OTTAWA — Mark Carney is not Justin Trudeau.
He’s also not Pierre Poilievre.
But it’s the prime minister’s migration of Trudeau’s centre-left Liberal party to the political centre — and beyond — that delivers the Conservative leader his primary challenge as he enters a new parliamentary session, armed with a domestic agenda his party insists it was right to focus on all along.
“It’s a different dynamic. You have a minority Liberal government with effectively no coalition partner,” Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman told the Star in an interview.
“You’ll see strong opposition, but we’ll be talking about our own priorities and, frankly, the priorities of Canadians.”
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Lantsman said her party doesn’t need internal or public opinion polling to know that those priorities are the issues the Conservatives needed to seize upon during the spring campaign, a strategy that exposed Poilievre to criticism that he lost the contest over his failure to pivot to Washington’s trade threats, but won him an expanded voter base and the largest seat gain of any federal party.
“We were out speaking to Canadians. Like, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out … that Canadians can’t afford a home, that young people can’t get a job, that the crime crisis is out of control. The consensus in this country has been lost on immigration because of a broken immigration system where we have used it to suppress wages for young people,” Lantsman said.
The four pillars of cost of living, unemployment, crime and immigration are what Poilievre seized on in the lead-up to Parliament’s Monday return — and a homecoming to the House of Commons after his own exile due to the loss in the general election of his Ottawa-area seat.
Last week, he called for an end to Canada’s decades-old temporary foreign worker program, alleging the policy was worsening an unemployment crisis by preventing Canadians from getting local jobs.
This week, he brought back his campaign-era housing pledges and, in a news conference featuring victims of crime and their families, outlined his vision for justice system reform.
Carney, meanwhile, has recently focused on throwing lifelines to tariff-battered sectors and laying the groundwork for a series of “nation-building” resource and infrastructure projects in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade aggression.
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While the Canada-U.S. trade spat is still an issue resonating with Canadians, it no longer appears to be a top concern. Carney’s front bench heard as much at the prime minister’s cabinet retreat last week, where Léger Marketing shared public opinion research that showed that affordability had become a more pressing matter for Canadians.
“It’s not that (Canadians) are not concerned about it, it’s just that they don’t want to hear about Trump. They have their own challenges,” said Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategies who worked on Poilievre’s leadership campaign.
That means dialing into issues Carney is not talking about will be key for Poilievre this fall, and is doubly important, Roth said, because of Carney’s shift away from the left.
“The Liberal move to shamelessly try to take up any issue that is popular for the Conservatives is, I think, a real challenge,” she said.
Carney has, among other issues, scrapped the consumer price on carbon, cancelled the proposed hike on the inclusion rate for capital gains, paused the sales mandate for zero-emission vehicles, expressed openness to expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, evaded committing to Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions targets, and forecasted a fall “austerity” budget.
In the weeks ahead, his government is also expected to introduce legislation on bail reforms and sentencing changes.
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Lantsman, for her part, rejected any suggestions that Carney has succeeded in his efforts to nudge the Liberals rightward.
“He’s saying all of those things, they appear in press releases, but there’s no evidence of anything. He’s surrounded himself with largely the same cabinet and the same failed ministers from the previous 10 years of Liberals,” she said.
Ben Woodfinden, Poilievre’s former communications director, said it’s time to retire the Trudeau comparisons.
“I don’t think right now saying he is just like Trudeau is good. They do have to reckon with the fact that he’s a different player,” Woodfinden said.
“They are dealing with a different kind of prime minister here. That’s a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity.”
That opportunity lies in the House of Commons, where Poilievre and Carney will duel for the first time next week, and where many Conservatives hope their leader will take the prime minister to task on delivering on his new and lofty ambitions.
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“There’s some contradictions in the Liberal-voting coalition and in the government’s agenda, between climate priorities and economic development, between the interests of labour and the interests of business,” Roth said.
“I think the added pressure of Conservatives pushing on those inherent contradictions will force these challenging choices for a government that already has challenging choices before it.”
But for Poilievre, who just marked his third year as Conservative leader, the battles outside the Commons loom just as large as those within.
Preparations are already underway for the Conservative party’s national convention in January, when Poilievre will face the next test of his leadership.
“There’s no serious organized efforts to challenge him in the leadership review … but he still has to take that seriously,” Woodfinden said.
“They still have to keep their eye on the prize, which ultimately is to win an election, whenever it is. So I do think they have to be careful not to do anything in the next three or four months that might jeopardize that.”
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Rob Batherson, a former Conservative party president, said the party is in the process of selecting the delegates who will attend next year’s gathering.
“This is where making sure there is good attention paid to grassroots members, to make sure that the care and feeding of the party is really strong, because you want to make sure that when people come to the convention in Calgary in January that they feel listened to, respected and prepared to give Pierre a second chance,” Batherson said.
“He is doing the work in terms of connecting with people one on one. But that’s the kind of work that needs to continue … and frankly, for the convention, it’s probably more important to do that work than whatever happens in question period.”
