Carney’s Liberal Majority Reshapes Fortunes to the Left and the RightThis week we covered the by-elections and floor-crossings that have reshaped Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party into a majority. Today I wanted to shift the focus away from the Liberals to consider the impact their move to the center might have on the Conservatives and the New Democratic Party.
To help navigate this, I spoke with David Coletto, who founded and leads Abacus, a Canadian polling and public opinion firm. Where does the Liberal Party shift leave the Conservatives? The Conservative core is solid but insufficient, and the coalition is harder to manage than it looks. My polling has consistently shown that roughly one in four Conservative voters are genuinely drawn to President Trump’s style of politics. They see the primary threats to their lives as coming from inside the country, from government overreach and institutions they feel have failed them. Our most recent work makes that division concrete: Among Conservative voters, only 31 percent identified Trump and American trade policy as a top threat. Government overspending, immigration and people currently in political power all ranked higher. [Read: Carney Seals a Majority and Remakes Canada’s Liberal Party] [Read: Elections and Defections Unshackle Canada’s Liberals Under Carney] These aren’t just different priorities. I think they reflect fundamentally different understandings of what is threatening Canada. Among Canadians who saw Trump as a top threat, 57 percent said they’d vote Liberal and only 26 percent Conservative. Among those most worried about government overspending, nearly 60 percent were voting Conservative. The last election was a contest between competing threat models, and the Liberals won the threat that dominated. Where can Conservatives look to build a majority for the next electoral cycle? The majority path for the Conservative Party is always narrow. I’m not certain there’s a natural Conservative majority coalition in Canada. Geographically, Quebec is largely out of reach. Atlantic Canada swung hard Liberal and has resisted the Conservative message, despite three of the four provinces currently being governed by conservative parties. They found surprising strength in parts of Ontario’s suburban belt, but it wasn’t nearly enough to offset Liberal gains elsewhere. To build a majority they need to hold the younger men Pierre Poilievre brought in on economic grievance while recovering boomers (primarily men) who moved to the Liberals when the external threat and Mark Carney changed their emotional calculus. Those two groups want very different things from a leader. All of it runs through one unresolved question: whether enough Canadians can get comfortable with Poilievre as prime minister.
Does the centrist evolution of the Liberals under Carney push Conservatives to the right, or does this reorganization confirm the party’s direction under Poilievre? The more honest framing is that yes, it largely confirms what was already happening. The Conservatives didn’t move rightward in response to Carney. They were already there. Poilievre built his brand before Carney was even a recognizable figure in Canadian politics. Those choices were made when the Liberals were governing from the left and cost-of-living anger was the dominant energy. What Carney’s arrival did was change the emotional register almost overnight. Government approval went from 27 percent to 43 percent in weeks. The tariff crisis nationalized the choice in a way that made Poilievre’s populist frame look misaligned. “Canada strong” is not the same terrain as “Ottawa is broken.” The Conservatives built a machine optimized for one kind of election and found themselves fighting a different one. Whether Poilievre can recalibrate is the real question. He has genuine political talent. But his brand is set, and the tension between the populist insurgent identity and the kind of sober opposition leader, a prime minister in waiting, who can peel off moderate Liberals, is hard to resolve. My research makes the stakes clear. Even among center-right Canadians, the American trade threat still edges out government overspending as the top concern. How should we think about opportunities on the left of the Liberals, especially for the N.D.P. and its new leader, Avi Lewis? The structural opportunity is real, but Avi Lewis inherits a difficult situation. The first question worth asking is whether the political conditions in Canada right now are compatible with the kind of politics he represents. My polling finds that the dominant emotional condition among most Canadians isn’t optimism or ideological enthusiasm, but anxiety about instability and uncertainty. When people feel the ground beneath them is unstable, the emphasis shifts toward security, competence and the perception that a leader can protect them from further disruption. The challenge for Lewis and the N.D.P. is salience. Structural critiques of capitalism rarely appear spontaneously. His specific proposals would likely test well individually, but issues that don’t occupy a central place in the public’s mental agenda rarely drive voting behavior on their own. He also faces a credibility challenge worth naming directly. Voter psychology during periods of uncertainty suggests people distinguish between policy content and leadership credibility. Lewis’s biography, as a journalist and filmmaker embedded in global progressive networks, doesn’t automatically confer credibility in communities where voters judge leaders through shared experience and cultural proximity. None of this means he can’t build that credibility over time. Jack Layton did it. But the path requires a message that resonates with people whose instincts are shaped more by economic stress than ideological debate.
From recent polling, give us a sense of the areas that can lead voters to switch party support. I think the Canadian electorate right now is sorted less by traditional ideology and more by what frightens people most. If you’re most worried about Trump and trade, you’re voting Liberal by a wide margin. If you’re most worried about government spending or immigration, you’re voting Conservative by an equally wide margin. That’s a volatile basis for any coalition because the dominant fear can shift quickly. Underneath it all, cost of living remains the unresolved tension. The affordability anxiety of 2022 to 2024 didn’t disappear, and since the conflict in Iran, it has intensified. But, instead of blaming policy choices coming out of Ottawa, most Canadians blame the decisions of the U.S. president. This gives the Liberals some cover, even as they respond to the anxiety through some targeted policies. Fundamentally, I think most elections are determined by a simple question: Which party and leader is best able to handle the issue more voters care most about? Right now, it’s Trump and global uncertainty. If that holds, it’s advantage Carney. If that changes, then we could see voters become open to switching. What are the greatest pitfalls for the Conservatives and the N.D.P? Where might they fail to grab opportunities and how? For the Conservatives, any move to broaden appeal on the external threat question risks alienating that base. Any move to keep that base fully activated cements the perception among the persuadable middle that the party’s instincts are pointed inward. That’s more of a genuine strategic dilemma rather than a messaging problem. For the N.D.P., the trap is timidity combined with a misreading of where the available voters actually are. The party is weak and rebuilding. With a majority government, the N.D.P. can be bold and work hard to differentiate itself from the Liberals without worrying about an early election. The voters the N.D.P. needs back are parked with the Liberals out of anxiety, not deep loyalty. Lewis has the ideological raw material for that argument — like Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City or the Greens in Britain. The question is whether he can make it land with people whose primary concern is stability, not transformation. That gap, between the politics he represents and the emotional condition of the electorate he needs to reach, is the central challenge of his leadership of the N.D.P. Trans CanadaThis section was compiled by Shawna Richer, an editor on the International desk at The Times.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada Bureau Chief for The Times. She is based in Toronto. How are we doing? Like this email?
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