​Carney and the Liberals pull into the lead. Election Call Is Coming as Early as Sunday.

It looks very much like Mark Carney will be visiting Governor-General Mary Simon this Sunday to call an election for April 28 or May 5.

The CBC reports that its Poll Tracker (with an amalgam of several polling firm numbers) shows that Carney and the Liberals have moved slightly ahead of Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, 37.7 per cent to 37.4 per cent.

The Against the Flow blog is not in the habit of breaking news stories, but what the heck, this could be the most important election in history for Canada, with U.S. President Donald Trump disrespecting our sovereignty and attempting to use tariffs to take over our country.

The new Liberal Prime Minister Carney has been steady on his feet in his first week since becoming Canada’s Prime Minister. Opinion polls show support for his Liberals has risen 17.6 per cent in a matter of days. Carney was wise in his first week to travel to Great Britain and France to meet with allies, rather than going to Washington DC to talk with Donald Trump before the U.S. President shows “respect” for Canada.

Meanwhile, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre is on his back foot. Just a few weeks after he was insisting that the nation of Canada “is broken,” he is trying to sell himself as the one to save the country from Trump while standing in front of meetings with a large Canadian flag as a backdrop. He has built his popularity for two years while claiming that everything wrong in the country was the result of the leadership of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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Prime Minister Carney and his government took the Consumer Carbon Tax off the table through a first-day cabinet Order in Council eliminating the tax, recognizing that the original Liberal Tax was hugely unpopular in the country. Then Poilievre showed he has no interest whatever in protecting the world from climate change by saying he would take the tax off major industrial carbon emitters as well.

Unlike PM Trudeau who had standing with Indigenous communities, Poilievre has precious little. He has just committed a Conservative government to accelerated development of the ‘critical mineral’ Ring of Fire in Northern Ontario. Bulling ahead on this file will not help him with First Nation Communities or environmentalists.

It is not as if the new Carney government has no problems because of shrinking the cabinet to twenty-four members from the previous total under Trudeau of thirty-five to forty.
                                                                                                                                                      It is shocking that there are just two ministers west of Thunder Bay, Ont. Yet, with just one minister in British Columbia, Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, recent polling shows the Liberals surging in that province, mainly at the expense of the NDP. The New Democrats have twelve of their 24 House of Commons seats in BC.

 New Brunswickers cannot complain about their representation as this province, has two ministers. PEI had no cabinet seats, although the fluently bilingual Steve MacKinnon grew up on “The Island” and now represents the Quebec riding of Gatineau.

Previously the Labour Minister under Trudeau, MacKinnon does not have the name “Labour” in his complex new “Jobs” ministry, and this has come in for criticism.

MacKinnon ruffled feathers this past week when he referred to part of his responsibilities as on behalf of the “handicapped” as opposed to “disabled” citizens.

The lack of a portfolio in the new government for women and gender equality has also been criticized.

With the main fight for the new government being against Trump, his tariffs and his breaches of Canadian sovereignty, the upsets over the distribution of cabinet seats could likely be overcome if Carney and the Liberals win the federal election.

That is not a sure bet at this point, Poilievre has built and held his lead in public opinion polls until very recently. He has also shown himself to be a tireless political campaigner and a very effective fundraiser.

Already he has dipped into his war chest for expensive campaign-style advertising before the writ is even dropped.

The Trudeau government often used public funds for advertising government programs which could easily have been construed as political in nature.

It is high time that pre-writ advertising is reviewed by the Chief Electoral Officer, perhaps with increased legal authority to limit the “buying” of votes, outside of an election in progress.
 Elon Musk’s use of his millions to buy votes in last fall’s US elections is a strong signal of the danger to democracy if such spending goes unchecked.

CBC pollster Eric Grenier notes the relative “efficiency” of the Liberal vote. That stems from the fact that the Conservative vote is very concentrated in the Western provinces, many of which have relatively low populations. The Liberal vote is spread over populous provinces like Ontario and Quebec, as well as in Atlantic Canada.

Grenier suggests that because of this, the Liberals are now close to the majority government territory, something they have not enjoyed since 2015.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         .