Trudeau had long ago reached his best-before date and there had been concerted efforts within the Liberal Party to oust him well back into 2024. Trudeau’s departure would not have had the effect it did, however, if not for the election of Trump... 2/n - ThreadSky

tmpear.bsky.social • 61 days ago

Trudeau had long ago reached his best-before date and there had been concerted efforts within the Liberal Party to oust him well back into 2024. Trudeau’s departure would not have had the effect it did, however, if not for the election of Trump... 2/n

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tmpear.bsky.social•61 days ago

... and his subsequent antagonisms toward Canada: his trade war and threats to make Canada the 51st state. In Mark Carney, the Liberals chose a leader who seemed tailor-made for the moment: he could be packaged as a “serious” politician whose experience leading the Banks of Canada & England... 3/n

tmpear.bsky.social•61 days ago

... through the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit respectively apparently proved him the steady hand the crisis demanded. Carney’s attributes contrasted well with his principal opponent, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. 4/n

tmpear.bsky.social•61 days ago

A career politician, Poilievre has little gravitas and—despite concerted efforts to package him as a likeable family man who “gets” working people—Canadians have failed to warm to him. There’s a strong argument his advantage was simply that voters disliked Trudeau more. 5/n

tmpear.bsky.social•61 days ago

And then there is Poilievre’s achilles heel: his Trump-lite ideology, policy positions and persona. Poilievre had used inflation as a cudgel to very effectively beat Trudeau into retirement, building a huge lead between mid-2023 and late-2024. 6/n

tmpear.bsky.social•61 days ago

But absent Trudeau and with Trump's arrival he was vulnerable. Could he really take on the man whose policy positions he had aped and whose language he had often copied? (The Liberals have run ads that show Trump and Poilievre saying the same thing in identical or near identical wording.) 7/n

tmpear.bsky.social•61 days ago

So why did we also see the polling numbers for the NDP and to a lesser extent the Bloc Québécois (Québec’s independence party) collapse? It’s mostly a case of “My overriding priority is to stop the right.” 8/n

deathbybacklog.bsky.social•61 days ago

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