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Front Burner Transcript for February 17, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Are there any patriots in the room who are ready to put Canada first?

[crowd cheers]

JAYME POISSON: Hey everybody, it's Jayme. In what has become a bit of a ritual these days, the U.S. national anthem was booed very loudly on Saturday at the Four Nations Face-Off tournament game in Montreal. Canada was playing the U.S.

SOUNDCLIP

[Anthem singer singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" as fans boo]

JP: And in a fitting metaphor, things immediately came to blows. Three fights broke out between the American and Canadian players in the first nine seconds of the game.

SOUNDCLIP

[Four Nations tournament broadcast clip]

HOCKEY ANALYST: And here we go. Look at this...

PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER: This Face-Off matchup is underway... And the gloves are off.

SOUNDCLIP

HOCKEY ANALYST: This was set up.

PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER: And here they come, Ray, you're right.

HOCKEY ANALYST: Right before the first Tkachuk fight, this was set up.

PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER: Now we're nine seconds in... We had a fight, two seconds in. Another one, one second later. Now, in the centre of the action, it's Colton Parayko and J.T. Miller.

JP: Two things I think are worth noting here: it looks like the Americans started it, and an American player, it seems, punched himself in the face. The tariff tension has forced this hard reset on just about every aspect of Canada-U.S. relations. And one of the people feeling that pretty keenly is Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. On Saturday, Poilievre held this, quote, "Canada First" rally, where he hoped to define himself and his campaign given this new political reality. So how did it go, and what tightrope is he walking right now? I've got two friends of the pod with me today to talk about all of this and I'm sure more. Aaron Wherry is a senior political writer with the CBC's parliamentary bureau. Hey, Aaron.

AARON WHERRY: Hey.

JP: And David Coletto is CEO and founder of Abacus Data. David, hey. Always great to have you.

DAVID COLETTO: Hi, Jayme.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Aaron, let me start with you. This Canada First rally in Ottawa, hundreds of people were there. It was expected to be an unofficial launch of the federal Conservative election campaign, and also, really, a pivot. Was it that? What was it?

AARON WHERRY: I think it was a bit of a pivot. You know, the Canada First phrasing from him started, I think, very shortly after Donald Trump won the election last fall. And so it's not entirely new, but he's certainly now leaning into it much more than previously. And I think, you know, he has this rally; it's on Flag Day. It's at this moment of peak patriotism. And it's a chance for him to kind of reframe his offer.

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Everyone now admits -- or they claim to admit -- that Conservatives were right on the Liberal capital gains tax hike. That Conservatives were right on the carbon tax, on pipelines, on LNG, on fentanyl, the borders, immigration, and the need to celebrate rather than cancel our proud history and country.

AARON WHERRY: You know, I think it's kind of funny because I think part of his speech was really saying, you know, all of the things that I have been calling for already are now that much more important and that much more needed, and I was sort of right all along.

JP: Yeah. Tell me more about like what--

AARON WHERRY: Yeah, like in terms of...

JP: What you mean, yeah.

AARON WHERRY: ...you know, we need to... you know, him saying, you know, that the-- that Canada needs to build pipelines.

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We need a plan to bring home production to this country. And that's what we will have. My common sense plan to unleash the production of our resources will allow...

AARON WHERRY: It needs to, you know, crack down on fentanyl, and it needs to, you know, unleash economic growth and entrepreneurship and... and spend on the military. He sort of trying to reframe a lot of things he was kind of already talking about as more needed now than ever. But I think it is also conspicuous how much his language has changed. I don't think the word "broken" appeared anywhere in that speech yesterday. You know, the idea that Canada is broken has seemingly disappeared out of his vocabulary.

JP: David, do you want to jump in here? Anything that stood out to you in particular?

DAVID COLETTO: Well, I think two things stood out. I mean, I had written about the fact that I thought Poilievre has a Trump problem and that there's a sizable portion of his own supporter base that really likes Donald Trump, and a sizable portion about equal the size who really doesn't. You know, what Trump has done is created a new wedge within the Conservative coalition that really did not exist a few months ago or even a few weeks ago. And I think yesterday... I think I counted-- he only mentioned Trump's name seven times, and a few of those were in the, you know, his French and English remarks. So he did not engage directly with the president and name him, but he aggressively went after his policies.

SOUNDCLIP

[applause]

PIERRE POILIEVRE: So let me be clear: We will never be the 51st state.

[cheering, applause]

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We will bear any burden and pay any price to protect the sovereignty and independence of our country.

DAVID COLETTO: I think he tried to thread that needle. And we'll see whether it was possible. But it is the big challenge I see Conservatives having to face now, that their coalition, which previously was united and glued together by a common desire for change and a common antipathy towards Justin Trudeau, has now been replaced with this wedge that's kind of dividing it around how do you deal with Trump and how hard can you go on him.

[music]

JP: The Liberals are really picking up on that, right? This weekend I noticed that they put out some ads really trying to nail Poilievre on some of this stuff. There's this one that they put up which is just clips of Poilievre and clips of Trump side by side.

SOUNDCLIP

[Montage of Trump and Poilievre clips]

DONALD TRUMP: Fake news.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Fake news...

DONALD TRUMP: The left-wing censorship regime.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Their woke censorship ideology.

DONALD TRUMP: Defeating the radical left...

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Radical leftist, authoritarian...

DONALD TRUMP: We want those great Canadian...

JP: And it makes the argument that Poilievre can't speak for Canada when he speaks like Trump. Another ad questioned Poilievre's ability to speak for Canada when, as we've been talking about, you know, he has been really focusing on how everything is broken for the last couple of years.

SOUNDCLIP

[Montage of Poilievre clips from Liberal ad]

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It's not the Americans' fault. It's our fault. We're stupid.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And everything in Canada is broken.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Canada is broken.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Everything is broken in Canada.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Everything is broken.

JP: Aaron, just, like, did you see those ads? What did you think?

AARON WHERRY: So I think the Liberals have been sort of playing at this argument for a while and trying to figure out how to land it. There was a period of time when the Liberals started referring to MAGA Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre's MAGA Conservatives. And then they kind of dropped that. And I think in part because the Liberal thinking, you know, going back to the first Trump term, was, you know, don't, don't be seen as attacking Donald Trump. Don't be seen as attacking what's going on in the States. And I think that has sort of fallen away now because Donald Trump isn't just the president, he is the president who is threatening Canada. I think David's right. For Pierre Poilievre, you know... Look, you can, you can sit down and list all the ways Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump are different. You know, Pierre Poilievre has not campaigned on the sort of nativist nationalism that you see in the United States. You know, he hasn't leaned on the idea of illegal immigration the way Donald Trump has. You know, so on and so forth. But some of the language and some of the, some of the things that Pierre Poilievre is interested in talking about, there is overlap, right? You know, he, he did use the word woke I think three times yesterday. He talked about cancel culture.

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We will defeat this insidious and divisive cancel culture that sought to destroy our national pride and monuments. They've even tried to destroy the great founder of this country, John A. McDonald. Well, I've got a message for them...

AARON WHERRY: And, you know, I think that that speaks to a certain part of the Conservative base that is interested in those issues and interested in those ideas. But, you know, the flipside of that is there are lots of Canadians probably looking at what's going on in the United States and feeling pretty concerned. And so for the Liberals, there's a lot of logic, I imagine, in saying: you see what's going on in the United States, and, you know, listen to Pierre Poilievre and notice the similarities.

DAVID COLETTO: Yeah, if I could just add, and I mean, the reason why today this is a much bigger problem for Poilievre than it was a few weeks ago, even as Canadians knew that Donald Trump was going to become president, was because what he did angered so many people. It was a sense of betrayal that now any sense that any political leader had in the past cheered for him, would have supported him, and even somewhat like him I think brings real risk in a way that it didn't a few, a few weeks ago. So that is part of why this landscape has changed: because the public is so mad. And what's really interesting, I noted in a piece I put on my Substack, it's baby boomers in particular. If you look at all the polls and the shift in the polls that we've seen over the last few weeks, a lot of that shift has come among those over 60. The Liberals--

JP: Yeah, why? Why do you think that is?

DAVID COLETTO: Well, I think they are watching this more intently than anybody else. They're also much more likely to say they're going to boycott American products and companies. They're more likely to change their behaviour than any other generation. So you're mixing this all in together, and I think... And then you've got, I think, the prospect of Mark Carney, which... he's not a boomer -- I think he's right on the edge -- but he's as boomer as they get in terms of the leaders that we have. And there's this actually interesting moment where, you know, the Liberals who a decade ago won a majority on the backs of the surge in millennial turnout, [JP: Yeah.] and now I think could be saved or at least not destroyed by this spike in--

JP: By their parents.

DAVID COLETTO: --in boomer interest. By their parents. Who--

JP: That's really interesting.

DAVID COLETTO: --are deeply enraged by and fearful about what Donald Trump represents.

JP: When we're talking about this tightrope that Poilievre has to walk when it comes to like rowing too close to Trump. I want to ask you about two specific things that happened in I think the last week, week and a half. Poilievre made this announcement about boosting Arctic security through a, quote, "massive cut" to Canada's foreign aid budget.

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We've got enough problems at home. We've got our own backyard to protect. We can't be sending billions of dollars to other places. Often and much of it is wasted and stolen and swallowed up by bureaucracies that act against our interest. I will be bringing our money home with massive cuts to these wasteful and corrupt foreign aid grants.

JP: Which was interesting because, of course, in the U.S. there are massive cuts to foreign aid right now given all that's happening with USAID. And the other one that I thought was interesting was that Poilievre is known, of course, for being confrontational with mainstream media outlets. Late last week, he sat down with someone from a new media company called Juno News. And on their website, they talk about the importance of free speech and press freedom, which they say used to be the foundation of Canadian newsrooms until, quote, "Justin Trudeau bribed every member of the legacy media with bailout money to help secure his reign as prime minister," unquote. And in the interview, Poilievre was asked whether he'd give press access to Parliament Hill to citizen journalists if he was elected PM, and he responded:

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely. I think their independent media should be allowed in the-- on the precinct. There's no reason why it should be a small cabal of government-approved mouthpieces. It is highly undemocratic. I've always believed that.

JP: And Aaron, you know, what did you make of these two moves maybe in particular? How do you think that people will react or respond to them?

AARON WHERRY: So the foreign aid piece, you know, in part, it's not a new position for the [JP: Yeah.] Conservatives. Andrew Scheer also talked about slashing foreign aid. But, you know, Poilievre doesn't just want to cut foreign aid. He says that it, you know, it's apparently going, most of it or much of it, going to:

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: ...dictators, terrorists and global bureaucracies.

AARON WHERRY: You know, so the Conservatives could fairly say, look, we've had this position for a while. The problem, as you point out, is for them, is that, well, that sounds like something Donald Trump's doing. And I think the other issue there is, on a larger scale, is if Canada is in a world that's going to be more uncertain and we don't have our most trusted friend and ally that we can count on, is now really the time for us to be engaging less-- or doing less for other countries and taking part less in international efforts in the world? So I think there's kind of two issues there for the Conservatives. On the media piece, it sounds a bit like what's going on in the United States, right? The attitude towards the mainstream, the quote unquote, "mainstream media." I mean, I do think that there's a piece of it where you're seeing politicians more and more -- you've seen Justin Trudeau do this too -- going to sort of non-traditional media outlets. In part because they, these outlets have an audience that you can reach that you maybe can't get by going on the, quote unquote, "mainstream media." But it does, again, speak to that sort of balancing act he has, where, you know, Pierre Poilievre wants to say he's standing up against Trump and standing up for Canada, but, you know, the Liberals are going to dine out on these things of saying, you know, that sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?

[music]

JP: So we've been talking about... well, today, and also on the show for a while, how that gap is closing between the Liberals and the Conservatives. But also, the polling is kind of all over the place too, in a way. Uh, I find it very hard to parse. So could you please parse it for me?

DAVID COLETTO: So let's, let's start with the thing we all agree on as pollsters, and that is: the landscape is changing. There's no doubt in my mind over the last two weeks that Donald Trump has thrown a complete grenade into the mindset of the public. But where the polls are disagreeing is on the size of the Conservative lead right now. We're all showing the Liberals gaining from anywhere between, you know, 7 to 10 points over a few weeks, which is a massive shift that you rarely see. But the Abacus poll that we rereleased last week shows the Conservatives ahead by 19. There was an EKOS poll that came out a day later that showed them ahead by 5. Both of those cannot be true. That is too big a gap. I think Liberals right now in this country are more likely than they were weeks ago to be excited about answering a survey when a pollster calls them. They're engaged in the leadership race. Trump has created engagement that wasn't there before, and Trudeau stepping away is giving them hope. Are there more Liberals? I don't think quite yet. But there's one indicator that we all agree also, is compared to a month ago, there are far more Canadians now open and reconsidering whether they'd vote Liberal again, where only a month ago more than half this country, 60-70%, were shutting that door completely.

JP: Do you have a sense of where they're getting those votes from? Like is it people who previously said that they were going to go Conservative, but now they'll, I don't know, go back to the Liberal Party, or is it people who were going to vote NDP who now are kind of more open to voting Liberal?

DAVID COLETTO: Well, that's the-- and that's the other thing I didn't mention. The NDP vote is dropping right across the board. In our poll, it's the lowest we've measured it in years, um, at 15%. When you put Mark Carney's name into the mix, it drops to 12-10%. That is catastrophic for the New Democrats. So we are seeing a number of New Democrat supporters in the past saying now they would vote Liberal. We are seeing some of those Liberals that had migrated either to the Conservatives or were saying to us they were undecided, coming back to the Liberals. But I still think the Conservatives are holding on to a sizable group of, of its new coalition that includes almost all of its previous supporters, and a sizable chunk of past Liberal, NDP, and even-- and People's Party supporters, that is giving them still that 42-43% share right now in vote intention.

JP: And then just tell me a little bit about what happens when you put Mark Carney's name atop the Liberal Party. You know, what are we seeing?

DAVID COLETTO: Well, we're seeing evidence from almost every pollster who does it that he either completely erases the Conservative lead, in the case of the Leger poll that came out, or in the case of an Abacus poll, tightens it and takes a lot more support away from the NDP. You know, no matter how you do it, Mark Carney, hypothetically -- because I still think it's somewhat hypothetical, 'cause half the country doesn't even really know who he is -- is at least right now able to get people over whatever hurdle they had previously to say, look, if it's him, if he's the leader of the party, I might actually vote Liberal this time.

JP: Aaron, you were the one who actually brought to my attention earlier this week that this boost for new leaders isn't unprecedented, right? When have we seen this before and what happened?

AARON WHERRY: Yeah. I mean, it... Whenever, as I've been watching these polls come in, I, I have been thinking back. Not from personal experience -- I wasn't a journalist in 1984. But um, John Turner replaced Pierre Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister in 1984, and the Liberal Party, which had been trailing in the polls to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives by a fair margin, started to come up. And then even going into that election, John Turner and the Liberals seemed to have or felt they had a small lead in the polls. And that did not end well for the Liberal Party. The Progressive Conservatives went on to win a massive majority. And you can, you can put that down to a couple things. One is, you know, the Liberal Party at that point was not really set up and ready to run an election. John Turner wasn't really ready to contest an election. You know, David just talked about sort of the hypothetical effect in polling. It's hard to know what will happen once it's not a hypothetical, right? If, once Carney is the leader... or if he's the leader, rather, you know, how does he fare? How do Canadians respond to him? I mean, I can, you know, speak from personal experience of covering the Liberals in 2006 and in 2011, and Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff put the party in the polling leads too. You know, look, the Liberals can't be unhappy that their polling numbers are coming back up. But it's not the, it's not the whole ball game.

[music]

JP: I guess, fair for me to say, what this says is that campaigns matter, obviously. And we haven't seen a ton from Carney yet. We haven't seen him kind of articulate his vision for the country in any real detail quite yet. So like, lots of unknowns here, right?

AARON WHERRY: Yeah, tons of unknowns. I mean, you can see the kind of, again, hypothetical argument, right? Mark Carney is a serious person who has had serious jobs, and this is a serious time. And he's talking about, you know, focusing on the economy, which seems to be the thing that people are worried about right now. And I think that from the outside, for those of us who aren't in the polling industry but who watch the polling industry obsessively, there was always a question of how much of this big Conservative lead is because of Pierre Poilievre and how much of this is because of Justin Trudeau. And the early indicators would seem to suggest that at least some of it was because of Justin Trudeau. And so you can again, yeah, you can see sort of the hypothetical argument for himself and and for why the Liberals may be doing better in the polls. But it's, it's still very early days. Like, you know, it seems like a lot's happened, but we're barely a month since the prime minister resigned. Justin Tru-- You know, Mark Carney's been a politician for about three weeks now. So--

JP: Yeah, guys, how has it been then?

AARON WHERRY: [laughs] Yeah, it's... there's a lot, there's still a lot to it to come.

JP: I know there's still a long way to go, but actually, there might not be that long of a way to [laughs] go, right? The other big question looming over all of this is the timing of an election. I saw last week an internal memo was leaked from the NDP, where the national campaign director was telling candidates and campaign staff to be prepared for a snap federal election as early-- well, called as early as March 10th, which I guess would put us at a like mid-May/end of May election. Carney has also said that if he is chosen as leader, he would think about just going to an election right away. And I'll put this to both of you as like a final question here. Do you think that's the most likely scenario here? David, you want to go first?

DAVID COLETTO: Look, I think it makes a lot of sense on the one hand. I think it forces the Conservatives into a spending limit that they don't have right now. It doesn't require -- let's assume Mark Carney is the prime minister -- to, you know, have to do anything actually. And when you start doing things in response to, let's say, tariffs that might come in in March, you might have a debate about whether that was the right thing to do or not. And you don't, you don't necessarily want to do that. So it allows you to take the momentum you have with that election as leader, and keep it going. So it makes, it makes some sense to me. On the other hand, is the Liberal Party ready? Can it run a national campaign as it just pivots away from the leadership?

JP: Aaron, you know, what do you think? Final thoughts?

AARON WHERRY: I mean, I... I do think there's a pretty clear argument for going early, at least not going back to Parliament. You know, the idea that there would be an election, that he would-- that Mark Carney would become Liberal leader on March 9th and then proceed directly to Rideau Hall on March 10th for an election, is a bit far-fetched I think. Like, I literally don't know whether you can work that timing out. But that he would come back to Parli-- that he would not bother coming back to Parliament on-- when it's due back March 24th makes sense in a lot of ways, because you just don't have to bother with a throne speech, you don't have to bother, you know, getting ready to meet Parliament and and run government and all of those things. The flipside of that is, you know, tell me what the state of the world and and the continent is going to be in mid-March. [DAVID: Mm-hmm.] The one argument for bringing Parliament back, the strongest argument, would be if there's some kind of emergency that needs to be dealt with. You know, if... if you need Parliament there to pass legislation or take measures to deal with some kind of economic emergency brought on by tariffs or something else, you know, then maybe you do bring Parliament back, at least for a little bit, and and try to kind of put something in place to deal with that. It's just so hard to know what the world's going to look like in a month that it's really hard to predict. It still seems more than likely that we have an election sooner rather than later, but, you know, the last month and a half-- month and a few days has taught us not to make predictions about these things.

DAVID COLETTO: And if I could just add one other thing. If it is Mark Carney, do you bring a Parliament back when you don't have a seat in it?

AARON WHERRY: Yeah.

JP: Yes.

DAVID COLETTO: Which makes it awkward, I think, to lead through a crisis and not be in that House of Commons.

JP: Yeah, you can't be [DAVID: So--] in the, you can't be in the room. Yes.

DAVID COLETTO: Yeah. So that makes it, I think, another-- I think that adds another check to the ‘call it earlier if you can.’ Because you don't then have to deal with the fact that you'd be the first prime minister, I think, without a seat either in the House or the Senate.

AARON WHERRY: First since Tur-- First since Turner.

JP: Lots of John Turner today. Um. Guys, it's always a pleasure to have you both here. Thank you so much.

AARON WHERRY: Thanks, Jayme.

DAVID COLETTO: Thanks, Jayme.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right. That's all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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How Trump is forcing the Conservatives to pivot - Transcript

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