Poilievre Needs An Election

Canada does not need a second 2025 election, but Pierre Poilievre desperately needs his third kick at the can this year. And he needs to make it Mark Carney’s fault, which will be a tougher sell after yesterday.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s first federal budget is bringing home Canada’s economy in the face of unprecedented threats from the United States. It shows that the current government understands that the greatest problem Canada has to address is protecting our sovereignty. After generations of playing by the neoliberal trade rules that have given us both billionaires and poverty, both stability and uncertainty, both fulfilment and longing, the focus is now firmly on building a Canada by and for Canadians.

It is important not to become isolationist in this moment, as this brings a host of problems of its own, but rather it is about understanding the need to build up Canadian infrastructure and Canadian projects that benefit Canadians. In addressing the needs of a whole country and not only its oligarchy, we will better insulate ourselves from outside uncertainty.

The budget is not a campaign blueprint. It shows that the government has a plan on a longer outlook than an election cycle. Not everyone will agree with it, of course. There are some parts of the budget I disagree with, too, such as cutting rather than aggressively expanding the Underused Housing Tax; but the big picture is what matters in the current circumstances, and that’s long term core infrastructure investment.

The Bloc has a litany of demands around downloading powers to the provinces — well, at least one of them — that won’t be met.

The Conservatives want to cap the deficit at $42 billion, which sounds nice, but austerity is the wrong reaction to major economic uncertainty. Then again, they should know that, given that Stephen Harper added $150 billion to Canada’s national debt while trying to stabilise the economy after the economic crisis that started in 2008 with the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

We remember that financial crisis well, of course, because in recovering, we collectively did a masterful job of protecting the assets of the oligarchs while starting the rest of us down a housing and cost of living crunch from which there is no obvious end in sight.

Telling people who are concerned about their jobs and their futures that the government will stop investing in them may work for a narrow segment of the MAGA movement and its Canadian sympathisers, but it is not something Canadians by-and-large especially want to see or hear. We see south of the border how the right wing is starving the people for the simple crime of being poor, while using access to food as blackmail to make them give up what little healthcare they have. That is the picture of unfiltered, ruthless austerity.

With so much going on south of the border, Canadians can plainly see the fiscal game the Conservatives play. They need a distraction to take power to execute their Canadian Project 2025 equivalent.

In order to sew division and have an election they can win, the Conservatives have a completely different approach. According to leader Pierre Poilievre, Canada has a crime crisis. Not only that, he credits Prime Minister Mark Carney with creating it in his six short months in office.

If this sounds familiar, it is because Donald Trump has been shouting from the rooftops about wildly exaggerated crime across the United States.

Crime is scary. It creates fear and uncertainty. It is a message that is aimed at allowing a government to trample on rights under guise of protecting people. If you are surrounded by criminals, you will be suspicious of your neighbour, reliant on your government to protect you from the other.

Indeed, Trump has used the overstated threat of crime to send the US national guard into cities across the country. That those cities are not supportive of Trump and his agenda is, of course, mere coincidence.

What does Pierre Poilievre hope to achieve by making crime the story and portraying Carney as responsible for it? Is he hoping to send Canada’s army, or perhaps the Texas National Guard, into our cities to curtail our apparent Carney Crime Wave? Or is he merely hoping to impugn the reputation of our police for not solving this spurious crime epidemic?

Poilievre's Descpicable Attack

Poilievre needs an election before his leadership review, which is now just over two months away. A federal budget in a minority parliament provides the only real opportunity to cause one.

To prevent an immediate election, the Liberals need a dance partner to pass the budget.

The NDP, after propping up the last Liberal government, lost their leader and official party status. This puts them in an awkward spot. Do they support the Liberals again at the risk of their own credibility? Do they oppose them without a permanent leader while still sitting on campaign debt? It is an unenviable position for them.

Does the Bloc support a Liberal budget that is all about building Canada? Not likely. They would if they could see how to use it to undermine the country, though.

How about the Conservatives? We already know Poilievre wants an election, and he wants to do it on MAGA-style dishonesty and division. But what about his people?

Nova Scotia Conservative MP and former deputy speaker Chris D’Entremont answers that one for us. He is no longer a Conservative MP as of last night, after all, rejecting Poilievre’s approach to our national dialog. After seeing Pierre’s vision for a Maple MAGA Canada contrasted with Carney’s vision for a sovereign one, he is telling us that Poilievre can no longer hold the softer elements of his own base.

On the same day as progressive Zohran Mamdani took out billionaire-backed Andrew Cuomo to become mayor of New York City on an American election day where progressives won a litany of local and state elections across the United States, the message is clear. A strong, focused, progressive message is what the voters ultimately want.

Support for MAGAnauts like Trump and Poilievre exists because their messages are clear and focused, and Liberals and Democrats have been afraid to offer their own vision, rather they are trying ever harder to move just a little more to the right to remain “centrists” — and keep access to wealthy donors.

With the message from last night’s budget, and the elections across the United States yesterday, an election would give Canadians a strong opportunity to tell MAGAnauts like Poilievre where to go. We could model it on the Dutch, whose recent positive campaign produced a decidedly positive result.

Petty crime is not the defining issue for today’s Canada. Our very future as a country is the question.

If Poilievre wants to have an election to avoid his party’s leadership review, I am quite sure Canadians as a whole would be more than happy to offer him a verdict — and save the Conservative Party the trouble.