They were done. Cooked. Spent. There was nowhere to go but down—into a brutal rebuild and an inevitable existential crisis.
Just days before Christmas and hours before delivering a devastating economic update, then finance minister Chrystia Freeland walked away, telling the embattled prime minister to shove it. In the days that followed, Justin Trudeau had never been more politically isolated. His reign was done. The man who had rescued the Liberals from oblivion in 2015 was now poised to leave them in a shambles.
This is not hyperbole. By late last year, the numbers were catastrophic. Léger had the Liberals at 20 percent nationally, trailing the Conservatives by twenty-three points. Ipsos and Abacus Data measured a twenty-five-point canyon between the two parties. Mainstreet Research placed the Liberals in the high teens. In the 338Canada projections, the party had even fallen behind the Bloc Québécois—not just in Quebec but from coast to coast.
Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party were about to cruise to power with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in Canadian history.
Then Trudeau resigned.
Then Donald Trump was sworn in, launching daily threats against Canada’s economy and sovereignty.
Then Mark Carney announced his candidacy for the Liberal leadership—and promised to scrap the carbon tax.
Then Connor McDavid scored that overtime goal.
And suddenly, the entire Conservative script—the one that was supposed to take them back to power after a decade on the opposition benches—became obsolete.
P ollsters have documented this reversal of fortune since the start of the year. Recent surveys from Léger, Abacus Data, Mainstreet Research, Innovative Research, and Liaison Strategies all confirm the Liberal surge and Conservative slide, though of varying intensity. On Monday, the Angus Reid Institute joined the fray. (See the complete list of federal polls here.)
Now with Carney at the helm, Léger and Mainstreet show the two main parties deadlocked. Although Abacus and Innovative still measure a Conservative lead, both firms saw the gap narrow considerably. And Liaison, which launched a daily tracking poll last Friday, even reported a two-point Liberal lead on Monday. As for the Angus Reid Institute, it measured the Liberals at 42 percent nationally, five points ahead of the Conservatives.
As Canadians prepare for a campaign, the political landscape has flipped on its head. The once-dominant Conservative lead has vanished. For the first time in over two years, the Liberals are tied in the 338Canada seat projections.
In last Sunday’s 338 update (March 16), the Liberals climbed for the tenth straight week, reaching an average of 150 seats, essentially tied with the Conservatives. This massive shift has reshaped the race nationally, but in terms of seat count, the biggest shifts have been in Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia—all regions where the Liberals must perform well to have any hope of defeating the Conservatives.
Carney enjoys a surprising je ne sais quoi in Quebec. A large-sample Quebec-only poll from Léger released on March 9 painted the extent of this paradigm shift. Across the province, the Carney Liberals were projected in the lead with 36 percent of decided voters, eleven points ahead of the Bloc Québécois (25 percent).
At first glance, Léger’s new figures weren’t all that surprising. Since Trudeau announced his resignation and Trump took office in January, multiple polls have shown the Bloc slipping in Quebec while the Liberals gain ground. In the aggregate, the Bloc has lost seven points in the province since New Year, while the Liberals have picked up thirteen points.
However, Léger’s numbers are even more dire for the Bloc when one looks under the hood.
In the Montreal CMA (census metropolitan area), Léger sees a crushing twenty-one-point lead for the Liberals over the Bloc. One could argue that the Liberal Party loads up on votes on the anglophone-rich island of Montreal, and that is historically true to some extent, but the Bloc (22 percent) is now battling the Conservatives (20 percent) for second place. Could this really be a product of the city’s franco/anglo divide?
Hardly. Among Quebec’s francophone majority, Léger sees a statistical tie between the Bloc (31 percent) and the Liberals (30 percent). For context, while the Liberals won the most seats and most votes in Quebec in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, numbers clearly indicate the Trudeau Liberals did not win the francophone vote in those elections.
Should Léger’s numbers hold until election day, with the Liberal Party within striking distance of the Bloc among francophone voters, the Liberals could potentially be underestimated in the model in Quebec. This will be a key indicator to watch during the campaign.
In Ontario, where Doug Ford handily won a third straight majority at Queen’s Park in February, federal polls show the Liberals have rebounded to a close race with the Conservatives.
If the voting patterns from the 2019 and 2021 federal elections persist—where the Liberals dominated Ontario, key to their national success—they will have a far more efficient vote than the Conservatives, with the Liberals favoured in the seat-heavy regions of the Greater Toronto Area. Past election maps suggest Trudeau and Ford pulled significant support from the same pool of voters in Toronto’s all-important suburbs—likely a factor in both men staying in power. If this election sees the rise of Carney/Ford voters, it would spell serious trouble for Poilievre.
Why? Electoral math, pure and simple. If the Conservatives don’t make significant gains in either Atlantic Canada or Quebec, they have no other paths to victory but to win Liberal seats in Ontario. There simply aren’t enough non-Conservative seats in the west to push them past the 172-seat threshold for a majority otherwise. The most attainable Liberal seats in Ontario are not in urban centres but in suburbs—that is, the seats Ford won provincially.
For the first time in over two years, the 338Canada model now classifies the election as a toss-up. The Liberals now win the most seats in 55 percent of the model’s simulations. This is a seismic shift. For the past eighteen months, the Conservatives held win probabilities exceeding 99 percent. Now, they are suddenly at risk of blowing one of the largest polling leads in modern Canadian history.
The big question: Can Carney’s Liberals sustain this momentum once the campaign begins? Polls do not predict the future—they describe the recent past. If trends hold, Canada’s political landscape is in for a shocking upheaval.
The 2025 Canadian election could be one for the ages.
