Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s roundup of experts and insiders providing insights into the political stories and developments Canadians need to be keeping an eye on this week.
Pierre Poilievre needs to find his counterpunch
By David Coletto, the founder, chair, and CEO of Abacus Data and author of the Substack inFocus
I expect the election campaign to kick off this weekend, with Prime Minister Mark Carney all but certain to seek Parliament’s dissolution. The lead-up to this moment has been nothing short of extraordinary: the abrupt resignation of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump’s aggressive posturing toward Canada, and Carney’s meteoric rise to the Liberal leadership. But it’s Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre whose fate may be most intriguing.
For months, Poilievre dominated the conversation by hammering Trudeau on rising costs, housing, crime, and government spending. He tapped into genuine frustration among everyday Canadians, who worried that their household finances were spiralling out of control. Poilievre’s relentless style helped him climb in the polls, positioning the Conservatives as the “change” option. That dynamic shifted the moment Trudeau bowed out. Suddenly, Poilievre was left struggling to pivot from attacking Trudeau to offering a clear, positive vision for the future.
Adding to his challenge, Trump’s renewed threats—from punitive tariffs to talk of annexation—have thrust national sovereignty to the top of voters’ minds. In our most recent survey, 50 percent of Canadians selected Trump as one of their top three national issues, a 24-point increase in two months.
Poilievre is now tasked with proving he can stand up to a belligerent U.S. president because Trump will loom large over voters’ decisions and the Conservative coalition is splintering.
Meanwhile, Carney’s credentials as a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England make him a formidable opponent. Though he’s still largely untested in the political arena, many Canadians see him as the calm, steady hand the country needs. Most believe he knows how to run an economy and can handle a crisis, even if they are worried he may continue too much of the Trudeau agenda. Whether Poilievre can counter that narrative and recapture momentum is the big question heading into this weekend’s expected campaign launch.
Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford in Toronto, February 27, 2025. Chris Young/The Canadian Press.
Why Doug Ford is playing nice with Mark Carney
By Laryssa Waler, the founder of Henley Strategies who previously served in communication roles in the Harper and Ford governments
During the 2019 federal election that saw Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer pitted against Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, Doug Ford was just settling into his role as premier of Ontario. He wasn’t particularly known for being disciplined at the microphone, often actually answering the questions he was asked. For this reason, his senior staff, of which I was a member, decided to limit his media availabilities. There was nothing to be gained for having Premier Ford weigh in on the federal campaign.
Ford stayed out of it again in 2021, limiting the media he did during the federal writ. In 2025 however, Ford won’t shy away from media. He will continue to play the role of Captain Canada, taking his message of “Canada is not for sale” to the airwaves.
Ford has made it clear to his staff: nothing is to be gained by throwing punches politically at the federal level, given that Ontario federal transfers and other funding envelopes are at the mercy of the government of the day. Why piss anyone off and risk the good graces of a current or future prime minister? It’s a perspective he likely gained during his years at Toronto City Hall, where political stripes did not exist. You worked with whoever you had to and found consensus often among strange bedfellows.
While we can guess who Ford marks an X beside on voting day, he’ll stay committed to the idea that Ontario and Canada’s biggest adversary is Donald Trump. It doesn’t serve the interests of Ontarians to drive a whiff of division into political discourse.
Vance lays out the post-Trump future of Republican politics
By Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large
This week U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivered another speech that should be of interest to those trying to understand the future of American political economy and the broader conservative movement.
His remarks to the American Dynamism summit built on his major address last month in Paris on artificial intelligence. The two speeches together start to give shape to a political economy agenda that bridges the perceived chasm between the populist right and American tech.
A key part of his argument is that the excesses of so-called “hyper-globalization” have been bad for both innovation and workers. It’s created a business model that’s preferenced low-cost production through offshoring and large-scale immigration over technology-enabled productivity gains. As Vance put it: “Cheap labour is a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits innovation.”
These arguments broadly reflect something that Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor and past backer of Vance, has advanced himself about a possible tension between globalization and innovation.
Thiel’s case is that the prevailing globalization narrative has been one of convergence. Even the nomenclature—developed and developing countries—conveys a story that’s less about absolute progress and more about relative progress. It’s the political economy of homogenization.
Innovation, by contrast, is about leveraging technology to do new things or do old ones better. It aims to boost the productivity of workers rather than arbitrage low-cost labour. It involves firms, industries, and even countries pulling away from the pack. It’s the political economy of what Thiel calls “zero to one” progress.
One doesn’t have to fully subscribe to Vance and Thiel’s views to accept that there’s something to this line of thinking. Canada’s own inverse relationship between large-scale immigration and poor productivity has been well documented by various economists and scholars.
There are of course outstanding questions about how to best deliver on Vance’s vision for greater innovation. His talk of de-regulation would find wide support. His calls for tariffs would ostensibly not.
But as an expression of the New Right’s political economy, it’s an interesting synthesis of pro-tech and pro-worker ideas that found a receptive audience at the summit and may find a bigger one across the country.
At a time when there’s a lot going on, this series of speeches by Vance may go underreported. But through them, we’re getting a window into a possible future of the post-Trump Republican Party.
