Two leaders, two very different byelection experiences...

Plus, when is a war, even a trade war, really a war?

There is no good way to spin the byelection results, don’t try.

Instead, figure out what to do in order to start winning, which you clearly aren’t.

That’s my advice to all Conservatives today after Monday’s disastrous showing. Three byelections and not only three losses but the Liberals took more than 50% of the vote in all three contests.

And in the one riding that the Conservatives had held for the last eight years, they fell to third and took just 12.5% of the vote. Régis Gaudreault took 3,962 votes out of 31,627 cast.

Meaning, if Gaudreault had taken a few hundred votes less, the party would be ineligible for claiming their election expenses.

That is a bad result. First to third. Barely making expenses.

The next test will be tougher…

In my column for the Toronto Sun, I wrote about how Poilievre needs to buckle up because there are more byelections coming including in Brantford-Brant South. That’s a riding the Conservatives have held since 2008 and should be a safe seat, but it’s not, it’s in play with the Liberals posing a real threat.

If Poilievre and team lose that byelection, whenever it comes, he will start facing challenges from inside the party. MPs will be looking at what happens to see if they are still safe in their ridings.

Here’s how I ended my column:

MPs may seem loyal to Poilievre now, but if allowing him to keep his job means they might lose theirs, expect that to change. If the polls don’t improve, his biggest threat won’t be Carney. It’ll be the MPs sitting behind him.

That prompted an angry email from regular reader Mark who accused me of piling on Pierre.

Did you know between 2014 and now our economy has gone from around 9.6 times smaller to over 13 times smaller compared to the Us? In dollars, the US added like 6 Canadas in that time frame.

Also back then our middle class was hailed by the NYT as being the most affluent and richest, even more so than the Americans. And our youth ranked Canada 5th in happiness.

Like our economy, our middle class is no longer and young people ranked Canada 71st in happiness.

To my simple mind, the problem isn’t the Conservatives.

I would agree that the Conservatives aren’t responsible for the sorry state of Canada’s economy. If you read my work, you know that I’m more critical of Carney and his government than I am of the opposition.

Carney isn’t living up to his promises to fix the economy. He’s not peeling back the years of regulation, the bad laws and more that are holding back.

Since the election, Poilievre has been good at pointing out where Carney’s policies are failing. In order to fix it though you need to win elections and govern.

So far, Poilievre has failed to do that.

Losing four of the MPs elected with your team last year to floor crossings and another taking a Senate appointment from the government is a failure of leadership for Poilievre and his senior team. Losing a byelection so badly in a riding you once held and being 29 points back in your only second place showing isn’t good enough.

What they have been doing isn’t working, they need to do better.

If hearing that offends you, then I’m not the writer for you. My job isn’t to cheerlead for Pierre or any politician, it is to call it like I see it.

Much of my criticism of Poilievre comes with suggestions on how to improve, how to win. Political parties exist to challenge for power, to win elections and govern.

Anything else is just a debating society.

Trump administration puts Canada on notice…

I like Jamieson Greer, Trump’s USTR. He seems like a reasonable guy, someone you can reason with even when you disagree.

By all accounts, Greer has a good relationship with Carney’s cross border trade minister Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette, his chief negotiator. Last week I was saying that it wasn’t just the introduction of Howard Lutnick into the negotiations on Friday that upset the apple cart, we also inserted Ambassador Mark Wiseman and Carney’s chief of staff Marc Andre Blanchard.

It changed the dynamic.

We can all imagine what Lutnick would be like, he’s got a larger than life personality, he’s brash and abrasive. But I’m told it wasn’t just Lutnick, it went from three people who work well together to a room full of people looking sideways at each other.

So the trade talks fell apart, Mark Carney declared war the next day and announced dollar for dollar retaliatory tariffs.

Now, Greer is warning Canada not to go ahead with those tariffs next Tuesday.

“If Canada continues to retaliate, the United States, of course, will defend its workers and its producers and all of that,” Greer told Politico.

He went on to say that Trump would have several options in front of him if we go ahead. That could include more tariffs levied against Canadian goods or he even suggested some products could be banning over our ongoing booze ban in most provinces.

Is it really a war…

One thing Greer has been adamant about is that neither he nor the Trump administration view our current situation as a war, trade or otherwise.

Carney has clearly called it a war, he jumped to that phrase the morning after talks collapsed. I’ve been writing about the political calculus for Carney on this, but also Ford and Trump.

All three leaders can benefit from playing up this “war” for their own political gain.

And speaking of political theatre…

In my column and the video below, I spell out that Trump renaming Lake Ontario is ridiculous. Also ridiculous, Canadians renaming everything under the sun over the past decade as politicians pushed BS and most media egged them on.