The pearl clutchers are at it again.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised Monday that, if elected, he and his government would use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to allow people who commit multiple murders to be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole.
There are two big questions about who will show up for the first leaders’ debate this week: Which Pierre Poilievre will we see? And how forgiving will the audience be?
The Pierre Poilievre who appeared on the Radio-Canada talk show, Tout le monde en parle, was a creature that had rarely been spotted in front of TV cameras.
The Conservative Leader was smiling, self-effacing, foregoing attacks on his Liberal opponent and talking to people rather than at them. It was style rather than substance, but it left a warmer impression than his usual too-hot-for-TV, aggressive style.
Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre agreed on one subject this week: change is needed.
The federal Conservative leader is saying that Canada needs change. The Ontario premier is saying that Poilievre needs to change his campaign team.
It is a remarkable feature in an already remarkable Canadian election campaign, this public airing of differences between Poilievre and Ford. Two conservatives, who would normally be allies against the federal Liberals, are openly at odds over who is best placed to win the April 28 election.
This *with us or against us* attitude is going to cost PP and the CPC the election.
*My way or the highway* combined with *I will burn down your village* may even cost him his seat.
I am quite surprised you took the time to think thru, write down and post such a ridiculous &… https://t.co/kbk4bXeXmO
— realNickKouvalis (@NickKouvalis) April 16, 2025
OTTAWA — Ontario Premier Doug Ford fired off another salvo in the on-again, off-again battle between his provincial Progressive Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party, saying his own campaign manager would have avoided the federal party’s current election woes.
With the Conservatives lagging behind Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s party since the beginning of the campaign, after enjoying a huge polling lead for the better part of two years, Poilievre’s strategy has been the subject of wide-ranging scrutiny.
Lots of flack over this statement below.
I think a lot of people are upset with Doug Ford – and I understand all of it.
But, everyone’s ire is one sided. Some balance and being better informed is required:
For months/years, Pierre did not reach out to Ford.
During Ford’s election in February 2025, Pierre and the CPC… https://t.co/XWS87wo8x8— realNickKouvalis (@NickKouvalis) April 14, 2025
Finally, some good news for Canada’s Conservative party. For the first time since the federal election was announced, a poll last week showed them in the lead, and polls over the weekend show them closing in on the Liberal party. They’re not where they were, but it’s progress.
In early January, the much-loathed Trudeau was stepping down, both Liberals and the New Democrats were highly unpopular, and the Conservatives, with a no-nonsense economic platform were considered a shoo-in for the next election.
A number of prominent business leaders are throwing their support behind Pierre Poilievre in the upcoming federal election because they feel his Conservative Party will best handle Canada’s slowing economic growth.
The group of more than 30 current and past executives includes Fairfax Financial CEO Prem Watsa, Canaccord Genuity CEO Dan Daviau, former Royal Bank of Canada CEO Anthony Fell and former Scotiabank CEO Brian Porter.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has not moved to the GTA, it just seems that way as he goes door to door with candidates, searching for a pathway to the Prime Minister’s Office.
After three elections in which Halton, Durham, York and Peel voters elected enough Liberal MPs to be dubbed the “Greater Trudeau Area,” opinion polls as recent as January suggested the seat-rich 905 belt was ready to swing back to Conservative domination.
Two Liberal Party staffers attended last week’s Canada Strong and Free Networking (CSFN) Conference where they planted buttons that used Trump-style language and highlighted division within the Conservative Party.
The conference, often referred to by its former name, the Manning Conference, is an opportunity for conservative-leaning Canadians to talk about policy proposals and network. It was held at the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa.
In an incident last month that may soon be considered ominous foreshadowing, Prime Minister Mark Carney was pressed by the media about his financial holdings and the ethical conundrums that they present. To change the subject, Carney boasted about his recently acquired security clearance, and claimed it was irresponsible for the leader of the Opposition not to obtain one himself.
This criticism flirted with the conspiracy theory that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would fail a background check, which ignores the fact that Poilievre received security clearance after becoming a cabinet minister in 2013, demonstrating that there had been no concerns by security and intelligence officials about his loyalty to Canada or compromising foreign connections.
Given the wild trajectory of federal politics since the start of the year, with the Liberals rising an eye-popping 25 percentage points in the polls, you’d think Pierre Poilievre was running a fault-filled campaign. Talk last week of internal disarray at his campaign HQ fuelled the perception.
But it is hardly the case. A bad campaign would have resulted in fading and falling support for the Conservatives. But the party’s high support numbers have barely changed since the months before the campaign began. They are still hovering in the 40-per-cent neighbourhood, which is often enough to form a majority government.
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives aren’t done yet. The campaign may finally be turning in their direction, despite polls showing Liberal leads.
Poilievre has drawn 16,000 people to a rally outside Edmonton, 5,000 in Surrey, B.C., 6,500 in Oshawa and 3,000 in Kingston, both in Ontario.
These are enormous numbers for Canadian political rallies. The Conservatives aren’t making them up.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is promising to crack down on the use of offshore tax havens and recover as much as $1 billion a year in lost revenues.
In a video posted on X, Poilievre said the money recovered through the initiative will be used to help pay for his plan to introduce a $14-billion income tax cut by reducing the rate in the lowest tax bracket from 15 per cent to 12.75 per cent.
“You can’t avoid your taxes, global elites should not be able to either, and that is why I will end the Liberal two-tier tax system,” Poilievre said during a campaign stop in Edmonton on Tuesday.
If you want to catch Pierre Poilievre in any detail, you have to do it early — in his morning media scrums on 24-hour news channels — before the ‘cycle’ takes over, and his points and his audience have been clipped, cropped, and culled.
For years, pundits have paraphrased his words, scarcely showing him actually speak (even while occasionally praising his political prowess.) To get around the media, Poilievre has had to post videos on social. Now, he’s accused of avoiding the media and not properly getting his message out (et tu, Kory Teneycke?)
Former prime minister Stephen Harper says Canada’s problems weren’t created by the Trump administration as he made an impassioned pitch for Pierre Poilievre to become Canada’s next prime minister and downplayed Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s role during the 2008 global financial crisis.
Mr. Harper appeared at Mr. Poilievre’s rally in Edmonton on Monday night to introduce the Conservative Leader to a crowd of thousands who packed into at a warehouse south of the city. The rally, which is the 11th of the campaign, was the largest one so far, with organizers saying upwards of 10,000 people registered for the event.
Pierre Poilievre’s campaign pivot to focus more on Donald Trump’s trade war may be helping the Conservatives narrow the polling gap with Mark Carney’s Liberals in the April 28 election.
According to the Star’s election predictor, the Signal, as of Monday the Liberals led with 42.3 per cent to 40 per cent for the Tories.
That’s slightly closer than on Friday when the Vox Pop Labs aggregator, which crunches publicly available polling information in a supercomputer, had the Grits at 43.2 per cent and the Tories at 39.9 per cent.
I think Carney is becoming “Known” as part of the braintrust behind Trudeau’s misrule and that is the real cause of his erosion in public perception.
