Canada’s national election campaign is just over a week old, but party leaders have already promised billions of dollars in tax cuts and programs if elected. Looming large is President Donald Trump, who announced midweek that auto tariffs would be imposed within the next few days. That news affected the campaigns of most of Canada’s party leaders.
The latest polling from Nick Nanos shows the Liberals, led by Mark Carney, holding a five-point lead over the second-place Conservative Party—a dramatic shift from three months ago, when the Liberals trailed by 20 points.
“What it looks is that Canadians, at least today, and this isn’t what will happen on voting day, but at least today, they’re sizing up the different options, primarily Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre, and they’re moving towards Mark Carney right now, and are giving him a tip of the hat in terms of the government that they’d like to lead the country,” Nanos said.
For now, a majority of decided voters believe Carney is the best leader to take on Trump and his tariffs. When asked who they would like to see as prime minister, 48 percent said Carney, while 32% supported Poilievre.
Carney’s campaign has centered on responding to the White House’s attacks on trade.
“I reject any attempts to weaken Canada. To wear us down, to break us, so that America can own us. That will never happen. And our response to these latest tariffs is to fight. It is to protect. It is to protect and to build. We will fight the US tariffs with retaliatory trade actions of our own that will have maximum impact in the United States and minimum impact here in Canada,” Carney said.
Carney is also pledging to build a new Canadian economy with less dependence on the U.S.
Meanwhile, the Conservative campaign has struggled to maintain focus. The party has tried to shift attention to affordability and housing, and some Conservative campaign literature even makes no mention of the tariffs. Instead, it emphasizes tax cuts, home building, and crime.
Sources within the party describe the campaign as disorganized, with frustration growing over Poilievre’s lack of focus on trade policy. When asked about tariffs this weekend, Poilievre failed to directly address them.
“After the lost Liberal decade of rising costs and crime and a falling Canadian economy under the American thumb, we cannot allow the Liberals a fourth term in office. We need a change to a Canada First government. That will axe taxes, build homes, approve resources, bring home the hundreds of billions of dollars the Liberals have pushed out of the economy so that we can stand up to the president from a position of strength,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre has promised a middle-class tax cut and a plan to allow Canadians to defer capital gains taxes. He is also pitching his Conservatives as the best choice to stand up to Trump.
The New Democratic Party, lagging in the polls, has also focused on cost-of-living issues. Leader Jagmeet Singh recently proposed an emergency price cap on grocery essentials.
“A lot of Canadians are worried about how much it costs them when they go to the grocery stores With all of the threats of Donald Trump and the threats of tariffs, one of things on people’s minds is the fact that food is already so expensive, will these trade wars and these tariffs mean that my food prices are going to go up even higher, and that leaves people really worried,” Singh said.
Still, the NDP has slipped in the polls, as have the Greens and the separatist Bloc Québécois. As week two of the campaign gets underway, the big issue on voter’s minds will still be Donald Trump and his tariffs, set to land on April 2nd.
