Kerry-Lynne Findlay won the BC Conservative leadership last weekend. It’s always incredibly easy to dissect the why of a win after the fact, Turns out, she had already won the more important contest weeks earlier, when she set the terms for what the race was about.

Her frame was a purity test. Are you a real conservative, or a BC Liberal looking to hijack the party for political convenience?

Once that became the ballot question party members thought they were answering, every other candidate was in a bind: Accept the frame and spend the campaign proving their Conservative credentials (which of course only reinforces KLF’s ballot question), or change the ballot question, perhaps to one about experience, competence, premier-in-waiting.

Some of KLF’s competitors tried the second option and ran what amounted to a general-election campaign for an audience that had shown up to answer a different question. Competence is a fine answer. It wasn’t the answer many members wanted to give.

In almost every contested decision — a leadership race, a regulatory file, a campaign, a boardroom fight — the side that defines the question has the strongest chance of winning. As a campaigner, it can be easy to focus our energy on winning the argument, but leverage sits further upstream, in deciding which argument the electorate believes it’s having.

Failure to set the frame means you run a campaign that answers the wrong question. No matter how strong your argument, you’re losing.

Findlay didn’t manufacture the appetite for a purity test; she read that it was already there, named it, and planted her flag before anyone else thought to. The frame worked because a real constituency was waiting to answer it. Set a question nobody in the room actually wants to take up, and you’ll find yourself framing to an empty room. The best politicians hear the question the room is aching to be asked.

So the next time you’re losing and can’t work out why, stop sharpening your argument. Look at the question. There’s a good chance you’re answering one your opponent chose for you, and answering it beautifully. The work is to change that question, or to claim it before they do. Whoever owns the question rarely has to win the debate. They’ve arranged things so the debate was never really in doubt.

Findlay still has to govern a party that’s only half-sure it wanted her, which is a genuinely hard problem and a different essay. But the win itself is a lesson in the thing I spend most of my working life on. Her rivals turned up with the better résumés and some excellent answers. She turned up with the question.

It’s going to be easy to make the economic case for Alberta staying in Canada, right? Perhaps. But that’s not what wins a referendum of this kind.

Premier Smith’s 37-word ballot question is a procedural mouthful, but the campaign it has triggered won’t be procedural at all. It will be about identity. It will be about who Albertans think they are, what they believe their province is owed, and whether the rest of the country can credibly say it has lived up to its end of the bargain. This might seem like an easy argument to make, but it’s going to be brutally tough.

Because while many have been distracted by the “healthy” numbers of Albertans who told Angus Reid they would vote to remain in Canada (60-67%, depending on the wording of the question), the more alarming number is that 30-35% would vote to leave. That’s a tipping point.

In Damon Centola’s spectacular book, Change, the sociologist outlines how the tipping point for social or behavioural change — the amount needed for a minority group to establish a new norm in a larger group — is 25%. Not 20%, 25%. Do we realistically think the leave side will ever dip below the 25% threshold? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Which means momentum can only go in one direction from here: in favour of the leave side. Why? Because the case to leave is emotionally resonant and easy to make. Because a leave vote will be a low-risk way to make a point. Besides, this isn’t the actual separation referendum, so what is there to lose?

The federalist side has spent the early weeks of this fight talking about the constitution, the legal threshold, the economics of a landlocked province, and the recklessness of putting this question to voters. Not to mention, drawing unhelpful analogies to Brexit. None of which is going to move anybody to the remain side.

And the federalists are about to make exactly the mistake the Better Together campaign made in Scotland in 2014. Better Together won — 55 to 45 — but it won so ugly that it earned the nickname Project Fear and arguably fed the grievance that has kept Scottish independence alive ever since.

The campaign was relentlessly economic, relentlessly cautionary, and relentlessly condescending. It told Scots they were too small, too poor, and too dependent to make it on their own. By the final fortnight, the polls had tightened to a coin flip, and the campaign was forced into a panicked late pivot — David Cameron's love-bomb speech, the Daily Telegraph's referendum-day Burns poem, and other emotional articulations of what the union actually meant. They may have worked. Barely. It was nearly too little, too late.

It’s a mistake to look at that win as a playbook to follow. The lesson of that campaign was how close the Unionists came to losing because they had spent two years arguing with people’s wallets instead of their values and relating to voters’ personal identities.

Listen to the language coming out of Ottawa and out east right now, and the same instinct is already in motion. Carney calls the separatists’ promises a “dangerous bluff.” Cabinet ministers warn about the legal threshold. Pundits litigate the question’s wording. The argument being mounted is that voting yes is irrational. It may well be. That is not the point. Telling people their grievance is irrational is the surest way to harden it.

The thing the federalists have to internalize, fast, is that a lot of Albertans pushing toward yes are not telling you they want to leave Canada. They are telling you they feel Canada has left them. They are wearing Canadian flags while collecting separation petitions, and the chattering class is mocking them for it without realizing the flag is the entire point. They want their country back.

So what would an emotional federalist argument look like? Not the bogeyman version where the rallying cry is Trump and the message is fear of him. That is just Project Fear with a new villain, and it concedes the same ground — we should stick together not because of who we are, but because of who is outside the door. That is not an identity. It’s a threat assessment. A shallow one at that.

The argument has to be affirmative. It has to come from Albertans first, then from federal voices willing to say plainly that the country got the message and is moving. It has to acknowledge — not deflect — that the last decade, Alberta was cast as the villain in someone else’s story. It has to make a case for Canada as something worth staying in for its own sake, not for fear of the alternative. And it has to do that without a single line that sounds like it was written by someone who has never set foot west of Dufferin Street.

The federalist side has the procedural argument. It has the economic argument. The constitution is on its side. The Supreme Court is, in all likelihood, on its side.

It does not yet have the emotional argument. That is the only argument that wins this thing. The campaign that figures out how to make Albertans feel that staying is an act of pride, not an act of resignation, will be the one that wins on October 19. It’s a brutally tough assignment.

For years, I’ve turned to my good friend Evan Menzies to make sense of Alberta, and he has never steered me wrong.

Evan recently penned a great essay every federalist should read, An Argument for Canada from an Alberta Conservative. He has the street creds to write such a piece, having cut his political teeth working for Danielle Smith and the Wildrose party, and having advocated for Alberta’s energy sector at the grassroots level.

We recorded and published this week’s episode of the podcast hours before Premier Smith was due to address the province about the ongoing political drama surrounding the big referendum question seizing mainstream Alberta right now: whether or not to call it quits on Canada.

Evan makes the case that separatism and conservatism are not the same thing.

He’s right.

And he’s also right to remind federalists that ignoring Albertans’ grievances is a big mistake.

The grievances are real. An Albertan’s vote counts for measurably less than a vote cast in Charlottetown. The National Energy Program still shapes how a generation of Albertans reads Ottawa’s intentions, as it should. A province that generates an enormous share of the country’s wealth, and is then told to be quiet about how that wealth gets spent, is entitled to be angry. I certainly feel it whenever I’m in Alberta, and especially when sitting in on focus groups in the province. The frustration is raw, and it’s very real.

And somehow, a movement to take radical action — to split the country up — has increasingly been branded as a conservative sentiment. Which, I get. I’m not pretending the polling data on this doesn’t exist. By and large, pro-separatist voters in Alberta are UCP supporters. But if we park party politics for a moment, this type of rupture is, by definition, un-conservative.

Conservatism is a temperament before it is a platform. It is a bias toward the tested over the theoretical — the instinct that a system which has worked, imperfectly, for a long time deserves the benefit of the doubt against a system that exists only on paper. Conservatives are supposed to be the people in the room asking the slow, unglamorous question: and then what?

The separatist project, as its loudest advocates now describe it, does not pass that test. The pitch, increasingly, is a blank slate. A new constitution, written from scratch. An end to the constitutional monarchy. A fresh founding document onto which Albertans can paint whatever they like.

I understand the appeal of the empty canvas. I also think it should worry any conservative who looks at it for more than a moment.

A blank slate is the most radical instrument in politics, and conservatives are meant to be the last people reaching for it. Everything currently guaranteed goes back into the box — the structure of the courts, the protections you never think about because you’ve never had to, the quiet arrangements that hold a society together — to be renegotiated by whoever shows up with the most energy on the day. Maybe you get those things back. Maybe you get them back improved. But “maybe” is a hell of a gamble.

Evan described the danger more vividly, describing the plan as pouring gasoline, striking a match, and hoping the explosion leaves the house arranged the way you wanted.

The aesthetics of the movement might look traditionalist. The mechanics, however, are revolutionary. You cannot conserve an inheritance by burning it down to see what survives the fire.

Which is a view we conservatives can hold while having empathy for the frustrations this movement is bringing to life. Let’s face it, political reform is slow. Albertans have been told to wait for it for their entire adult lives, and at some point patience runs out. It is the strongest card the separatist movement holds, and given how long it takes us to get anything done in this country, it’s a good one.

Independence is not the shortcut it looks like — a constitutional rupture is its own long, grinding decade, with one difference that outweighs all the others: you cannot take it back. The conservative wager has always been that the dull, incremental path compounds. The revolutionary wager is that you can skip to the end. Again, that’s a hell of a gamble.

There’s a part of this story that Evan highlighted for us, and it’s not getting enough consideration: Many of the people drawn to separation are among the most patriotic Canadians you will ever meet. They are not anti-Canada — they believe Canada walked away from them, and they have a decade of evidence to point at. Lecturing them is not a winning approach, and I won’t do it.

As Evan reminded me, a country is worth more than the government of the day, and always has been. Loving an inheritance enough to do the slow, thankless work of fixing it is a far more conservative act than trading it for a blank page and hoping for the best.

This debate is mainstream now, and it will not resolve this fall, or probably for years after. So conservatives are going to have to decide what the word still means. It cannot mean agreeing to tear the house down in order to prove you love it.

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When Keir Starmer announced last month that he would nationalize British Steel, he qualified the commitment with five extra words: subject to a public interest test. That’s weasel language; it preserves a litigator’s optionality and commits his government to nothing. And it explains why he’s fighting for his political life.

The conventional read is straightforward. Starmer can’t communicate. His backbenchers smell weakness. Four ministers have resigned this week, 85 (and counting!) of his own MPs have publicly told him to go, and a party that won a massive majority less than two years ago is in open mutiny.

It’s pretty much, the complete opposite of what we’re experiencing with Mark Carney in Canada.

Carney took office in March 2025 with the same headwinds Starmer was inheriting. The expert read was that the banker would struggle with retail politics. Fourteen months later, he’s converted his minority into a majority through floor-crossings and byelections, and the Liberal Party is in a stronger position than when he took the leadership.

Starmer was supposed to be the safe pair of hands. He had the bigger mandate, the bigger party machine, the better starting position by any measure. And now he’s the one fighting for his job.

The easy explanation is personality. I think that’s wrong. Personality is downstream of something more interesting.

Operating systems

Every senior leader runs on an operating system — a pattern of how they process information and turn it into action. The good ones know its blind spots.

Starmer’s is a lawyer’s. He sees a problem and reaches for process, qualification, and risk mitigation. The British Steel line is not an outlier. It is the most concise summary of how Starmer thinks. He doesn’t want to nationalize British Steel; he wants to leave himself an out if the politics turn against him. The legal mind defaults to optionality. The political mind defaults to commitment.

When Starmer told his cabinet this week that the Labour Party has a process for challenging a leader, and that process had not been triggered — same OS at work. The political read of a parliamentary party in open revolt is: this is over. The legal read is: the procedural conditions are not met. It is the response of a man who genuinely believes that not being formally challenged means not being challenged.

Carney’s OS is different. He spent two decades reading markets, an unforgiving teacher in one specific way. Markets don’t care about your process. They care about what you said and what you did, and they punish dithering more harshly than being wrong. When Carney makes a commitment, the market — and now the electorate — believes him.

A bit of charm probably doesn’t hurt either. Regardless, while he—like Starmer—leads a “centre-left”government, they share few similarities.

The system magnifies it

The Westminster tradition has long relied on backbench rebellion as a release valve (at least in the UK) Once thirty or forty MPs realize they can force a U-turn, momentum shifts in their favour. I’ve always been amazed at this power, given how whipped caucus is in Canada. A backbench mutiny at the scale of this week would be unthinkable here in a way that defines what is thinkable in the Canadian system.

Starmer’s lawyerly OS is the wrong system for an environment in which rebellion works. It produces what we’re watching now: every concession invites the next demand, every U-turn signals weakness, every subject to a public interest test reads as the door being held open for retreat.

The point

Competence and political antenna are not the same thing. Starmer is more “competent” than the average politician by traditional measures. He’s also missing the instinct for political consequence that you can’t teach a lawyer in two years. The lawyer’s training is to argue from the rules. The politician’s training is to read what the room will accept and write the rules around that.

We recorded a Craft Politics episode this week with James Wharton — former Conservative MP, ran Boris Johnson’s 2019 leadership campaign — and I asked him what Carney has that Starmer doesn’t. His answer was bang on: Carney is pulling off the trick Starmer was elected to do.

The trick was never a matter of where Carney or Starmer sit on the political spectrum. It was being the reassuring adult in a fractured time. Starmer was supposed to do that and didn’t. Carney was not supposed to and is.

Pick your operating system deliberately. The alternative is what’s happening in Westminster this week.

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Three weeks ago I posted a short note here on Substack, sharing that on Kyla Ronellenfitsch’s polling was an eye-opener for me. I said I’d been incredibly wrong about something I’d been arguing on Craft Politics for months — that cost of living was the one issue Conservatives still owned, and that the moment Canadians shifted off Trump and back to the kitchen table, the polls would start to move toward Pierre Poilievre, or at least to the Conservative Party of Canada.

Turns out, I had it (mostly) wrong.

This week I had Kyla on the podcast to walk me through exactly how the data tells the opposite story of the one I had been pushing. What follows is what I took from our conversation, organized in a similar pattern to how we broke it down on the pod.

What I had right: cost of living is indeed a top issue.

It’s the dominant concern for two-thirds of Canadians. It has been since well before the election, and it’s holding steady. Kyla’s tracked it across four polling waves: 59% salience on election eve, 69% in November, 66% in January, 67% now. That part of my hypothesis was fine. If anything, the issue has stayed more salient than I’d have predicted in a Trump-saturated news cycle.

So far so good.

What I had wrong, first: the Conservatives no longer own this issue.

This is the one that genuinely surprised me when Kyla first shared her data in April. For forty years — from Mulroney through Harper through every subsequent leader — the Conservative Party of Canada has held a structural brand advantage on economic management. (Though, I’d argue the Chretien/Martin Liberals were a notable anomaly in this period). Point is, we assume the Tories have the stronger brand when it comes to economic issues.

It is no longer there. At least, on pocket-book issues, which is where I thought the CPC would have a long and enduring advantage.

When Kyla A/B tested party brand against leader brand on managing the cost of living, she found the Liberals leading the Conservatives by five points at the party level. At the leader level, Carney beats Poilievre 40 to 31 — a nine-point gap, with another 13% saying there’d be no difference and 16% unsure. There is no plausible read of those numbers in which the Conservative Party still owns this issue.

Kyla called the +5 number “bluntly, a disaster for the CPC team,” and on the show she walked through why. If a Conservative party can’t win on the economic argument, what’s its argument? You’re left with secondary issues — crime, immigration, identity — and at least so far, none of those is a Conservative platform that performs at scale in this moment. And she’s right — I certainly have a hard time seeing a path to victory for the Conservative Party if it doesn’t win on pocketbook and economic issues. Safety and immigration along won’t cut it.

What I had wrong, second: this isn’t new.

I’d been telling myself the cost of living lead was a recent Carney-effect phenomenon, and that the underlying brand would reassert itself when the news cycle settled down. Turns out the lead isn’t recent and the underlying brand isn’t reasserting itself.

Kyla’s been tracking the head-to-head on cost of living for over a year. From immediately after the election through now, the split has been consistent — roughly 60-40 in Carney’s favour when forced into a binary choice, even before adding the “no difference” option that softens the gap. A year is long enough that “Carney effect” is no longer a satisfying explanation. Something more durable is happening.

Part of it is the Liberal Party brand recovering from where it was at the depths of late-Trudeau (43% favourable now, against a much weaker number 15 months ago). Part of it is Carney himself outperforming his party. But the most useful framing I took from the conversation was Kyla’s own:

Carney is more popular than the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is more popular than the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party is more popular than Pierre Poilievre.

Which, when we zoom out, has been the case for at least a year now. The public opinion environment is more calcified than I first realized.

What I had wrong, third: the young voter coalition was always softer than the headlines suggested.

The bigger pundit-class story over the last 18 months has been that Pierre Poilievre brought a generation of young voters into the Conservative coalition — that the Rogan-style media diet, the housing message, the change-versus-status-quo frame had unlocked a structural shift to the right among young Canadians, especially young men. I’d been carrying that assumption around without examining it.

Kyla has dismantled this narrative:

• In September 2024, the Conservatives led the Liberals among young men by 35 points. As of January, that lead was 5.

• Among young women, the Liberals have taken an 11-point lead, but most of that gain came from NDP collapse, not Conservative weakness.

• And another interesting finding from her study of more than 2,000 young Canadians: 44% of them have favourable or neutral views of both Carney and Poilievre. That seems like a very malleable cohort of the electorate.

Which means the original Conservative gain among young voters wasn’t really a Conservative gain. It was a Trudeau-fatigue exit. Young voters were leaving the status quo, and the Conservative Party happened to be the only obvious place to go, especially with a leader that was saying all the right things in YouTube. When the status quo changed, they left again. It’s the same cognitive trap as the cost of living one — narrative ossified during peak Trudeau, never updated when the underlying conditions moved.

So what does this mean.

Three things, I think.

One: the next eighteen months are being underwritten by a Carney brand that may or may not transfer to the Liberal Party. Kyla’s “single number to watch” twelve months from now is whether Carney’s personal favourability and the Liberal advantage on cost of living move in lockstep, or whether the brand has actually transferred. If they move together, the Liberal lead is fragile — pull Carney out and you’d expect the Liberal advantage to come with him. If they diverge, with the Liberal Party advantage on the economy holding even as Carney’s personal numbers soften, then the Conservative Party has a much harder problem than it currently believes it has.

Two: the Conservative rebrand can’t work the way it’s currently designed to. Pierre Poilievre is rebranding against a sitting Prime Minister who is also rebranding, in roughly the same direction, with more institutional credibility and a head start. The “softer side” version of Poilievre that started showing up a few weeks ago has snapped back to attack mode. The rebrand needs to fix something deeper than tone — the underlying perception captured in Kyla’s November leadership audit, where the most commonly held view of Poilievre among non-polarized voters was “scary.” Until the floor of that perception lifts, the ceiling of any rebrand is capped.

Three: the strategic playbook I’d been running in my head — cost of living comes back, Trump fades, Conservatives recover — was a playbook for a public opinion environment that exists, but not in Poilievre’s favour. The electorate that exists now wants stability. Carney has — credit where it’s due — governed roughly the way he campaigned, and voters have rewarded him with patience.

Rudy Husny said something on the podcast this week that’s so good.

We were talking about Quebec — Fréchette’s arrival, Milliard’s stumble, PSPP’s referendum conviction — and somewhere in the middle of it, Rudy pivoted to a line about how political leaders manage their own caucus. He’d watched Pierre Poilievre spend two years twenty points ahead of Justin Trudeau without meaningfully recruiting. He’d watched Mark Carney come from nowhere, win a majority, and barely slow down to say thank you.

His take, roughly paraphrased: caucus management is the opposite of a stock exchange.

You invest when you’re high in the polls, because that’s when you’ll need the return later. When you’re down, it’s too late.

Can you tell Rudy’s had exposure to Brian Mulroney?

I don’t think we talk about the art of caucus management enough. In fact, we really only pay attention to it when there’s a bit of drama, usually in the form of a floor-crossing. Well, at least, in the last year. Either way, it’s easy for political leaders to drift into taking caucus members for granted, to assume that the people who helped get you here will stay. You almost have to think it so you ca focus on spending your oxygen on this week’s fire.

However, when the fires start, you’ll need to cash in some credits. And if you’re doing this only when you’re riding low(er) in the polls, your ledger quickly turns red.

So I liked Rudy’s framing.

When you’re up twenty points, you don’t need your caucus. That’s exactly why you invest. The promising candidate who’d take your call at 58% won’t take it at 32%. The riding president who’d host three events for you when you’re winning won’t host one when you’re losing. The MP who’d defend you on a panel will suddenly develop a pressing commitment that weekend. None of this is betrayal. It’s natural.

Poilievre had a window where he could have recruited the best bench in Canadian conservative history. Ministers-in-waiting, star candidates, public figures, policy people with real weight. A twenty-point lead is the best recruiting ad in politics. He largely didn’t use it. When the numbers moved, the window closed. The people who would have joined his team at the peak of the wave started asking harder questions on the way down, and most of them said no. Even now, when he would benefit from showcasing his team, we’re not seeing it. And it’s not because he’s lacking talent. There is exceptional talent sitting on his bench.

But this lessons applies just as much, if not even more, to PM Carney. He’s riding one hell of an extended honeymoon in the polls. He’s a magnet.

If Rudy is right — and I think he is — this is exactly the moment Carney should be investing in caucus. Not managing by exception. Not waiting for a problem. Actively putting in the hard yards to build loyalty while he has the leverage to do it. Because when Trump’s trade war starts actually biting, when the cost of living doesn’t move, when the inevitable mid-term drift sets in, that’s when he’ll find out whether the people around him are invested or whether they were just along for the ride.

The Brian Mulroney school understood this. Mulroney was famous for knowing everyone’s kids’ names. People mocked it as retail politics, sentimentality, old-school schmooze. But the retail was the strategy. When he needed his caucus to swallow the GST, to swallow Meech, to swallow free trade — he had built enough relational capital over years of birthday calls and handwritten notes that people stayed with him through things that would have fractured other governments.

We’ve drifted away from that. Modern political leadership runs on comms discipline, message tracks, and proximity to the leader’s principal secretary. The relational work — the thing Mulroney made his whole career about — has been outsourced to operations staff who don’t have the authority or the standing to do it properly.

And let’s be clear, this is hard work. You can’t fake this retroactively. You can’t buy caucus loyalty the week your numbers turn. The investment has to happen while the market thinks you’re winning. By the time the market has doubts, the price has already moved.

Which brings me back to Quebec, because this applies to PSPP too. He was twenty points up for eighteen months. The question isn’t just whether he should drop the referendum — it’s whether, if the PQ wins a minority in October, he’s built the caucus relationships he’ll need to hold his own party together through a Bouchard-style walk-back. My read: probably not yet. He’s spent a lot of those eighteen months defending his convictions on Twitter rather than investing in the people who’d need to carry him through a reversal.

—

We got into this and much more with Rudy on the latest Craft Politics — Quebec’s WTF moment, why the “Fréchette as Carney” framing is lazy, and three plausible scenarios for the October 5 provincial election.

Mark Carney now leads a majority government he never actually won. Five floor-crossings, three byelection wins in seats the Liberals already held, and a Supreme Court do-over in the one riding that was even close. One hundred and seventy-four seats, assembled like IKEA furniture — one piece at a time, with occasional confusion about whether you’re doing it right.

A majority built this way is a different animal than one earned on election night, and how Carney governs it will matter.

So what actually changes? Committees.

Most Canadians think the opposition’s job is Question Period. It’s not. Question Period is theatre — grown adults yelling at each other for the cameras while the Speaker tries not to lose the will to live.

The real accountability work happens in committees, where the government can be compelled to produce documents, call witnesses, and answer for its decisions. WE Charity, ArriveCan, foreign interference — all of those investigations relied on opposition-controlled committees forcing the government’s hand.

During the minority, the opposition held those committee majorities. That’s over. The Liberals now control every House committee. They decide who gets called, which files get opened, and which investigations move forward. Any majority government gets this power — it’s structural, not unique to Carney. But it’s worth naming, because when the next scandal hits (and one always does), the opposition will have considerably fewer tools at its disposal.

The procedural stuff matters. But the political story underneath these byelections is arguably more consequential.

Eric Grenier at The Writ published a sharp piece this week showing that Monday’s Conservative by-election losses were the worst the party has suffered in a decade.

• 11 points in University–Rosedale.

• 12 points in Scarborough Southwest.

• 15 points in Terrebonne — where the Conservatives cratered to 3.3%.

• You have to go back to 2014 to find comparable losses. That was the year before Harper fell.

Grenier’s read — and I think he’s right — is that by-election trends have historically predicted the next general election. The strong Conservative by-election performances in 2023 and 2024 foretold what was supposed to be the collapse of Trudeau’s Liberals. These results may be doing the same work in reverse.

The easy conservative response is “we were never going to win these seats anyway.” Fair enough. But conservative voters usually still show up in ridings where the party can’t win. They did in LaSalle–Émard–Verdun in 2024. They did in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount in 2023. They didn’t on Monday. That’s a motivation problem. And motivation problems don’t tend to stay contained.

Meanwhile, the majority itself is thinner than it looks. Two seats above the threshold. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is already eyeing provincial politics, which would open another vacancy. Normal parliamentary wear and tear — resignations, the odd scandal, someone deciding they’d rather go fishing — can eat a two-seat cushion fast. Liberals are apparently courting up to eight more opposition MPs. The floor-crossing era isn’t over. Its purpose has just shifted. Before Monday, it was about reaching majority. Now it’s about insuring it.

Which means the incentive structure that pulled five opposition MPs across the aisle doesn’t go away — it gets stronger. If you’re a Conservative backbencher looking at these byelection numbers and wondering whether you’ll hold your seat in the next election, the math isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable.

Carney’s majority was built, not won. He governs with the arithmetic of a majority and the mandate of a minority. What he does with that gap will define the next two to three years.

New episode of Craft Politics is live. We dig into what the majority unlocks at the committee level, preview the UK’s May elections with Andrew Percy, and take a first look at Quebec’s increasingly unpredictable October election. Listen wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)

This week, we run the issues scan across three stories that share an uncomfortable theme: everyone has a story about winning, and almost none of them hold up.

First up, the Iran ceasefire. After nearly six weeks of Operation Epic Fury, the US and Iran agreed to a two-week pause in the fighting — announced on Truth Social less than two hours before Trump’s own deadline, the one where he threatened to send Iran “back to the stone ages.”

Both sides declared total victory. The problem is the Strait of Hormuz is still largely closed, over 400 tankers remain anchored in the Persian Gulf, and Iran is now demanding tolls for ships passing through what used to be an international waterway.

We break down what the stated war aims actually were, whether any of them were achieved, and why Trump’s inability to set modest goals — and stick to them — has handed the Iranian regime a survival story it will tell for decades.

Andrew puts it plainly: if you’re going to take on a despotic regime, you have to do it from the moral high ground. Threatening to wipe out a civilization is not that.

Then, the floor crossings.

Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu became the fifth MP to cross to the Liberals since last April’s election, bringing Carney’s seat count to 171 — one short of a majority. With three byelections on April 13th in Scarborough Southwest, University–Rosedale, and Terrebonne, a Liberal majority is now a question of when, not if.

What makes Gladu’s crossing so striking isn’t just the number — it’s who she is. An MP who aggressively challenged the COVID response, pushed back on vaccine policy, fought the conversion therapy ban, and voted to restrict abortion is now a Liberal.

I credit Fred Delorey for the framing: what we’re seeing isn’t just Conservative dysfunction — it’s Mark Carney operating as a ruthless political player. The whole caucus is now available for picking, not just the red Tory wing. And for Pierre Poilievre, Andrew draws the parallel nobody wants to hear: Jeremy Corbyn nearly won in 2017, and by 2019 the public had moved on. Moments pass.

Finally, Hungary.

On April 7th — five days before the election — US Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest, stood on stage with Viktor Orbán, called Trump on his phone so the crowd could hear “I love Hungary and I love Viktor,” and told voters to stand with Orbán at the polls. He did all of this on the same day he called EU behaviour “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference I have ever seen.”

Andrew doesn’t mince words on the hypocrisy — and draws on his own experience as a British MP who did Council of Europe election monitoring to explain just how extraordinary Vance’s visit actually was.

I flag the Russia angle: the Financial Times has reported a Kremlin-linked operation flooding Hungarian social media to boost Orbán — and now you have the US and Russia aligned on the same side of a European election. Andrew’s line: the MAGA obsession with strongmen is being used by Putin like a useful idiot.

The Hungarian election is April 12th. Independent polls have Tisza up 16 to 19 points. We’ll see.

Mentioned on this episode:

• Fred Delorey’s piece on Carney as a ruthless political operator

• Financial Times report on Kremlin-linked social media operation targeting the Hungarian election

They cover Trump’s complete inversion of the standard wartime communications playbook — waiting a month to make his case while public support eroded beneath him. They dig into the regime change contradiction: Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up in the first days of the war, now says regime change was never the goal, and claims the remaining leadership is “less radical.” Joseph and Andrew aren’t buying it.

The conversation turns to the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran’s IRGC is running a de facto toll booth — charging ships $2 million to pass, with China potentially assisting in the collection. Trump says the Strait will “open up naturally.” Andrew argues the conflict isn’t over until it’s resolved, and that if the U.S. and Europe both refuse to secure it, Iran has no incentive to give up its leverage.

Andrew offers a provocative thought: the endgame might look remarkably similar to the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal that Trump tore up. And both hosts question whether Western leaders — Starmer, Carney, and others — have anything resembling a plan to deal with the economic fallout hitting consumers at the pump and the grocery store.

As a Conservative partisan, I should be celebrating as the NDP elects a self-described democratic socialist who wants to nationalize groceries and slap an export tax on oil and gas. A party polling in single digits just handed its leadership to a guy with no seat in the House, $13 million in debt, and a platform that reads like it was drafted at a faculty lounge brainstorming session.

And yet I can’t quite bring myself to dismiss it.

Here’s what bothers me. Avi Lewis won 56% of the vote on the first ballot — a decisive margin that tells you the membership didn’t stumble into this. They chose it. He clearly has some organizing chops, even if we’re looking at a depleted party. Nearly 40,000 people looked at a platform that includes public grocery stores, public telecom companies, a million government-built homes, postal banking, and a Green New Deal funded at 2% of GDP, and said: yes, this is the direction.

These are proposals that wouldn’t survive a single Treasury Board meeting. The idea that Canada Post — an organization that struggles to deliver packages on time — should also handle your mortgage is, on its face, absurd. But dismissing it entirely requires ignoring something that’s been building for a while.

Mark Carney has moved the Liberal Party to the centre. Some would say centre-right. He’s polling in the high 50s, projecting economic competence, and governing in a way that has made a lot of progressive voters quietly uncomfortable. He voted for a defence budget that Avi Lewis called “austerity that would have made Stephen Harper smile.” He cut a pipeline deal with Danielle Smith. He supported — with some regret, as he put it — the strikes on Iran.

That leaves a vacancy on the left. And Avi Lewis is the only person standing in it.

The Corbyn comparison is the one everyone’s reaching for, and it’s instructive — but not in the way most people think. The thing about Corbyn isn’t that he lost badly in 2019. It’s that he nearly won in 2017. The commentator class that had written him off as a joke spent election night watching the results come in with their jaws on the floor.

I’m not saying Lewis is about to replicate that. The Canadian context is different. But the mechanism is the same: populist messaging that sounds unrealistic in a boardroom can sound like a lifeline at a kitchen table. And kitchen tables are where elections get decided.

The case against Lewis is straightforward and strong. His own provincial peers started distancing themselves within minutes of the result. Nenshi in Alberta came out swinging. Beck in Saskatchewan sent an open letter that read more like a separation notice than a congratulations. The NDP’s electorally successful provincial wings — Manitoba, BC — look nothing like what Lewis is proposing. He’s targeting degree-educated urban progressives in Toronto and Vancouver, which is a real constituency but not one that wins you government. And he has no mechanism to get into the House of Commons anytime soon.

But the case for Lewis is subtler and harder to dismiss. In an environment where affordability is the dominant issue and trust in institutions is low, the guy saying “the grocery companies are ripping you off and the government should do something about it” has an audience. It doesn’t matter that the policy is unworkable. What matters is that the diagnosis resonates. And right now, with gas prices climbing and the cost of everything else following, a lot of Canadians are more receptive to that message than the political establishment wants to admit.

The NDP has either planted a seed or dug a grave, and I still can’t tell which one it is.

Tim Kiladze had never heard of Huntsville, Alabama before he pitched the story. He’d seen the stat — Canada’s GDP per capita had dipped below Alabama’s — and half-wondered if it was real.

So the Globe sent him south. And what he found wasn’t cotton fields or Confederate flags. It was the foothills of the Appalachians, a biotech research park where the dominant car in the parking lot was a Subaru Outback, and a mayor who’d spent 18 years rebranding his city with lapel pins that read “Huntsville: a smart place.”

Tim described a feeling he couldn’t shake the whole time he was in Alabama — that these people were hungry. Hungry to attract jobs, hungry to build, hungry to prove the stereotypes wrong. He compared it to what he sees at home in Canada and the gap was immediate: we Canadians expect things to come to us.

The economic story backs up the vibe. Mercedes-Benz showed up in 1993. Alabama rolled out aggressive tax incentives, won the bidding war, and got that first plant built. Then Honda came. Then Hyundai. Then Mazda and Toyota. Alabama now produces 1.2 million vehicles a year. Ontario does 1.3 million. That gap used to be enormous. Not anymore.

Tim met Greg Canfield, the state’s former commerce secretary, who was candid about the fact that early incentive programs were unsustainably generous. They reformed the whole thing 20 years in. But by then Alabama had something it didn’t have before: a reputation for speed. Companies knew they could build fast there. Speed to market became the selling point.

Speed to market. What a concept.

Because here’s what was happening in Canada the same week Tim’s piece came out: Enbridge announced it wouldn’t participate in the proposed Alberta-to-Pacific pipeline. Why? Because the company looked at the regulatory environment and decided it couldn’t justify sinking capital into something that might never get built.

Alabama gets plants built in two years. Canada can’t convince a company to start.

Tim went further in our conversation than he did in the piece. He’d spoken recently with people involved in major Canadian project proposals — people who want to get things done. He asked them: are these projects going to happen? The collective answer: “I don’t know.”

One variable he double-clicked on is the courts. Duty to consult rulings, judicial reviews, First Nations groups that have learned — understandably, given the history — to use legal processes to slow or stop development. Northern Gateway was killed by BC courts, not by a change in government policy. Tim worried aloud that no matter which party holds power in Ottawa, the courts remain the bottleneck.

That should alarm us more than any GDP comparison.

And this is before we consider what we’re up against competitively. The US runs a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit that juices growth and funds the subsidies making places like Alabama attractive to global capital. Canada can’t do that. As Andrew noted, the UK learned what happens when you try — the Liz Truss mini-budget crashed a government in six weeks. The fiscal space available to a mid-sized democracy is fundamentally different.

Tim’s suggestion: maybe you can’t compete across the board, but maybe you can be selective. Pick a handful of industries, fund them properly, accept the trade-off. The China model, but with guardrails. That’s essentially what Carney’s Major Projects Office is supposed to do. Whether the machinery of government — and the courts — will let it work remains an open question.

There’s something else that gets lost in the competitiveness discourse. Tim was emphatic: he wouldn’t want to live in Alabama.

Life expectancy there is 74 years versus Canada’s 82. Minimum wage is $7.25 US. A Canadian expat told Tim his son’s high school had the same turf as Gillette Stadium. Twenty-five miles down the road, kids don’t have books. Low regulation, low taxes, weak unions, minimal safety net — that combination generates impressive top-line growth. But the growth doesn’t reach everyone.

Canada chose a different operating system. Public healthcare, public education funded at the regional level, stronger labour protections. But it’s not all roses here either. Tim’s kids go to a public school in Toronto that he described as looking like a bomb shelter. He tried to get a wall painted and hit union rules and red tape. Our healthcare system has ICU bed shortages we identified during COVID and still haven’t fixed, a nursing crisis everybody acknowledges and nobody resolves, and ERs where doctors go public because conditions have become a travesty.

We hide behind our morals. That was Tim’s line. We point to the values encoded in our system and use them as reasons not to look in the mirror. The values are good. The execution has been declining for years. And at some point, poorly executed values stop being values. They become rhetoric.

The UK has been having this conversation for over a decade. In 2014, Fraser Nelson at the Spectator concluded Britain was poorer than every US state except Mississippi. In 2023, John Burn-Murdoch at the FT sharpened the point: strip London out, and the rest of the country drops below Mississippi. Nothing changed. The debate gets relitigated, the same objections get raised, and the underlying problems compound.

I worry Canada is settling into the same pattern. In 2007, the Harper government’s competitiveness review concluded: “Canadians do not perceive that there is an imminent crisis.” Tim wrote that if Ottawa commissioned another report today, the conclusion could easily be the same.

The debate about whether Canada is technically poorer than Alabama is interesting. It’s also a trap — the metric debate is where the conversation goes to die. The harder questions never get asked. Why did Eli Lilly choose Huntsville over Montreal for a $6 billion pharmaceutical plant? Why is Enbridge walking away from a pipeline? Why are people inside the system telling reporters, on background, that they don’t know if major projects will get built?

Alabama is just the mirror. What it reflects back is a country that built an operating system for a world where being a G7 nation was enough. That world is gone. And the operating system hasn’t been updated.

There’s a line from our conversation with Lord Walney today that’s been ringing in my head since we stopped the recording…

He was describing what happens when evidence of Iranian-linked extremism gets brought to the Charity Commission — the regulator responsible for overseeing charitable organisations in England and Wales. And he relayed a conversation that United Against Nuclear Iran, a research group, had privately with Commission staff. The response, paraphrased: We just don’t really want to get into this because we’re young civil servants. If we get branded as Islamophobes, that’s going to be very difficult for us to get on.

It’s the kind of calculation that, when multiplied across thousands of officials in dozens of institutions over the course of years, produces a system that looks away.

Walney’s report, Undue Influence, documents a network of as many as 30 charities, cultural centres, and religious institutions in Britain with alleged ties to the Iranian regime. He examined 10 in depth. Eight are under active investigation by the Charity Commission. All continue to operate. One of them — the Islamic Centre of England — had a governing document that literally required a trustee be appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader. A former Iranian Deputy Minister of Culture described it to Walney as a kind of headquarters coordinating the wider network. (The Centre denies this.)

None of these organisations are accused of involvement in terrorism or assassination plots. But his argument is that the violent threat and the influence network are, as one analyst he cites puts it, “two sides of the same strategy.” The charities embed the regime’s worldview. They confer legitimacy. They provide access to decision-makers, to universities, to communities. And they create an environment in which the harder edge of Iranian operations — the 20-plus plots MI5 tracked in a single year — can flourish.

I’d encourage you to listen to the full conversation and read the report yourself. Walney walks through the specifics with real clarity, and Andrew — who raised concerns about several of these organisations directly with the Met Police and the Charity Commission during his time in Parliament — brings the kind of firsthand frustration that makes the regulatory failure feel concrete.

But what I want to explore here isn’t the specifics of the network. It’s the thing that allowed the network to operate unchallenged for so long.

The fear of being accused of racism — or more precisely, of Islamophobia — has become one of the most consequential forces in British public life.

Sir William Shawcross, who chaired the Charity Commission between 2012 and 2018, told Walney directly that there was a “real nervousness about talking about suspicions of Muslim organisations” — a “widespread fear amongst police, amongst schools, the headmasters and others of being accused of being racist.”

Walney expanded on this in our conversation. He described how Islamist actors — a small minority, far removed from the lives of most British Muslims — have weaponised the accusation. Anyone who scrutinises extremism gets accused of promoting a conspiracy theory, of suggesting that all Muslims are bad. And that accusation, Walney argued, has had a “really significant chilling effect on the willingness of political leaders and then also civic public life” to engage with these issues.

Andrew made a point on the show that I think cuts to the heart of it. He asked: can you imagine a scenario in which neo-Nazi organisations were allowed to operate as registered charities, poisoning the minds of young white kids, and regulators just looked the other way? The answer is obviously no. That would be shut down immediately. But when the extremism comes wrapped in religious identity, the institutional response is paralysis.

And it’s not because officials are sympathetic to extremism. Most of them are, as Walney put it, “generally quite tolerant. They want to be seen as decent people. They genuinely don’t want to offend people. They’re not experts on Islam.” So when someone stands up and angrily accuses them of Islamophobia, their instinct is to recoil. To back off. To find a reason not to pursue it.

That instinct is human. It’s understandable. And when it becomes institutional culture, it’s devastating.

This isn’t only a UK problem. In Canada, we’ve had our own version of this dynamic — though it’s publicly played out more around Chinese foreign interference. The Hogue Commission exposed how officials at multiple levels of government were aware of interference operations and either failed to act or actively chose not to escalate, partly because of sensitivities around how interference allegations would land in diaspora communities.

The pattern is the same even if the actors are different. A liberal democracy’s openness — its freedom of association, its charitable sector, its instinct toward tolerance — becomes the vector for the threat. And the institutions designed to protect that openness freeze up precisely because the threat is wrapped in the identity politics that those institutions have been trained to navigate with maximum caution.

Walney made an interesting observation about why the centre and the left of British politics struggle with this more than the right. He said they’re “much more comfortable at talking about right-wing extremism because it largely involves white people and a culture for which they sort of feel familiar with and able to speak out against.” Islamist extremism requires a different kind of confidence — the confidence to say, as a white, non-Muslim official, no, I’m not an Islamophobe, and you’re the one who’s wrong about these extremists. That takes thick skin. Most people in public life don’t have it, or don’t want to spend it on this fight.

What makes the timing of all this particularly charged is that the UK government just introduced a new definition of anti-Muslim hostility. Walney was clearly concerned about it. He gave the government some credit for walking back the worst elements of earlier proposals and enshrining freedom of speech protections on paper. But his worry — and Andrew’s — is about how it gets applied in practice.

The risk isn’t that the definition itself is extreme. The risk is that institutions with knowledge gaps and risk-averse cultures will default to the most cautious possible interpretation. A health trust director, a police chief, a school head — they get a new definition, they’re not experts in Islam, and they think: I’ll just apply this as broadly as possible so no one can accuse me of anything. That’s how a well-intentioned policy becomes a tool for silencing exactly the kind of scrutiny Walney’s report calls for.

So where does this leave us?

The UK government has announced new powers for the Charity Commission — the ability to shut down charities promoting extremism, to disqualify trustees convicted of hate crimes, to speed up investigations. That’s welcome. Walney said so himself.

But the tools aren’t the problem. The tools have never been the problem. As Andrew pointed out, successive governments have stood at podiums after terrorist attacks and said “this can’t go on, we have to change.” And then nothing changed. Not because the laws were insufficient, but because the institutional culture — the career incentives, the fear of accusation, the sheer discomfort of the work — made the path of least resistance look a lot like the path of doing nothing.

Walney put it well: “Even when at the top the political will has been there... there was nothing that got close to how do you drive change successfully through a large organisation or multiple large organisations that have their own cultures embedded in them.”

That’s the real challenge. Not writing new legislation. Not publishing new definitions. But building the institutional confidence to actually use the powers that already exist — and the ones being created — without flinching when the accusations come. Because they will come. They always do.

Canada proscribed the IRGC. The EU proscribed the IRGC. The US did it years ago. Britain still hasn’t. And until it does, the Charity Commission will keep operating in a framework where it can only act on governance failures and compliance breaches — not on ideological alignment with a regime that has plotted assassinations on British soil.

The fear of being called a name kept the door open for decades. The question now is whether anyone has the nerve to close it.

Nobody invoked international law when Hamas crossed a sovereign border on October 7, 2023.

Nobody marched when the Iranian regime massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens in January — the largest and deadliest crackdown in the country's modern history, met with live ammunition, executions, and the longest internet blackout on record. Three separate UN bodies — the Fact-Finding Mission, the Special Rapporteur, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — independently concluded that Iran is committing crimes against humanity. Against its own people. Children as young as seven confirmed as victims.

And yet the moment the US and Israel launched strikes on February 28, the international law chorus showed up right on cue. Suddenly, the rules matter again.

I’ve been struck — genuinely struck — by how the entire conversation has been framed around that date. As if the conflict began when Western powers acted, and everything before it was just background noise. That framing does real work. It turns the aggressor into the victim. It makes the response look like the provocation. And it lets a lot of people off the hook for ignoring what this regime has been doing for 47 years.

Andrew and I dug into this on this week’s episode of Craft Politics, and I want to pull on the thread a bit more here.

There are two distinct oppositions to this war, and they’re very different in character. On the right — particularly the American right — the objection is pragmatic. Cost, overreach, American interests, a reaction to electing a president who wasn’t supposed to meddle in foreign conflicts. You can disagree with that position, but at least it’s coherent. It’s an argument about strategy and priorities.

The opposition on the left is something else entirely. It’s framed as a moral argument — but it’s a moral argument that somehow casts the Iranian regime as the victim. And that is a problem I can’t get past.

This is a regime that accuses America and Israel of being imperialist while running its own proxy empire across Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Iraq. A regime that has hijacked a Persian civilisation dating back millennia — 7,000 years of history captured by a 47-year-old transplant that enjoys somewhere between 10 and 15% domestic support, depending on which polls you trust. A regime whose charter is explicit about exporting its revolution across the Middle East, which requires — in their own framing — the elimination of Israel.

And so-called anti-imperialists want to defend this.

I find it genuinely confusing. Not in the way where I’m pretending to be confused for rhetorical effect — I mean I have sat with this and tried to understand how someone who claims to care about human rights can watch a regime hang gay men from cranes in public squares and then show up to march against the people trying to take that regime apart. The best explanation I’ve landed on is the one Andrew put bluntly on the show: there’s a hierarchy of evil, and at the top of it is Western colonialism. Everything else gets filtered through that lens. If the West does it, it’s imperialism. If someone else does it — no matter how brutal — well, you have to understand the context.

That filter explains a lot. It explains why October 7 produced calls for “context” rather than condemnation. It explains why the regime’s massacre of its own citizens in January barely registered in Western discourse. And it explains why, the moment the US and Israel act, international law becomes sacred ground.

As Andrew said — and he’s right — it would be lovely if international law worked and was respected. But we’re in a situation where the only people following it are the nations that aren’t acting despotically. The regime doesn’t respect international law. It weaponises it. It uses our commitment to rules against us, knowing that every Western response will be met with a chorus of legal objections that its own behaviour never triggers.

This brings me to Mark Carney, whose response to this war has been — I’ll be charitable — uneven.

On Day 1, his statement was clear, decisive, and among the most hawkish of any world leader. I was genuinely surprised. "Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security." That's not hedging. That's a position.

And then, within 72 hours, the walkback began. Anand called for de-escalation. McGuinty called for a ceasefire. Carney himself, pressed on it in Australia, said he supported the mission “with regret.” Three officials, three positions, in three days. Then another reversal — he couldn’t rule out military involvement. Then another shift in tone.

My best guess is the initial statement was genuine conviction, and the walkback was caucus management. Some version of senior Liberals looking at that statement and saying: what the hell, we weren’t expecting that. And from there, the operating system kicked in — soften the position, triangulate, find something that keeps the caucus together even if it makes no sense to anyone watching from the outside.

The problem is Carney has built his brand on being the right person for a crisis. This is the crisis. And the government’s response looked less like strategic deliberation and more like making it up as they went along.

The Keir Starmer parallel is worse, honestly. Andrew — who served as a Conservative MP for over a decade — was genuinely embarrassed by the UK response. Starmer initially refused to let the US use British bases, then reversed course after Iranian retaliatory strikes hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and put British personnel across the Gulf at risk. He published legal advice suggesting the initial US-Israeli strikes didn’t meet the self-defence threshold. He told Parliament the UK doesn’t believe in “regime change from the skies.”

Trump called him “not Winston Churchill.” That landed because it was true.

The damage to the special relationship is real. Gulf allies who have historically looked to the UK as a stabilising presence were apparently frustrated by the absence. And the image of American bombers operating from British bases while the British government insisted it wasn’t really participating — that’s not a sustainable position. It’s a legal fiction that everyone can see through.

I don’t know how this war ends. Trump is calling it a “little excursion” while his Defence Secretary promises the most intense day of strikes yet. Iran has named a hardline successor who signals defiance, not negotiation. Israel appears to be racing to inflict maximum damage before the political window closes.

What I do know is that the framing matters. If we keep treating February 28 as the start of this story, we’ll keep having the wrong conversation — one where the regime gets to play the victim and the people who’ve suffered under it for half a century get erased from the picture.

The war didn’t start on February 28. It started a long time ago. We just weren’t paying attention.

This essay draws from this week’s episode of Craft Politics. Andrew and I cover the Iran war, the EU’s protectionist “Made in Europe” act, and Carney’s Indo-Pacific tour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Two-thirds of Canadians say they’re in the political centre. Only about 12% place themselves on the far left or far right. On paper, we’re a moderate country.

So why does it feel like we’re tearing each other apart?

That question sat with me after a conversation I had on this week’s episode of Craft Politics with Richard Jenkins and Alexander Chipman Koty, the two authors of a new report from Digital Public Square and Abacus Data on political polarization in Canada. They surveyed 2,250 Canadians — not just about where they sit on the political spectrum, but about how they feel about people on the other side. The distinction between those two questions turns out to be the whole ballgame.

There’s a concept in political science called affective polarization, which is different than ideological polarization in which people move further apart on actual policy — climate, immigration, taxes. Affective polarization is when people develop strong negative feelings toward the other side regardless of whether they disagree on much. It’s tribal. It’s emotional. And according to this research, it’s where Canada’s real problem lives.

Richard put it in a way that stuck with me: we haven’t become a society where our politics are more divisive. We’ve just become better sorted. The issues stack on top of each other so that conservatives all look alike, liberals all look alike, and the NDP all look alike. There’s less room for overlap because your political tribe now carries a whole bundle of assumptions about who you are, what you watch, what you eat, and who you hang out with.

Alex made a similar point about how political identity has leaked into everything — sports, music, the Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny performs and suddenly it’s a political event with Kid Rock running a counter-broadcast. Every facet of culture can become a proxy war.

That’s the operating environment. And it means that even when Canadians aren’t far apart on the substance, they’ve built these elaborate pictures of the other side based on what the algorithm serves them. You see the worst of the right or the worst of the left, assume it’s representative, and your contempt hardens from there.

The finding that surprised me most — and the one I suspect will surprise listeners — is that the hostility between left and right isn’t symmetrical.

• You’d assume the anger is roughly equal on both sides. It’s not.

• Canadians who are only slightly left of centre view the right more negatively than slightly right-of-centre Canadians view the left.

• The left, as Richard put it with a laugh, does a better job of hating the other side.

His explanation was interesting. The left has been winning the moral argument on social issues for a while now — and that creates a sense that the right is trying to roll back hard-fought progress. It produces a kind of moral certainty that sharpens the contempt. And then, eventually, the right pushes back hard against what it perceives as virtue signalling. Which is part of how you end up with the Trump phenomenon — a rejection of that moral framing dressed up as populism.

Andrew saw the same dynamic from the receiving end. He talked about how even moderate Labour voters would treat him like an anomaly — “oh, you’re one of the good Tories” — as if the default assumption was that anyone on the right must be driven by something sinister. He found that the centre-left was far more likely to assume bad faith about the centre-right than the other way around.

This asymmetry matters for anyone trying to build bridges. If you assume the hostility is equal and you design interventions accordingly, you’re going to miss something.

The report breaks Canadians into six segments based on their attitudes toward democracy, nostalgia, belonging, and polarization itself. The two that stuck with me were on opposite ends.

The Civic Optimists are the Canadians most satisfied with democracy, most proud to be Canadian, most trusting of institutions. They skew heavily 55 and older. They’re the winners — the political system has rewarded their choices and values, and they feel good about it.

The Frustrated Pessimists sit at the other end. Lowest trust in institutions, highest nostalgia for a Canada that used to be, heaviest social media use. They feel the system has let them down. They skew right. And they’re the most frequent daily consumers of the platforms most likely to reinforce that frustration.

What struck me was less the segments themselves and more the generational fault line running underneath them. The civic optimists are a product of a different era — one where the social contract felt more intact, housing was accessible, and the future looked brighter than the past. Younger Canadians don’t have that foundation. They’re more cynical, more right-leaning than previous generations at the same age, and — this is the part that should get your attention — more open to political leaders who bend the rules to get things done.

Alex was careful to add a nuance that I think matters: those same younger Canadians were also the strongest defenders of minority rights. When the survey asked whether it’s acceptable to restrict the rights of minorities in the name of national identity, young people were the most opposed. So it’s not that they’ve abandoned democratic values. It’s that they’ve lost faith in the system’s ability to deliver on those values. That’s a different problem — and arguably a more fixable one.

Richard made a point near the end of the conversation that I’ve been chewing on since. He said Canadians dramatically overestimate how many people are at the extremes. They think there’s a massive group of far-right fascists or far-left radicals out there, when in reality the fringes are small. But that misperception changes everything — because if you believe the other side is full of extremists, you behave accordingly. You disengage. You dehumanize. You stop treating politics as a disagreement between reasonable people and start treating it as a war.

Walter Lippmann wrote about this a century ago — the idea that we don’t see the world as it actually is, we see the world through pictures we’ve constructed in our heads. What’s changed is that we now have tools that validate those pictures 24 hours a day. The algorithm doesn’t show you a representative sample of the other side. It shows you the most outrageous example, because that’s what keeps you scrolling.

Alex described some of Digital Public Square’s work to counter this — gamified platforms that share real survey data with users and let them guess what other Canadians actually think. The punch line, more often than not, is that people discover they have more in common than they assumed. It’s a small intervention, but the experimental evidence suggests it builds empathy. And in a landscape where most of the incentive structures push toward division, small interventions that actually work are worth paying attention to.

We ended the conversation where I think most honest conversations about polarization end — slightly frustrated and without a clean answer. Andrew and Richard had a spirited back-and-forth about electoral reform (Andrew pushing back hard from a UK perspective, Richard arguing for at least some structural changes to reduce the regional polarization that reinforces political polarization in Canada). Alex made the point that no system design can solve this alone if people’s underlying grievances about housing, affordability, and economic security aren’t addressed.

My own takeaway was simpler, and I offered it half-jokingly on the episode, but I mean it: put the phone down and go talk to a neighbour. The affective polarization that this report documents — the contempt, the assumption of bad faith, the in-group/out-group tribalism — thrives in the absence of face-to-face contact. It’s remarkably hard to maintain contempt for someone you’ve actually had a beer with.

The data says we’re not that far apart. The data also says we can’t feel it. And the gap between those two things is where the real danger lives.

The premise came from a frustration I’ve carried for years. Public affairs doesn’t have a shared curriculum. There’s no agreed-upon set of foundational texts. No canon. Lawyers have their core cases. Economists have their essential readings. MBAs have their strategy bibles. Public affairs practitioners? We improvise. We learn on the job, pick up frameworks from colleagues, absorb whatever books happen to cross our desks, and build our own mental models from scratch.

That’s fine when it works. But it means most of us have significant gaps in our foundations, and we don’t always know where those gaps are until we’re in the middle of a campaign wondering why our perfectly crafted message is landing wrong.

Masters in Public Affairs is my attempt to fix that. One book per episode. Deep dives, not summaries. I’m pulling out the durable ideas — the principles that hold regardless of which country you’re in, which party is in power, or which technology platform is dominant this year — and translating them into mental models practitioners can actually use.

The thesis behind the show is borrowed from elite athletics: the best performers work the fundamentals. They don’t chase tactics. They master the structures underneath. I think the same is true in public affairs, and I think the fundamentals are sitting in books that most of us haven’t read carefully enough.

Three episodes are out now. Lippmann’s Public Opinion. McRaney’s How Minds Change. And the one I want to walk you through today: Frank Luntz’s Words That Work.

Why I think this matters for Craft Politics listeners

If you’ve been listening to Craft Politics, you already care about the craft of public affairs. You’re already thinking about how to do this work better. Or maybe you're simply fascinated by it all. Either way, Masters in Public Affairs is the deeper layer underneath that. It’s where the foundational thinking lives.

Craft Politics covers the practice — the campaigns, the strategies, the conversations with people doing the work. Masters in Public Affairs covers the theory that makes the practice make sense. They’re complementary. One explains what’s happening now. The other explains the structures that have always been true.

I don’t expect every Craft Politics listener to want both. But if you’ve ever wondered why a message that should have worked didn’t, or why your perfectly logical argument bounced off an audience that seemed to agree with you in principle, the answer is probably sitting in one of these foundational books. That’s the gap Masters in Public Affairs is built to close.

The episode on Words That Work is out now. I’m cross-posting it to the Craft Politics feed this week so you can hear what the show sounds like. If it resonates, subscribe to Masters in Public Affairs wherever you get your podcasts. If it doesn’t, no hard feelings. Craft Politics isn’t going anywhere.

Pick your preferred podcast app:

• Spotify

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Masters in Public Affairs is a new podcast and essay series building the canonical foundation for modern public affairs. New episodes published regularly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Two leaders who didn’t come up through politics. Two very different results.

There’s a version of the conventional wisdom that says politics rewards political people. At least, that’s the version I’ve longed parroted. On balance, I believe the ones who’ve spent decades in the system — learning its rhythms, accumulating its debts, absorbing its logic, who know how the game is played—perform better than neophytes.

That conventional wisdom is having a rough month.

This week gave us one of the starker political contrasts I can remember watching in real time. On one side of the Atlantic, a prime minister with no majority is sitting at approval ratings that would be the envy of most leaders inna the Western world. On the other, a prime minister with the largest parliamentary majority in a generation has just recorded the worst approval numbers of any sitting British PM since polling records began. Negative 47%.

Both of them, notably, came to the job without the typical political biography.

I want to be careful not to overclaim here — context matters enormously, and I’ll get to that. But I think there’s something real in this contrast worth sitting with.

Mark Carney announced this week that Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux is crossing the floor to join the Liberal caucus — the third CPC member to do so in recent months. Combined with three outstanding by-elections the Liberals are favoured to win, Carney could soon hold a slim majority government. Not bad for a party that, fourteen months ago, was staring down the barrel of a potential third-place finish.

When we recorded the last episode of Craft Politics, I was still convinced — from a pure political strategy standpoint — that calling a snap election in 2026 was a no-brainer. The polling numbers are there. The opposition is in disarray. Pierre Poilievre’s personal numbers remain stubbornly negative. The window exists.

I’ve changed my mind.

The more I watch how this prime minister operates, the more I think he’s genuinely not interested in the political play. It doesn’t seem to be how he’s built. He wants to demonstrate something first. He wants to earn the mandate. Dance to the beat of his own drum.

And it’s working.

Think about what’s happened in just the past few weeks. A defence industrial strategy, a serious push toward NATO’s 2% GDP spending target — ahead of schedule — and a goal of 5% by 2035. A trade visit to China. An upcoming trip to India, which carries real political risk given how some Liberal ridings feel about Modi. And the appointment of Janice Charette as Canada’s chief trade negotiator with the United States — one of the smartest personnel decisions I’ve seen from this government, and I say that as someone who had the privilege of working alongside her in Ottawa. She’s whip-smart, she’s trusted across party lines, and she doesn’t carry the ideological baggage that made the previous relationship with Washington so difficult to manage.

None of these moves feel like they’re playing to a base. They feel like someone who has a list of things to get done and is working through it.

Now look across the Atlantic.

Keir Starmer came to the Labour leadership — and eventually to Downing Street — as an accomplished lawyer and public servant. Not a career politician in the traditional sense. And yet somehow, his government has managed to feel like the most politically reactive administration in recent British memory.

This week’s reversal on local elections is the one that stings most, and not just because of the substance. Starmer’s government had announced that elections in 30 council areas would be delayed — ostensibly to allow for a structural overhaul of local government. Reform UK launched a legal challenge. And just before the High Court was set to hear it, the government blinked. The elections will proceed.

Fine. Governments change course. That’s not inherently a problem.

The problem is that Starmer gave an interview days earlier explicitly ruling out more U-turns. That’s now the twelfth or thirteenth reversal — depending on how generously you count — in under two years. On welfare cuts. On inheritance tax. On digital ID plans. On pub business rate relief. On immigration rhetoric. And now this.

Each individual reversal might be defensible. The cumulative picture is not. It reads as a government that doesn’t know what it believes, staffed by people whose instincts run in a different direction than the words coming out of their mouths. The public can smell the gap between the two.

Carney’s instincts and his political positioning appear to be aligned with public opinion and public priorities. He is focused. The red Tory, pro-business, trade-diversification, muscular-on-defence pitch he’s making fits naturally. And voters are remarkably good at detecting when a leader means what they’re saying.

Starmer’s problem might be that he doesn’t fully mean it. His natural political home — the lawyerly, progressive, careful-on-immigration-rhetoric left — keeps surfacing in ways that contradict the tougher messaging his government has committed to publicly. That tension compounds with time.

I want to end on something that didn’t fit cleanly into our episode discussion but has stayed with me since the weekend.

The mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge last week was devastating. The ages of the victims hit close to home for me — they overlapped with my own kids. A photo circulated over the weekend: Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, and Governor General Mary Simon, together at a vigil, holding hands, along with other opposition leaders.

I looked at that photo for a while.

I have a hard time picturing the equivalent in American politics right now. Maybe that’s unfair — maybe something that catastrophic would still produce moments of unity south of the border. I genuinely hope so. But the contrast felt real. When it mattered, two leaders who spend significant energy politically jousting, showed up in the same frame, doing the same human thing.

Canada gets it right sometimes. Worth acknowledging when it does.

This week we sat down with Dave Cournoyer, — one of the most consistent and respected voices covering Alberta politics — to unpack how we got here, who’s driving this, and why the pro-Canada side should be worried about what comes next.

What We Covered

Alberta as Canada’s energy engine. The province produces roughly three quarters of Canada’s oil and gas. But oil and gas isn’t just an economic issue in Alberta — it’s cultural, it’s identity. When the federal government comes after that, the reaction is deeply personal. Dave walked us through how decades of tension between Alberta and Ottawa — from Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program in the early 1980s to Justin Trudeau’s climate agenda — created the conditions for what we’re seeing now.

How the separatist movement actually organized. Here’s what I’d forgotten (or underestimated): this iteration of Alberta separatism didn’t start with pipelines or oil prices. It started with opposition to COVID-19 public health measures. Groups like the Alberta Prosperity Project spent two to three years travelling rural Alberta, holding town halls, building lists, and organizing — well before they made separatism their headline issue. By the time they did, they’d already done the hard grassroots work. That matters.

The movement is no longer fringe. Dave made a point that stuck with me: Alberta separatism used to live exclusively in fringe political parties pulling tiny vote shares. Now, the separatist movement is increasingly ingrained within the governing United Conservative Party. Separatist-aligned activists hold constituency association presidencies. They openly booed Premier Danielle Smith at the party’s fall convention. The infrastructure has shifted from the margins to the inside of the governing coalition.

Danielle Smith’s impossible tightrope. Smith has positioned herself as supporting a “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada” — which, as Dave put it, is having your cake and eating it too. Her voting coalition includes both separatist-curious activists and pro-Canada conservatives. If a referendum happens, she’ll face enormous pressure to choose a side. That choice could make or break her political future.

The pro-Canada side’s leadership problem. This was the crux of Dave’s recent Substack piece — and the heart of our conversation. Dave identified three potential faces for a pro-Canada campaign: Thomas Lukaszek (who ran the Forever Canadian petition and collected 456,000 signatures), former Premier Jason Kenney (who’s been vocal but lost his political base), and NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi (who has the clearest political freedom to be unequivocally pro-Canada). The problem? Their relationships are fraught, and there’s no unified campaign infrastructure. We could end up with a three-headed monster where everyone assumes the other guy’s in charge.

Lessons from Brexit and Scotland. Andrew drew heavily on his experience with both UK referendums — and the parallels are uncomfortable. The leave side gets to run an aspirational campaign. The stay side almost inevitably ends up running a negative one, which gets flipped into “project fear.” A referendum legitimizes the question regardless of the outcome. And if separation loses 70-30, you’ve now quantified and galvanized a significant bloc with no political home. Scotland’s independence referendum was supposed to settle the question. It did the opposite.

Foreign interference is a real wildcard. Separatist leaders have claimed meetings with the US State Department. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has openly discussed Alberta separatism. Donald Trump would love nothing more than to be an epic disruptor on this file — and all it takes is a Truth Social post to dominate the news cycle in Alberta for days.

The Bottom Line

Dave put it plainly: if a referendum were held today, it would likely lose — the separatist side would pull 20 to 30 percent. But a referendum held 10 months from now? Nobody knows what the defining issue will be by then. Campaigns take on a life of their own. The separatist side is organized. The pro-Canada side isn’t — not yet. And that gap is the whole problem.

Alberta and Canada are worth fighting for. But someone needs to start fighting now.

Starmer’s slow-motion collapse

The Mandelson crisis has become something else entirely. What started as questions about vetting and judgment has triggered a cascade: chief of staff resigned, comms director gone, cabinet secretary potentially next. The Scottish Labour leader publicly called for Starmer to step down. Cabinet ministers are releasing their own text messages to get ahead of briefings against them.

The leadership contest seems to be happening already. Starmer just hasn’t recognized he’s toast.

Andrew was in Westminster this week and described something I found striking: Labour MPs are depressed. Not angry, not defiant — just defeated. Imagine winning a 174-seat majority and finding yourself under 20% in the polls before you’ve even hit the two-year mark. Every week brings another comms disaster, another U-turn, another own goal.

The upcoming by-election will be framed as a referendum on Starmer’s leadership. May’s local elections will be brutal. And at some point — everyone seems to agree on this — there will be a final straw. We’re just not there yet.

What I keep coming back to is how much of this is self-inflicted. You have to go back five prime ministers to find one who completed a full term. And when you trace the reasons why, it almost always comes down to basic competence failures. I don’t love saying that — it’s easy to armchair quarterback — but it really does seem to be that simple.

Poilievre’s leadership math problem

Pierre Poilievre secured 87.4% support at his leadership review. No surprise. But here’s the tension worth watching: party polling is stable in the high 30s, yet his personal approval keeps ticking down.

Six in ten Canadians say they’re satisfied with Carney’s government. That includes a not-insignificant number of conservative voters.

I think it’s premature to assess Poilievre’s ability to win a general election. He’s spent the last few months clearing hurdles — winning back his seat, securing the leadership review — that required him to keep appealing to the base. Now that’s behind him, the real test begins: can he adjust his image over the next six to eight months to close the gap between party polling and his personal numbers?

The challenge is that he built such a strong brand as the angry guy making sharp arguments on behalf of frustrated Canadians. That worked brilliantly in opposition to Trudeau. It’s less clear whether you can pivot from that to something with broader appeal — or whether you even need to, if the Carney honeymoon eventually fades.

The snap election temptation

Polymarket currently has a 44% chance of a Canadian election by June 30th — and it’s trending up.

If I were purely playing political chess, I’d be tempted to call it soon. The Liberals are polling well. Carney’s approval is high. The NDP is weak. The Conservatives have a leader who may be weighing down the brand. And the Trump threat — which has been a tailwind for Carney — might look less urgent after midterms if Democrats perform well.

But Andrew made a point worth remembering: the electorate can be unforgiving of unnecessary elections. In 2017, UK Conservatives were 20 points ahead, called a snap election, couldn’t explain why they were having one, and nearly lost. Campaigns change things. World events turn on a dime. You can start an election with six in ten Canadians behind you and finish on the defensive because the narrative shifted to crime or cost of living.

There’s no genius here. It’s art, not science. And the honest conclusion we came to is that we don’t have an effing clue what happens next.

But you should still tune in next week. Maybe we’ll figure something out.

Quebec represents 23% of Canada’s population and 20% of GDP. If it separated — which is back on the table for the first time in a generation — it would be like the UK losing Scotland, except with a larger economy.

The last referendum in 1995? The “no” side won by 54,288 votes. Half a percent. Thirty years later, the separatist Parti Québécois is leading the polls with a commitment to hold another referendum by 2030.

We brought in Kevin Paquette, a colleague at Crestview who was president of the CAQ youth wing during the party’s rise, to make sense of what’s actually happening.

What We Covered

• The collapse of the third way. François Legault’s CAQ offered Quebec nationalists a deal: protect the French language, get more autonomy, skip the referendum drama. The party went from 90 seats in 2022 to polling at near-extinction today.

• Support for the PQ doesn’t mean support for sovereignty. Roughly 30% of current PQ voters would vote no in a referendum. People are parking votes with the PQ because they’re fed up with everyone else.

• The Montreal-regions divide. Elections aren’t won in Montreal. They’re won in the francophone regions where people feel increasingly disconnected from a metropolitan core that doesn’t share their lived experience.

• The Supreme Court wildcard. The upcoming decision on Bill 21 and the notwithstanding clause could hand the PQ a narrative that writes itself: we tried to make Canada work, and Canada said no.

Key Insight

Kevin’s prediction: minority government, regardless of who wins. Both the CAQ and Liberals are picking new leaders months before the October 2026 election while the separatists cruise in the polls. A third referendum loss would end Quebec’s leverage game with Ottawa permanently — which means nationalists may not actually want a referendum they might lose.

Guest

Kevin Paquette — public affairs consultant at Crestview Strategy, former CAQ youth wing president (2017–2019), and sharp observer of Quebec’s regional-urban divide.

This week, we dissect Prime Minister Mark Carney’s headline-grabbing Davos speech, Trump’s inflammatory comments about NATO allies in Afghanistan, the Labour Party’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing in a by-election, and the continuing exodus of Conservative MPs to Reform UK.

Plus: a deep dive into Trump’s collapsing poll numbers across key demographics.

The post-war order is dead. We knew that already. But last week, someone important finally said it out loud — and the reaction tells us more than the speech itself.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address at Davos has been called a doctrine. It’s been called a warning shot. It’s been called the moment Canada found its spine. And while I’m a sucker for all of that framing (as a former speechwriter, I can’t help myself), I think the real story is simpler: Carney told a room full of elites what they already knew but had been too polite to admit. The operating system the West has relied on since 1945 doesn’t work anymore. Pretending otherwise has become risky, if not naive.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

That’s the line. Transitions imply continuity. Ruptures don’t.

The speech and its audience

Holly raised a fair question on this week’s episode: who was the speech actually for? The CEOs in the room? Donald Trump? Voters back home?

My read: it was for all three, but primarily domestic. Carney won the Liberal leadership by positioning himself as the only candidate capable of handling Trump. Davos gave him the global stage to prove it — right before Trump took the same stage with a rambling, unfocused address that confused Iceland and Greenland.

The contrast was deliberate. And it worked.

The Liberals have seen a bump in the polls since. Too early to attribute it directly to Davos, but the timing is notable. Trump looms large over the Canadian psyche right now, and every time he does something erratic, it helps the party that positioned itself as the adult in the room.

But there’s a second audience worth considering: middle powers everywhere. Carney appears to want Canada to be seen as the leading voice among countries that aren’t superpowers but still hold significant regional influence. “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu” was the other memorable line. It’s not subtle. It’s a pitch for coalition-building among countries that suddenly find themselves without a reliable big brother.

The ego and the backlash

Trump’s reaction was predictable. He threatened 100% tariffs on Canada, then walked it back when he realized he didn’t understand what Carney had actually signed with China. The whole cycle — outrage, threat, retreat — took about 48 hours.

This is the pattern now. Andrew made the point on the show that we’re trying to rationalize something irrational. Disorder reigns. Maybe we should stop looking for coherence where there isn’t any.

I’m not sure I agree entirely. Patterns are emerging, even if they’re patterns of chaos. We know that anything perceived as a personal affront triggers a tantrum. We know the tantrum usually burns out within days. We know Trump cares deeply about what the British Royal Family thinks of him (weird, but documented). And we know that when his base pushes back — as they did in Minneapolis this weekend — he’s capable of reversing course.

That last one is new. And it might matter.

The Afghanistan insult

Speaking of tantrums: Trump claimed last week that NATO allies “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines” in Afghanistan.

I grew up as a military brat. I have friends and family who served. So this one landed differently for me.

The numbers: 2,461 American souls lost. 457 British. 158 Canadian. Then France, Germany, Denmark, and others. NATO was there. Side by side. Dying alongside American troops in a war invoked under Article 5 — the only time that collective defence clause has ever been used.

And it was used by the United States.

For all the rhetoric about NATO serving European interests at American expense, the historical record shows the opposite. When America called, its allies answered. Many of them came home in coffins.

Trump has since walked the comments back, reportedly after the King got involved. But the damage is done. In the UK, the response was overwhelming and bipartisan — Holly noted that almost everyone who spoke publicly was sensible and clear. In Canada, veterans’ groups were furious. Even some American veterans pushed back.

Andrew made a broader point worth sitting with: there’s something in the American psyche that sometimes erases allied contributions from the historical record. Watch any Hollywood WWII film — it’s often told as if no one else was there. That’s not malice. It’s just the water Americans swim in. But it creates real friction when a president says the quiet part out loud.

The Labour Party’s gift to Reform

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Labour Party continues to find creative ways to hurt itself.

Andy Burnham — Mayor of Greater Manchester, former MP, former minister, perennial leadership hopeful — wanted to stand in a by-election for a safe Labour seat. The NEC said no, citing the cost of a mayoral by-election that would follow. Convenient.

The reality is that Keir Starmer doesn’t want a rival on his back benches. Burnham has been openly positioning himself as an alternative, and Labour MPs reportedly like him. Blocking him is a short-term fix with long-term costs.

Here’s the problem: Labour may now lose that seat to Reform anyway. It’s Greater Manchester — a Labour bastion for generations — but the demographics make it a target. Burnham probably would have held it. Now we’ll never know, and the narrative will write itself regardless.

This is a government with a 170-seat majority, less than two years in, and it cannot stop fighting itself. It’s a continuation of what we saw under the Conservatives. The cycle of self-destruction just changed jerseys.

The Conservative exodus

Speaking of the Conservatives: Suella Braverman defected to Reform this week, following Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell. Three MPs in seven days. For a party that doesn’t have many MPs left, that’s significant.

Holly noted that Braverman’s speech was polished — far more so than Jenrick’s rushed announcement. Reform is getting better at this. The production value, the staging, the messaging. They’re professionalizing quickly.

The deeper problem for the Conservatives is that they keep losing people from the right. At some point, there is no right left. And that sends a signal to right-leaning voters that the party has given up on them. Meanwhile, they’re also bleeding to the Liberal Democrats on the other flank.

Getting squeezed from both sides with a diminished caucus is not a recoverable position. At least not easily.

Trump’s polling collapse

I pulled up a chart on the show that’s been making the rounds. It tracks Trump’s support across key demographics from 2020 to 2024 to today.

The trajectory is a U-turn. Among non-white voters: collapse. Among 18-29 year-olds: collapse. These were the groups that swung toward him in 2024. Now they’re swinging back — hard.

The data is pre-Minneapolis. It doesn’t capture whatever effect the weekend’s images might have had: peaceful protesters, ICE agents, a shooting. We’ll see if that accelerates the trend or gets absorbed into the noise.

But here’s what I’m watching: Trump’s retreat in Minneapolis may be the first time he’s recognized that his base moved away from him on an issue. That’s different. He’s usually immune to feedback. If he’s suddenly responsive to it, something has shifted.

The question is what happens next. If his numbers keep sliding, how do the people around him react? Does JD Vance start creating distance? Does Marco Rubio? Do the heirs to the MAGA movement realize they need to protect themselves from the man who built it?

And if Trump feels abandoned, what does that look like?

Word of the week: Big Daddy Carns

This one comes from Kyla Ronellenfitsch who worked on Carney’s campaign. Apparently, during a 2025 event, a woman heckled the PM with “Lead us, Big Daddy!” He was flustered. Maybe a little flattered.

The term became internal shorthand for Carney’s specific flavour of cheeky, charming competence. Business Carney, but also the alter ego who pocketed a beer at the St. Patrick’s Day parade and bragged about his Spotify age.

Kyla’s point is that Davos was Big Daddy Carns energy: serious but fundamentally human. The speech showed Canadians who they elected.

Whether that holds through whatever comes next — tariffs, trade wars, more tantrums — remains to be seen. But for one week at least, Canada’s prime minister looked like the grown-up in the room.

That’s not nothing.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube and Spotify.