Dispatch from the Front Line: Well, it could always be worse

On Carney's problem. Poilievre's future. And Jenni's guy beating Kory's guy by 1.1 million votes in the province of Ontario.

Well, your Line editors have slept a bit. Read a bit. Pondered a bit. Snacked a bit. And we’re ready to offer our first response. But first, a huge thank you to everyone who watched or took part in our livestream last night. We had a blast. And we hope you enjoyed it, too. Many thanks to James for helping us run things behind the scenes. It was terrific.

You can see a recording of it here. Enjoy! (The broadcast starts around the 31-minute mark.)

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Understanding just what drives the profound masochism that sits at the heart of the Canadian electorate is probably a task best left to a future generation of historians with deep training in psychopathology. For now, as Gandalf almost said to Frodo, all we have to decide is what to make of the time that is given us.

As things currently stand, the Liberal Party of Canada, led by Mark Carney, has won its fourth consecutive federal election and third consecutive minority, just three seats shy of a majority. The Conservatives remain the opposition with 144 seats, while the Bloc Québécois has 22. (These numbers have been bouncing around a bit all afternoon and are very much subject to change — some of these ridings are only a few dozen votes from changing hands.) The NDP has been virtually wiped out, reduced to seven seats in the Commons, five shy of official party status. Both NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre lost their seats; Singh has resigned, while Poilievre’s future remains unclear.

Let’s start with the bad news. Between 2015 and 2025, Justin Trudeau led what was undoubtedly the most unserious Canadian government since the Second World War, and probably the most unserious government since Confederation. It was by almost every measure a lost decade for Canada, during which our economy stagnated, our international reputation suffered, our defence and security rotted, and our national unity was destroyed. When Trudeau finally decided to leave office in early 2025, the country was poorer, less confident and capable, and more fractured than it was when he took over. To underscore the point, an end of year poll had the Liberals at 16 per cent amongst decided voters.

Yet through it all, Liberals swore that the problem was not their policies, nor was it their team. No, the problem was largely one of communication. The country had stopped listening to Trudeau, so all they had to do to get things back on track was to get a new leader. It seemed … implausible. Yes, Trudeau was an atrocious prime minister, equal parts flakey and uninterested, smug and condescending. But so was the team around him, and so were the policies. Surely a new leader, no matter how worldly and accomplished, would be just lipsticking the pig.

Yet whether it was Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada, Pierre Poilievre simply not being up to the task, or some sort of muted Carney-mania (or a combination of all three), the fact remains: the pig is all rouged up and ready for the dance. If the Liberals take from this the lesson that the last 10 years was basically a success story, that they now have a mandate to proceed full steam ahead with the old team and the old policies with a new leader, then Canada is in deep, deep, deep shit.

Deeper than we already are. Which is very.

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So other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, there might actually be some good news here, and it begins with the observation that at least we avoided the complete nightmare scenario. That would have been either a Liberal or Conservative minority where the Bloc Québécois held the balance of power. It did not take much imagination to think of a scenario where one party had fewer seats, but a higher percentage of the vote, and sought to control parliament through a deal with the devil Bloquistes. That this was avoided is no small mercy.

As we see it, the Liberal position looks pretty good. They are three seats shy of a majority, but it is not clear they need to make any unpleasant deals with anyone, especially the Bloc or NDP. The rump NDP caucus has zero leverage right now; what choice do they have but to vote for the government, no matter what the issue? They’re gonna throw the country into another election when they have no leader, and no party status? More or less similar reasoning applies to the CPC, at least as long as they sort out their own leadership problem.

But there is a better reason why the Liberals might be in stronger shape than the numbers would suggest, and that is their platform. It is not a great platform, especially in the specifics. But in its general tone and theme and direction, it is broadly pointing where the country needs to go. And more importantly for our purposes here, it is also broadly pointing in the same direction as the Conservative platform — namely, the country needs to start getting stuff done. Canada needs to start building.

The Liberal platform was called “Canada Strong,” with the tagline “Unite. Secure. Protect. Build.” The CPC platform was headlined “Canada First For a Change” and it declared, “it is time for Canada to think big again. It is time to challenge ourselves to build.” Meanwhile, in the last week of the campaign, an independent organization called Build Canada released some polling it had commissioned from Pollara that supported the idea that Canadians are ready to demand a government that actually gets something built. Some of the results include: 83 per cent of Canadians want to eliminate barriers to interprovincial trade; 71 per cent of Canadians want faster approval for major energy projects; three quarters of Canadians want increased funding to the armed forces; 82 per cent would support a national health data system; 71 per cent would like to see Canada launch a sovereign wealth fund. Overall, seven in ten Canadians want the government to prioritize long-term growth over short-term spending.

The point is less about the specifics than the overall message: Canadians are fed up with the status quo. They recognize that another decade of Trudeau Liberalism will destroy the country. Pierre Poilievre spent the better part of the last three years claiming that Canada was broken. We at The Line have made it pretty clear that we agree with him, at least in terms of how our government functions. And while Liberals protested and cherry picked global stats and rankings to argue that the country was doing just fine under Liberal rule, their entire platform, and indeed Carney’s entire approach to the campaign, is a recognition that Poilievre was right.

If the Liberals have a mandate to do anything, it is to fix what they spent a decade breaking. We have to say, that strikes us as pretty damn rich. But the work needs to be done, and the people have spoken.

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That brings us to the next most pressing question in Canadian politics at the moment — can Pierre Poilievre stay on as Conservative leader?

Yes, he made significant gains in the Conservative seat count over 2021; he earned roughly 2 million more votes than Erin O’Toole, and the returns so far suggest that he topped 41 per cent of the popular vote. For a leader helming his first election, these are very significant improvements in the party’s standings.

But he didn’t win.

And, let’s be clear, actually winning was very much the heart of Pierre Poilievre’s leadership proposition. No more running from the centre, remember? This was a guy who believed he could win the electorate by presenting himself as authentically, true-blue Conservative. No enemies to the right.

How’d that work out? By vacating the centre, the ever-amorphous Liberals were simply able to stick a new conservative-ish sounding leader on the lemon, and drive right into the tonal and ideological space that the actual Conservatives vacated. It’s almost as if this whole politics business involved — wait for it — building coalitions instead of just winning arguments.

This result, especially after the sustained and dramatic lead that the Conservatives enjoyed for more than a year prior to the election, is a disappointment at minimum, and a catastrophe if you really had your heart set on kicking the Liberals out. Adding to this mess, Poilievre appears to have lost his seat in Carleton — a fact that we can attribute to a pointed anti-Poilievre sentiment among Ottawa civil servants especially, and a particularly juvenile protest movement that lengthened the riding’s ballot to 91 potential candidates.

If we were to extend the logic that Poilievre’s own faction used to justify the defenestration of O’Toole, this outcome alone would be enough to justify a new Conservative leader. An anti-Poilievre coup would be entirely justified on karmic grounds alone. His theory of the electorate was wrong. He failed.

However, we would like to encourage the Conservatives to pause; we would extend the same rhetorical mercy to Poilievre that we did to O’Toole in the days after the 2021 election. Namely, you guys can’t keep doing this. If the NDP is too slow to dump its duds, you are way too fast. You can’t keep switching leaders like coke-addled magpies after every disappointing election result.

Did Poilievre and his team make mistakes? Yes. Large ones. But that means there’s room for improvement and growth, including bringing in new talent and considering new strategic directions going forward. Poilievre blew a winnable election — but if the Conservatives engage in a little genuine responsibility and self reflection, they’ll emerge with the conclusion that this was, indeed, a winnable electorate that they can actually win if they take the failures here to heart.

Starting from scratch with a new leader — again — just resets the clock on Poilievre’s undeniable gains. Unless there is a potential leader who is so high profile, so credible, so undeniably charismatic, that he or she can pose an instant challenge to Carney — and there isn’t — then the party is better off with Poilievre.

Consider, for a moment, that whatever the final vote count, the Liberals seem to be looking at a minority government that will need to be propped up by either a leaderless NDP, or the Bloc. We are probably about to head into a recession, the shine is quickly coming off Carney, and unless the Liberals clean their own house and change course, there are even odds that we’re going to get a government that is almost as dysfunctional and annoying as the last one. In other words, the fundamentals of an imminent Conservative majority government are still intact — and perhaps sooner than anyone can imagine at present. The Conservatives simply may not have the runway required to run another leadership race and build up another leader.

The Conservatives are not exactly apt to take our advice, but if they were, we’d offer it thus: stick with Pierre. Stop acting like such petty pricks to everybody all the time; rebuild relationships within caucus, over the partisan divide, and, especially, within the Conservative tent. Stop fostering the persecution complex — it gives off loser energy, and ultimately proved self defeating. Start treating this game like the team sport it is, and highlight some of the talent you have within the broader caucus, and the movement more generally; do a thorough post-mortem on the election results and the strategies that led to it. Bring in new blood. Now is not the time for more Conservative bun fights; it’s time to start imagining what the next few years are going to bring, and how Conservatives can sensibly react to the threats Canada faces, both within and without.

Do all that, and at a minimum, we’ll have a competent opposition party that can strengthen the country through serious and principled dissent. Do all that, and at best, there’s every reason to think that Poilievre can make the incremental gains needed to become prime minister.

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Speaking of those Tories, as your Line editors continue to analyze and observe the results from Monday, one of the immediate stories that jumps out at us is that the Conservatives overperformed their polling averages. We suspect they are quite disappointed in the outcome, but also relieved. All that stuff above we just said about Poilievre? Imagine if the Liberals had beaten the Tories by five or 10 points in the popular vote, as polls were recently suggesting before the last-minute tightening.

And the more we look at this, the more we realize that the story of Monday night is much more complicated than what we’d originally thought was happening.

First, let’s consider the national popular vote. There continues to be real variation in the numbers as final ballots are counted, but it looks like the Conservatives are going to come out with something close to 41 per cent of the vote — at this exact moment, they’re at 41.3. That means they are only a few off points off their recent polling maximum. If you remember just a few months ago, when the Conservatives were on track to win a 230-seat majority, their 20- to 25-point lead was a result of them being in the low-to-mid 40s while the Liberals dropped down close to 20, and sometimes dipped below that.

The election has essentially validated the Conservatives’ position in the polling. They didn’t come off by much — a very modest softening and margins of error account for all the gap between the polling high and the final result. The Liberals simply zoomed back up, rising by more than 25 points while the Conservatives lost three. As we said, the Conservatives are probably disappointed in that — and we think they could have run a better campaign. We tried repeatedly to tell them exactly how to do that. But a look at the numbers here tells a different story than what polls were telling us only a week or two ago. The Conservatives basically held their recent polling highs.

This is the best result, in terms of share of popular vote, that the Conservative party has ever had in the modern era. The Liberals just came back that much more. We’ll probably spend a bit of time thinking about that and what it means, but that’s just what the math of the situation is.

There’s another issue that also needs to be examined. And it too involves math, alas. Quite a bit of bandwidth was taken up in the final days of the campaign by the fighting between the federal Conservatives and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives. Conservative MP Jamil Jivani had some very tough words for Doug Ford and his people on election night — a product of that fighting and bad blood. It all stemmed from comments by Kory Teneycke, Doug Ford’s political guru, who was openly critical at high-profile events of the federal Conservative campaign and pointed to Ford’s recent third majority win as proof that he knew what he was talking about.

And Ford’s third majority win is indeed significant. We don’t overlook that. But with final votes still being counted, Pierre Poilievre won more than a million more votes in the province of Ontario than Doug Ford did in February. Ford’s last majority win came on the backs of roughly 2.1 million votes. Poilievre is already at 3.2 million and climbing in the province of Ontario.

And that leaves us scratching our heads a bit. We have no stake or role in any of the bun fighting between Poilievre’s campaign chief, Jenni Byrne, and Teneycke. We get to be bemused/horrified observers of this one. But we fundamentally agreed with Teneycke’s criticisms of the Poilievre campaign. We still think it was a huge error to take weeks to really respond to Trump’s rhetoric and tariffs while Carney went full Mike Myers on us and got his elbows up.

But, ahem. Jenni’s guy won 1.1 million more votes in Ontario than Kory’s guy. Again, that’s just the math. Kory is probably happier with his election than Jenni is hers. But. There is some room for debate here.

As with the above, we still need to figure out what to make of that. But like we said. Monday is turning out to be a more complicated story than we thought.

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A final note in closing. And it’s from the heart. Thank you to all who ran. Thank you to all who assisted. Our thanks, as well, to the families of those people, who haven’t seen their loved ones in a while. And an apology to our own spouses and children. We’ll be nice again, guys. Just need a nap first.

But last but not least: congratulations, Prime Minister Mark Carney. You’ve got a hell of a mess on your hands but we sincerely and truly wish you all the best. Your success is our success. Elbows up, eh?

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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.