By Ray Rivers
April 2nd, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Some pundits are calling it a crisis, and some a civil war – but nobody is calling it winning – as the Tories continue their decline in public support. In fact their fall from grace is happening way faster than the two years it took for Mr. Poilievre’s meteoric rise in the polls.
Poilievre can talk a good story.
Current Tory leader, Pierre Poilievre, is an articulate and convincing attack dog who, much like Donald Trump, thrives on character assassination and misinformation. His success at trashing Trudeau and grinding down his public approval rating seemed like the path to a Tory victory. But then along came the tariff crisis and a new Liberal leader. And the wheels began to fall off the Tory tour bus.
As the Conservative Party heads to the polls, it does so with a couple of handicaps. For one thing its leader has no resume, certainly nothing that compares to that of Mark Carney, his Liberal opponent. Poilievre can talk a good story but Carney has actually done it – an Oxford polished economist who had governed both the Canadian and British central banks as those economies each went through economic crises.
Carney’s track record includes being CEO of the extensive Canadian investment company Brookfield and heading up a UN environmental program. He has built and maintained close professional relations with most European heads of government, especially those of France and Britain. Carney also has had previous interactions with US president Trump, and based on the two leader’s recent phone contact appears to have gained Trump’s respect as well.
Then there is the matter of Poilievre’s style, which Canadians and many Tory insiders would like him to change. But it seems the only game he knows is to keep calling this country weak and broken, in the hope that voters will see him as its saviour. But this persistent negativity and personal name calling, which may have helped turn Canadians against the former Liberal leader, is a poor substitute for leadership.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith thinks she ought to use Canada’s current crisis to push for more provincial sovereignty.
When it comes to the matter of national unity he also suffers from the intrusion of Alberta’s separatist premier on his behalf. Her shameless cozying up to the very people, the MAGA crowd down south, who are scaring Canadians out of their comfort zones at the moment, is disquieting. Danielle Smith is out of her lane and out of control.
Smith had initially asked Trump to stall, not end, the tariffs until after the election because she felt that would restore Tory political fortunes. And it is telling that she believes that Poilievre is of like mind to the erratic US president. Does that imply that she approves of Trump’s erratic approach to government, including his breaking of the USMCA, which he once touted as the best deal ever?
Further, she has chosen a great time to reach out to Quebec’s premier inviting him to help craft a plan to tear Canada apart. She thinks they ought to use Canada’s current crisis to push for more provincial sovereignty. It’s exactly that kind of parochialism which has historically created all those inter-provincial trade barriers all our politicians now claim they want to eliminate.
So, if there is a civil war brewing among Tory loyalists, they have only themselves to blame for their choice of leader. Being prime minister is not just another job, but it is a job. And like any job the best person is the one who is best qualified. And that, more than anything else, accounts for why the Tory steamroller appears to have stopped rolling along.
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
Background links:
Civil War – Smith – More Smith – Poilievre – Even More Smith – Smith and Sovereignty –
Discover more from Burlington Gazette - Local News, Politics, Community
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I have said many times my problems with PPCon and the Conservatives. A year ago, He talked too much, too strident, over and over, about how Canada is broken in so many ways, and Justin Trudeau is to blame, but he will fix everything, for everybody, at no visible cost, debt, or program because you will Axe-the-Tax.
Again and again, he said he would fix everything, but never had any costed plan telling how. And now, in the election and, with Trump barking at the door, he has not changed his worldview – It’s a new reality, and new politics is in our face, and he does not seem to get it.
Now, it’s still gas tax Carney, over and over, long after he publicly decided to scrap it, as of today in fact. However, he says Canada is still the same broken, but he will again fix it in the same with jobs, nice houses in newly safe neighbourhoods, newly defended by brave soldiers, under newly raised Canadian flags. It looks like the same plan as before, but the global contextual reality has changed, so the previous thinking won’t fit.
My problem with this is there is still no visible costed plan – what will he do about the world of Trump?
Ray rightly says it. Compared to Carney, he hasn’t got any competence, or experience, even a minimal of a resume.
I have to agree that I cannot call the election, but here you have a Rivers account on The Rise and Fall of the Conservative Party of Canada
You have always had problems with the Conservatives, Tom, and that’s because you’re a life-long Liberal. Pierre “talked too much”; he is the leader of the opposition, his job is to critique the government in power and he was so good at it that he drove Justin Trudeau from office. And indeed Trudeau was to blame–he created or exacerbated problems in Canada so seriously that many would agree that “Canada is broken”—an affordability crisis with record line-ups at food banks, a housing crisis with tent cities from coast to coast, an opioid and fentanyl crisis fueled by government policy, a debt crisis with record increases in the national debt so much so that Trudeau increased more than the total of all the previous Prime Ministers of Canada, a corruption crisis with scandal after scandal–so bad that the Liberals openly covered up missing millions, a crisis in rising violent crime that reflects an “un-justice” system urgently in need of reform, an unchecked level of immigration that has failed to properly vet new immigrants and that has ignored the infrastructure capacity of Canada to absorb them. So yes, Tom, Poilievre and millions of Canadians can reasonably conclude that compared to 10 years ago, Canada is broken. Not irreparably, there is still much to like and be proud of, but another four years of the same Liberal cabal that created these problems will not improve life for them.
Laughably, while you condemn Poilievre for his “Axe the Tax” policy that has focused on the Liberals’ ideological obsession with the distraction of environment crisis, Carney, a long-time proponent of higher carbon taxes, has deluded the Canadian electorate into believing that he has cancelled the carbon tax. This is simply Liberal disinformation; the law remains in effect and he has simply reduced the rate to 0% for how long? Until the election is over? Will he simply hike the clean fuel surcharge to make up for it? Hide it as a producer tax, faking out enough Canadians who don’t understand that those producers will merely pass it on to them in the form of higher prices? How can increase the industrial carbon tax on steel producers, which he has suggested, without adding to the burden already imposed by Trump’s tariffs?
You condemn Poilievre for not costing out his policy proposals but apparently have no problem with Carney failing to do the same, although Carney did offer up a nice word salad when confronted with the question.
You also believe that Mark Carney, the Liberals’ new shiny pony, has the competence and experience that Poilievre lacks but what are we to make of this new Messiah–his resume of the Governor of two central banks is actually open to some considerable scrutiny and particularly in England, to some considerable criticism and his record at Brookfield is even more troubling with moving his head office to New York (Trump must be so proud) and moving his profits to several tax shelters outside of Canada. This long-time champion of environmental activism has headed a company with a very checkered environmental record. He professes that he will generate untold economic growth in Canada but at the same time, will not repeal anti-pipeline legislation in Canada. Do I trust the future of Canada to this man, surrounded by the government of the previous 10 years? A resounding NO!!!!
And should Canadians be focused on Donald Trump? Absolutely–he poses a very serious threat to a Canadian economy severely weakened by a decade of Liberal economic mismanagement. But Carney likes to distract Canadians by his focus on Donald Trump and away from the problems created by his government. As Pierre Poilievre noted yesterday, “Some Liberal supporters and lobbyists have asked why I keep talking about the cost of living, housing, crime and the Liberal drug crisis instead of focusing exclusively on Donald Trump. I will not stop talking about these problems which predate Donald Trump and which will outlast Donald Trump if we do not act on them”. It might be easy to ignore these problems if you are a boomer (I’m one for the record), live in a house you bought eons ago, and are living off a defined-benefit public sector pension, but for working Canadians, these problems can not be ignored.
Well said, Ray.
No guts j to id yourself?. Of course, you didn’t say anything anyways.
And Pepper, is this a new rule that comments do not have to have any name?
Anyways j., do you have a point?
As I said, I myself have been saying this same thing for more that a year. Typical ConCon.
My point is to point to and comment something on Ray’s story.