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This Graphic Truth lays bare how a party in political freefall has roared back to life.
The Graphic Truth: Tracking the Liberal comeback
Despite the two parties narrowing by a point in the polls since they released their platforms this past week, looking at the arc of the race overall, it appears that the Conservatives peaked too early and the Liberals have made an impressive resurgence.
When Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned — accusing the Liberal leadership of being unprepared to face the growing threat of Donald Trump — it sent shockwaves through the party and delivered a major blow to Justin Trudeau’s leadership. The Liberals were already tanking in the polls, and many saw no way back.
But since Trudeau stepped down, the party has been on a sharp upswing. Trump’s renewed threats against Canada have sparked a surge in Canadian nationalism — a momentum the Liberals have tapped into. It’s too soon to call the results, but as the election comes to a close, this Graphic Truth lays bare how a party in political freefall has roared back to life.
What Canada’s main parties are running on in upcoming election
Canada’s 45th general election is less than two weeks away, and the nation faces a fraught political climate fueled by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats towards the country. The election's outcome could have far-reaching impacts on Canada’s future and position in a fragmenting world. In an exclusive interview, GZERO’s Tasha Kheiriddin sits down with Eurasia Group‘s senior advisor John Baird and Vice Chairman Gerald Butts to unpack what’s at stake in Canada’s election, including key political players and the strategies behind their campaigns.
Butts, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a key Liberal strategist, says Carney is seeking a public mandate after taking over during Canada’s longest-running minority Parliament. Baird counters that Carney aims to ride early popularity and break from the Trudeau legacy.
Despite clear ideological divides, both Butts and Baird agree on one point: Canada needs a strong majority government. Baird warns that, “when you have such a small number of Members of Parliament, it’s like the tail wagging the dog,” expressing concern over the instability of minority rule. Butts echoes the sentiment, stating the country would be “far better served by a strong government of either political stripe.”
With Canadians heading to the polls, the world will be watching closely. The 2025 Canada election could determine not just the nation's economic path but its place on the global stage.
Watch full interview: Canadians head to the polls — and into the Trump vortex
Canada’s Liberals and Conservatives are neck and neck as election begins, and running on similar promises
Canada’s federal election is on. The polls show a polarized contest between the Liberals and Conservatives, one dominated by Donald Trump and the question of who’s best-suited to deal with his tariff and annexation threats. Canadian nationalism has surged. The Liberal Party, recently down 25 points in the polls to the Conservatives, have seen their fortunes turn around under new leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney — a manwho’s been all too keen to, ahem, adapt ideas from his top rival.
Liberal, Tory, same old story?
A Trump-centric campaign risks obscuring other important policy issues. But how much does it matter when the two front-runners are so close together? So far, both parties — one of which is running on the slogan “Canada Strong” and the other on “Canada First” – have adopted similar proposals for a range of issues.
Both Liberal and Conservative campaigns launched with promises to cut personal income taxes. The Liberals are offering a 1% cut to the lowest bracket, and the Conservatives are putting forward a 2.25% cut. Both parties are also promising to cut federal sales taxes on new homes for first-time buyers, with Liberals including new builds worth as much as CA$1 million and the Conservatives ramping it all the way up to … $1.3 million, but they’ll expand eligibility to non-first-time buyers, including investors.
On defense, Carney is promising to spend 2% of GDP on the military by 2030 and expand Arctic security. Poilievre has promised more or less the same, with details to come. Both say they’ll speed up the building of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines, though Carney would keep a Trudeau-era emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, while Poilievre would not.
Affordability remains a major concern, even more so with tariffs threatening the economy. Poilievre even says he’d keep (though perhaps not expand) the Liberals’ public prescription drug, daycare, and dental care programs. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of Canadians can’t afford food. In 2024, the Liberals launched a food lunch program, which the Conservatives attacked as a headline grab but didn’t outright oppose. The parties haven’t released more on food security and affordability yet, but they almost certainly will.
Can the Liberals rewrite the past?
While the Liberals are now led by Carney, with former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gone, they’re still the same party that has governed for nearly a decade and earned ire from voters for policy shortcomings. With a policy agenda that, so far, looks similar to that of the Conservatives, the Liberals must persuade voters they’re not just better on policy, but that their guy is better on character and competence, and that his team is fit for purpose.
It’s a tricky task, and it’s fair to ask how much the Liberal Party has changed. Many top candidates and current Cabinet ministers are the same faces from Trudeau’s years, including Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, Bill Blair, and François-Philippe Champagne. The Liberal surge even persuaded a handful of candidates who’d served in the caucus to run again after saying they were out under Trudeau, including high-profile players Anita Anand, Sean Fraser, and Nate Erskine-Smith.
When Carney announced his Cabinet just before he triggered the election, Conservatives were quick to point out that the group contained 87% of the same faces from Trudeau’s table. Among the faces are those who supported, just weeks earlier, policies Carney is now reversing, including the Liberals’ signature consumer carbon price and its planned increase to the capital gains inclusion rate (reversals Conservatives were calling for).
Canada’s “presidentialized” election
A leader-focused campaign in the face of Trump’s threats will, perhaps ironically, be thoroughly American. Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice, notes that the tricky thing for the Liberals is this is a change campaign, with voters looking to reset after the Trudeau years. Carney will have to present himself as that change – which could mean an intense focus on him as leader.
Thompson calls it a “presidentialized” campaign, one that comes with a risk for the neophyte Liberal leader. “It opens the question of Carney’s political experience, or rather lack thereof – and the fact that he has never run an election campaign before, let alone a national general election campaign. It’s an open question whether his political inexperience comes out in a negative way.”
But a focus on character could also set Carney apart from Poilievre, even if the two don’t have much daylight between them on policy. Voters see Carney as the best person to be prime minister, and he enjoys high favorability ratings — over half the country likes him. The Conservative Party leader, on the other hand, isn’t particularly well-liked, with his unfavorables sitting at 59%.
Promise now, worry later?
For all the talk of character, Conservatives, including Poilievre himself, have accused the Liberals of stealing their ideas. That’s a fair criticism. As Thompson puts it, the Liberals have caught the Conservatives out and, indeed, have adopted their positions. But how far will that take the Liberals? And at what cost?
“These are all Conservative policies that were being wielded against Trudeau,” Thompson says, “which Carney has now adopted as his own. And it’s shrewd politicking.” But it’s also risky. “If the Liberals win, they need to deliver very quickly on showing that this is a new government and that they have new policies. The honeymoon period would be, I think, quite short.”
The Liberals will be happy to worry about all of this later. For now, they’re the beneficiaries of an election in which the very issues that were set to spell their doom have become temporarily incidental to Trump and to questions of character and competence – questions to which voters seem to think Carney is the answer.
The policy challenges that got Liberals into trouble in the first place are still lurking and waiting to reassert themselves in short order. But for the Liberals, those are problems for another day.
Canadian PM Mark Carney
Canadian PM calls snap election
The countdown is on! On Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carneydissolved parliament and called a snap federal election that promises to be one of the most consequential — and hotly contested — in recent Canadian history.
Until January, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives had maintained a two-year lead in opinion polls, which ran as high as 25% in December. But the resignation in January of unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, coupled with the return to power of US President Donald Trump, upended the race. It allowed new leader Carney, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, to capitalize on his financial and governance experience in the face of anxiety about Trump’s tariffs and talk of annexation. The Liberals are now neck and neck with the Conservatives and even ahead in some polls.
With the election set for April 28, the Conservatives are scrambling to retool their message, notably on the carbon tax, which Carney has now set to zero for consumers but maintained for industrial emitters. They also question Carney’s ethics, claiming he has conflicts of interest stemming from his work as chair of Brookfield Asset Management. The New Democratic Party of Jagmeet Singh is feeling the squeeze as it attempts to hold onto progressive voters, while the Bloc Québécois of Yves-François Blanchet will fight to represent Quebec’s interests in the new parliament.
For news about outgoing GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon and his decision to run for the Liberals, click here.
Outgoing GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon
Evan Solomon to run for Liberals
GZERO’s Evan Solomon announced on Thursday that he will be returning to Canada and running for Mark Carney’s Liberals. A former Canadian broadcaster, he has been GZERO’s publisher since 2022.
“Given the urgent challenges and threats facing Canadians right now, I’ve decided it’s the right time to come home and do whatever I can to help serve my community and country,” Solomon said in a LinkedIn post. “I will be joining the team led by Prime Minister Mark Carney and will be running as a candidate in the next Federal election. More details on this will be coming very soon!”
Maziar Minovi, CEO of Eurasia Group, praised Solomon for taking the plunge into politics. “You brought to your leadership at GZERO Media sharp insight, strategic vision, and an unwavering commitment to fact-based journalism. Now, you’re bringing that same passion to public service — exactly the kind of step we love to see from our teams.”
Minovi said the Eurasia Group is happy when members of his team choose public service. “As I often say, if you wouldn’t be seriously tempted to take the right job in government to impact the world, then you don’t belong at Eurasia Group.”
Eurasia Group special advisor Justin Kosslyn will be stepping in as GZERO’s interim publisher.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney holds a press conference at Canada House, in London, Britain, on March 17, 2025.
Canadians to head to the polls
New Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to call a snap election on Sunday, sending Canadians to the polls on April 28 or May 5. The campaign, taking place against a backdrop of provocations from Donald Trump, is expected to focus on who is best equipped to handle the US president, former central banker Carney or Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
The Liberals are leading in the polls after an unprecedented 25-point surge since Trump was elected. In the tumultuous period since then, Trudeau was forced out, and Carney took his place, swiftly canceling the consumer carbon tax and thereby removing the two issues Conservatives had built their campaign around. But Poilievre is a veteran, Carney is a political rookie with shaky French, and the electorate is volatile, so the results are unpredictable.
Polling shows Carney — who presided over the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England during economic crises — has an advantage over Poilievre as the candidate best suited to respond to Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty, but Poilievre will challenge that. He seized, for instance, on a Fox News interview in which Trump said he would rather deal with a Liberal government. Poilievre is already delivering campaign-style announcements highlighting his party’s plans to aggressively exploit natural resources, and will argue that Carney will continue with Trudeau-era climate policies that constrained development.
Carney has the momentum, though, after a successful trip to Europe, and the Liberals are announcing high-profile candidates, including former Quebec finance minister Carlos Leitão and outgoing GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon.
Because of Trump’s rhetoric, Canadians are already intensely engaged, so the campaign ahead is likely to have a different dynamic than most, where part of the challenge is getting tuned-out voters to pay attention. The wildcard will be Trump, who is promising to bring in tariffs on April 2 that could send Canada into a recession as voters are trying to figure out who can best handle him.
Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, is seen here officially announcing his bid for the federal Liberal Party leadership at Laurier Heights Community League in Edmonton, Canada, on Jan. 16, 2025.
Is Canada set for a snap election?
When was the vote supposed to happen? Canadian law requires that an election be held by Oct. 25, 2025. Federal elections last between 37 and 51 days and must be held on a Monday, so a March 10 call would mean a vote on April 21. Opposition parties are already planning to bring nonconfidence motions when Parliament reconvenes on March 24 to oust the minority government and force an early vote.
Why would Liberals call an early election? The resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, and talk of Canada as the 51st state have changed the political conversation. The ballot question has shifted from the government’s economic record to who can best take on Trump.
As a result, the Liberals’ poll numbers have risen dramatically. If Carney were leader, they would be tied withPierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, according to a new Leger survey. Since the opposition wants to force a vote anyway, there is arguably little to gain by waiting.
But it’s not a done deal. Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland says she would not hold an early election, citing the fact that, unlike Carney, she has a seat in Parliament and “would have the right to stand up in the House of Commons and to represent the government.” The timing could hinge on who wins the leadership – and where polls go between now and then.Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the federal Liberal caucus holiday party, the day after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unexpectedly resigned, in Ottawa, Ontario, on Dec. 17, 2024.
Chances of Trudeau staying as PM drop quickly
After Finance Minister Chrystia Freelandresigned in mid-December, Trudeau was said to be considering quitting. Since then, his Atlantic and Quebec caucuses – groups of members of Parliament from regions or provinces – have said he should go, which means the majority of Liberal members of Parliament are calling on him to quit. Trudeau’s former principal secretary – and Eurasia Group vice chairman – Gerald Buttsthinks Trudeau is less likely to stay on after the Freeland departure as his grip on power loosens.
“Mr. Trudeau was unlikely to lead the Liberal Party into the next election and is now much less likely to do so,” he writes. “That election will probably come sooner rather than later, and the odds of it producing a Conservative majority government are materially greater than they were before the events of 16 December.”
Before Christmas, Trudeau canceled all of his year-end press interviews save for one with comedian Mark Critch. A few days later, Trudeau was mocked and harassed while on vacation skiing in British Columbia.
The Liberals are down roughly 20 points in the polls, and the Conservatives are preparing a vote of non-confidence against the government through a committee backdoor trick by way of the standing committee on public accounts, which they control. The New Democratic Party has said it will vote non-confidence but hasn’t specified whether it’ll vote with the Conservatives if they proceed with their current plan, or wait to come up with their own. Whatever happens next, the days of Trudeau’s government appear to be numbered.