Canada's Election Clock Just Changed
Floor crossings, fighter jets, and falling approval ratings...
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.