On the campaign trail, half the battle is not putting your foot in it

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/03/2025 (195 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To win a federal election campaign, you need to string together as many good days as possible, while limiting bad days to as few as possible.

Seems simple, but what qualifies as a good day?

That’s a day when you have drawn the attention of the public and news media to one of your campaign planks. If your ideas are top of mind with voters and journalists, then you have a fighting chance to win some hearts and minds.

So, how would we define a bad day?

That’s a day when you spend all your waking hours facing awkward questions about something you said or did in the past, or a controversy that allows your political opponents to point fingers. In other words, days when your good ideas are eclipsed by your mistakes.

It’s still early in the 2025 election campaign, but the Conservatives and their bombastic leader, Pierre Poilievre, are narrowly leading on the bad day scoreboard.

It started Sunday, the day a writ of election was granted by the governor general, with the unearthing of a weeks-old interview between Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and a far-right podcast in the United States.

In that interview, Smith claimed she had reached out to the Trump administration to ask that it pause tariffs until after the election to help Poilievre. Smith added that “Pierre would be very much in sync with, I think… the new direction in America.”

For the first two days of the campaign, Smith’s awkward attempt at “helping” the Tory campaign put Poilievre on the defensive. His rebuttals to Smith’s assertions that he was “in sync” with the Trump administration drew eyeballs away from some of his early campaign pledges.

Then, as interest in Smith’s interview was waning, the Globe and Mail reported CSIS had found evidence Indian agents or their proxies had meddled with the 2022 Conservative leadership campaign to help Poilievre get elected.

Even though CSIS found Poilievre did not know about the meddling, the Tory leader was forced to spend valuable campaign time defending his leadership campaign and his decision last year not to obtain the necessary security clearance so he could see evidence of Indian influence in his leadership bid. Poilievre was the only major party leader who refused to view classified evidence from the CSIS investigation.

After two days of defence, Poilievre and the Tories went on the offensive. Riffing off attacks levelled before the campaign started, the Tories accused Liberal Leader Mark Carney of helping wealthy Canadians shelter income in tax havens abroad while he was on the board of directors of Brookfield Asset Management, a global investment fund created in Toronto but headquartered in New York City.

The Tories have used the Brookfield narrative to amplify what they believe are vulnerabilities in Carney’s profile as a prime-minister-in-waiting: that he is a wealthy elite; that he aided wealthy Canadians to avoid paying taxes; that he worked for companies that left Canada and relocated in the U.S.

Did the Tories manage to create the same disruption in the Liberal camp as they suffered in the first 48 hours of the campaign? It doesn’t appear so.

Although Poilievre has been good at translating the Brookfield narrative into edgy campaign trail attacks, the story is muddy and complex, and thus unlikely to resonate with the public. Evidence of that could be seen in the low take-up by national media; only the CBC, which had been spanked by the Globe on reporting the Poilievre-CSIS story, went heavy on Brookfield. Everyone else ignored the story.

Conservatives will no doubt see this as proof the national news media wants the Liberals returned to power. The problem with that gripe is that the CBC, the federal Crown corporation that could be massively de-funded under a Tory government, leaned heavily on the Brookfield allegations.

The truth is that neither the CSIS story nor the Brookfield story qualify as seismic moments in the election campaign. Both tales are likely to be referenced by the leaders throughout the campaign, but only in passing. There simply isn’t enough meat on either bone to make this a ballot-box issue for voters.

In fact, this campaign has been, for better or worse, a seismic gaffe-free event — at least so far.

Carney has made some mistakes that you would expect from a first-time political leader suddenly thrust into the crucible that is a federal election campaign.

On Tuesday, Carney made two notable mistakes while referring to one of his candidates in Montreal who survived the 1989 Montreal massacre.

Nathalie Provost was shot three times at Polytechnique, the engineering school at the Université de Montréal. Carney referred to her twice as “Provonost” and said the massacre took place at Montreal’s Concordia University.

Mistakes such as this only become an issue if they keep happening. It’s unusual for a leader and party to lead the campaign in gaffes and still win.

Fortunately for Poilievre and Carney, neither leader has made enough mistakes, or a big enough mistake, to change the election.

But, hey, tomorrow is a new day and a new chance to achieve infamy.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca