What is going on in Quebec?

Rudy Husny walks us through an incredible 10-week period in what might be the most politically dynamic environment in Canada right now.

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.

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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.