Good morning. Donald Trump’s return to the White House has upended Pierre Poilievre’s messaging – more on that below, along with Ukraine’s imperilled peace plan and Air Canada’s class-action payout. But first:

• The sex-assault case begins for former Canadian world junior hockey players
• Canada’s red-ink era is here to stay as parties promise deficits
• An earthquake in Istanbul injures more than 230 people and prompts widespread panic

For more than a year, the Conservative Party held a double-digit lead in the federal election, bolstered by the three-word slogans that Pierre Poilievre so enjoys. “Axe the tax.” “Fix the budget.” “Boots not suits.” “Build the homes.” Poilievre had sharpened his snappy sound bites over two decades in politics – starting as a combative backbencher in 2004, then as Leader of the Opposition since 2022 – and they were resonating with voters outside the typical Conservative tent. Union workers who leaned NDP found themselves drawn to Poilievre’s affordability sales pitch. Millennial voters, vital to Justin Trudeau’s 2015 triumph, felt the Tory leader could help them actually buy a home. Pundits sized up the polling data and declared the election would be a “rout” or a “cakewalk.”

Then Donald Trump returned to the White House.

As The Globe’s Andrew Willis writes in his new profile of the Conservative Leader, “Poilievre’s simple yet strategic slogans ran into the complex chaos of the U.S. President’s trade war and annexation threats.” The Liberal Party pivoted quickly. Trudeau stepped down and Mark Carney stepped in, talking up his economic-crisis credentials – and making a big show of dispensing with the carbon tax and capital gains levy after becoming Prime Minister. “Poilievre lost both the foe he wanted and the taxes he targeted as central planks in his small-government platform,” Willis writes. Yet he couldn’t stop mentioning them. “Carbon Tax Carney” got a lengthy spin on the campaign trail. So did “Just like Justin.”

Those three-word slogans didn’t land quite the same way. By late March, polls showed the Carney-led Liberals had overtaken Poilievre’s Conservatives. Party insiders pleaded for a change in strategy to reflect the new political reality – first discreetly, then into the nearest microphone. Kory Teneycke, who spearheaded Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s three consecutive majority wins, insisted that tariffs needed to be Poilievre’s single ballot-box issue: “If they don’t get on it, and get on it quick, they are going to get obliterated.” Teneycke then told a podcast that the Conservatives’ refusal to focus on Trump’s economic threat constituted “campaign malpractice.” When asked for his take, Ford shrugged and said, “Sometimes the truth hurts.”

Not only had Poilievre failed to take the fight to the U.S. President, Teneycke lamented, but he couldn’t distinguish himself from the guy. “He looks too much like Trump. He sounds too much like Trump. He uses the lexicon of Trump,” Teneycke said. The challenge for Poilievre is that at his much-hyped rallies – which far surpass the size of Carney’s events – the lines that get the loudest cheers are the ones that sound pulled from Trump’s playbook. The crowd wants to hear that a Conservative government will promote “a warrior culture, not a woke culture” in the military. They approve of defunding our national broadcaster and cutting foreign aid. And yes, even in April, they put their hands together for slashing the carbon tax.

So while “stay the course” won’t wind up on any Conservative placards, it has, within the party at least, been working for them. They aren’t the ones hemorrhaging support – instead, the 25-point polling gap has been made up by NDP, Bloc Québécois and Green voters switching allegiance to the Liberals. In pretty much any other federal election, a 39-per-cent share of the vote would hand Conservatives a majority government, as it did for Stephen Harper in 2011. But this isn’t any other federal election. And the Liberals are sitting at 44 per cent. (You can find the full methodology here.)

Maybe the trouble for Conservatives isn’t the message but the messenger. Last night, The Globe reported that Poilievre is at risk of losing the seat he’s held on to for the past 21 years. Internal polling shows him in a dead heat with Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy in Carleton, a riding the Conservative Leader won with 52 per cent of the vote in 2021 and 46 per cent in 2019. Poilievre’s call for change might be popular with Canadians, pollster Nik Nanos told The Globe. “But they are not enthusiastic about him.”

U.S. Vice President JD Vance urged Ukraine to accept a ceasefire deal with terms that greatly favoured Russia, while Donald Trump launched another social-media broadside against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of jeopardizing the peace process. Read more here about the stalled talks to bring this three-year war to an end.

At home: A Quebec judged ordered Air Canada to pay $10-million in a class-action lawsuit that alleged passengers were charged more than the ticket price advertised.

Abroad: More than 20,000 mourners gathered to watch Pope Francis’s procession to St. Peter’s Basilica, where he will lie in state before his burial on Saturday.

Retail: Hudson’s Bay will begin clearance sales at six stores that had been previously left out of the liquidation.