Campaign notebook: last day in Canada

For me, anyway.

I'm heading to the Middle East today, so dispatches about the final week will be from a great distance. Will it matter?

It won’t matter. This thing is over. Here’s why.

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Two-word reasons why the Poilievre Conservatives will lose, in no particular order:

• Trudeau left

• Trump arrived

• Poilievre Trumpy

• Tories Trumpy

• Carney experience

• NDP collapse

• Bloc collapse

• debates irrelevant

• Tory disunity

• Grit unity

• Warren's hair

That last one is on there just to see if you were paying attention.

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Seriously, however. This is from my brilliant pal Jas Johal in Vancouver. Check this out.

It’s a small Reid sample, but check out Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal. Game, set, match.

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Someone said to me yesterday that, if the Tories had kept Erin O'Toole, they wouldn't have lost this election.

Maybe. Who knows. Woulda coulda shoulda stuff bores me.

This I do know, however: the Conservatives’ biggest problem is not their leaders. It's their grassroots.

The Tory rank and file, nowadays, always like politicians who voters dislike. They have an unerring instinct for bad choices. They are angry and resentful and paranoid, and they always want someone who embodies their anger and resentment and paranoia.

Until that changes, they’re basically doomed.

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That said, I actually think Pierre Poilievre and Jenni Byrne have run a good campaign. They haven’t made as many errors as the Liberal campaign - China-adjacent, platform spending, insensitivity to Canadian Jews, etc.

So, the Tories didn’t lose the election during the campaign. They lost before the campaign even started.

Poilievre ran around the country for two years saying, over and over, “Canada is broken.” When Trump started saying the same thing, the Tories were in deep shit.

But it was too late to fix it. They needed to pivot long before the writs dropped.

They didn’t.

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Like I always say, media polls are worth what you pay for them: nothing.

They are only remotely useful if you aggregate them over a long period of time. So, take a look at Nanos, over a long period of time.

Nothing has changed the trajectory of the race. I know that political hacks like to say “campaigns matter.” But they don’t always.

My candidate, Kamala Harris, ran a solid campaign. Didn’t matter.

Poilievre ran a solid campaign. Didn’t matter. Die was cast weeks ago.

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Nobody heard anything about the campaign yesterday because Pope Francis died. I was really, really sad that he died. I loved that man. He was such a good man.

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Speaking of goodness: this is the week when grassroots partisans typically say things online that they wouldn't show to their own children.

It's also the week when aspiring politicians say things online that will be used to bar their candidacies four or eight years from now.

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It's the final week in Canada's 2025 campaign, the polls are seemingly getting a bit tighter, and the idiocy factor is therefore off the charts.

So, I will head tomorrow for the comparative calm of the Middle East. Ta.