why Poilievre lost is bullshit. He got outworked, and the campaign refused to admit it was possible until it was too late. This is Fanjoy’s win and Poilievre’s loss. We won’t hear otherwise.

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At this early date, The Line doesn’t have a ton of thoughts to offer on the nitty gritty riding-level stuff. We’re going to talk to our nerds about this, but right now, most of our nerds are still catching up on the sleep they didn’t get over the last six weeks. Once they’re better rested and have reintroduced themselves to their spouses and children, we’ll hit them with a lot of questions.

And we have a lot. It’s a weird election map. Not bullshit, just … weird. The pollsters basically got the top-line national-level results right. The parties got roughly the vote share that they’d expected. But the map itself was bizarre — and we know for a fact that the party HQs agree with us. Even if they ended up within a handful of seats of their expected final tally, they won some seats they didn’t expect to, and lost some they thought were safe. There is much head scratching going on right now in the various party command centres.

We suspect that this is the most true for the NDP. The NDP didn’t think they were going to have a good night. And they didn’t have a good night. But their voter coalition moved in both directions — they lost some seats to the Liberals, but a lot more to the Conservatives. This isn’t a great mystery. Anyone who really knows Canadian politics knows that whether the threat to the NDP comes from the left or right really depends on where in the country we’re talking about. The Conservatives have been trying to grab the NDP’s working-class blue-collar and rural voters for decades, and had some success on Monday. The Liberals, for their part, basically ate the NDP’s urban progressive voter base for breakfast. Not a single NDP MP was elected in the province of Ontario. Indeed, if not for a single seat in Montreal, the NDP would have been wiped out of eastern Canada entirely.

The Line hasn’t yet really reached out to our friends in the NDP. It would feel crass at this point. We’d feel like we were intruding. And we wouldn’t really know what to say. We know that it’s very possible that the NDP bounces back in a less bizarre election. This might really have been a one-time fluke of circumstance. A pleasant but ineffective leader, an external threat, a Liberal rebound — maybe this was the perfect storm. It’s really possible this is a blip.

But it’s also possible that the NDP spent too long believing its own bullshit — that it could be a party that was equally effective being a voice for rural working-class Canadians and white-collar urban progressives at the same time. The Line has noted the danger in this more than once, as have many others. We are reminded of Stein’s Law, here: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

The NDP couldn’t go on forever trying to be two different parties at once. On Monday, the illusion that that was possible might have stopped.

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One final comment before we wrap this up. The role provincial politics played in this election is fascinating. And there’s a lot of bullshit to sift through.

First, we called bullshit (with a laugh) when Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet offered Carney cooperation and a truce. It’s not that we doubt his sincerity. It’s that we think Blanchet has been finally aroused to the reality that The Line has been speaking of for months: We’d never dare declare Quebec separatism dead, but it is, if nothing else, on hiatus for a while. Quebecers have always been the most delightfully ruthless voters in Canada. Their pragmatism amuses and inspires us. The moment Donald Trump began putting the squeeze on Canada, Quebecers nationalists were the first to figure out that Quebec’s best shot at maintaining its current cushy deal was inside a strong Canadian federation. We called this the moment François Legault began cautiously wrapping himself in the Maple Leaf shortly after Trump’s election.

This is no cause for triumphalism or reckless arrogance on the part of the Liberals, and history has shown they’re prone to both. But it is certainly cause for them to recognize that Blanchet is offering the truce not out of generosity, but out of necessity. We hope Carney deals with him graciously and fairly, but also keeps that in mind when cutting any deals.

Speaking of separatism, we also call bullshit, with eyebrows arched high toward the ceiling, at this bullshit out of Alberta. Danielle Smith didn’t wait long before taking steps to alter the terms on which Alberta could opt for a sovereignty referendum — to make it easier, it hardly need be said. Remember what we said above about how crossing the floor moments after an election is bad for democracy? Changing the rules on something as important as this is also bad for democracy. We hope Smith knows that. If not, we hope someone closer to her than us explains it. This is ugly stuff.

And last but not least, we want to respond to some reader feedback suggesting that we were flinging a bit of bullshit ourselves. In our post-election dispatch on Tuesday, we noted that Poilievre had won more than a million more votes in Ontario than Doug Ford did in the February provincial election. Our point was that the notion, advanced by some of Ford’s people, that Poilievre had blown the campaign didn’t rest easily with Poilievre getting a lot more votes than Ford, even if that didn’t translate into more seats. Some readers said, fairly, that that wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, since the elections were different, had different turnouts, different contexts, etc.

Fair enough! So here’s the apples-to-apples comparison: vote share. On Monday night, Pierre Poilievre won 44.3 per cent of the vote share in Ontario. In February, Doug Ford won 42.97 per cent.

We aren’t trying to make any sweeping point here, beyond that the narrative from the Ford guys that Poilievre blew it doesn’t fit neatly with these numbers. But we did hear the feedback from readers on how we presented that argument, and hope that the above is more satisfying.

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Okay! That’s it for the 2025 federal election! We had a lot of fun with these and we can see from our charts that you guys did, too. Thanks so much for reading and sharing your ideas. And as always, like, subscribe and support The Line. Until next election, the Bullshit Bulletin is signing off.

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The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter. Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.