Shutterstock

By John Delacourt

April 19, 2025

The comedian Robin Williams famously likened living in Canada to “living in a really nice apartment over a meth lab”, a line that was much funnier when the dealer down below didn’t get high on his own supply and suddenly start threatening to expand his operations into your home.

Given this recent twist in our bilateral dynamic, the punditry plotline of our federal election campaign, bolstered by the latest polling, has really been about measuring degrees of crisis perception and its relationship to the interplay of fear and leadership in the cases of Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

While the polls early on pointed to a tightened-up, post-Trudeau, two-party race, that was followed by a remarkable shift in fortunes for Poilievre from two-year frontrunner to a man angling to save his future as party leader in the face of Carney’s unexpected popularity as a defender of Canada against threats from an American president using populism as a cover for an assault on democracy. At this writing, the polling aggregator 338Canada is projecting a Liberal majority, with all the usual cautions among professionals that much can happen in 10 days.

In bigger picture terms, this campaign has also been a series of variations on one principal theme: erosion of trust in government and the institutions that once functioned based on a collective understanding of the truth (what author Jonathan Rauch aptly called the “constitution of knowledge”) – and how this country has summoned up its conception of nationhood to allay this decline in trust and set the course for its future in a very different world.

Poilievre and Carney have positioned themselves accordingly — and differently — as they’ve intuited the emergence of this trust question and how it relates to the wholesale obliteration of trust waged by an American administration next door. Who leads the next government will set a defining, consequential course for that constitution of knowledge.

That tension between trust and disbelief, between autocracy and democracy, and between the two brands of politics currently at odds as humanity navigates this tectonic grind played out in the past week of Canada’s campaign narrative via the battle between legacy media and right-wing advocacy outlets. After the post-debate scrum following the French debate was dominated by representatives of True North and Rebel News, the scrums following the English debate were cancelled by the Leaders’ Debates Commission on the grounds it could not ensure a “proper environment” for the Q & A session.

As the Globe and Mail’s Bob Fife put it, in an interview with CBC’s David Cochrane, “These are not journalists. These are people who are political partisans, who try to raise money because of what they’re doing with their right-wing antics.”

Suddenly, the tactics of barring media from your campaign plane, hectoring outlets not openly supportive of your agenda, penning reporters like cattle, and bullying them on their lines of questioning are no longer perceived in a vacuum. Trumpy is as Trumpy does.

This Liberal can tell you, after living through the fallout of more than one of Bob Fife’s breaking stories while working in government, it would be impossible to make the case for Fife’s perspective being in any way motivated by his own partisan interests; the proof is in the work.

It’s impossible to view this conflict without seeing the most partisan component of it, the wedge issue defined by the epitome of legacy media in Canada: the CBC. For years, the CBC has been a punching bag and a reliable prod for fundraising for the Conservatives. During his campaign for the Conservative Party leadership, Poilievre made de-funding the CBC a populist theme, complete with the enlistment of children holding up signsdemanding the financial starving of the country’s public broadcaster.

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, concerns about the CBC’s direction transcended partisan views. A late-2024 survey from McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, done before the CBC’s mandate review was announced in the last days of the Trudeau government, reported that 78% of Canadians want CBC to continue, if it addresses major criticisms of programming and policy decisions.

Support for the CBC has now surged, in alignment with the Liberals’ electoral fortunes (Carney has promised a $150-million increase to the $1.4-billion parliamentary grant, an 11-per-cent increase to $35.50 per Canadian per year). The Conservatives’ open animosity to the broadcaster and other legacy media outlets has seemed not only out-of- step but un-Canadian at a time when being Canadian has taken on a whole new meaning. Suddenly, the tactics of barring media from your campaign plane, hectoring outlets not openly supportive of your agenda, penning reporters like cattle, and bullying them on their lines of questioning are no longer perceived in a vacuum. Trumpy is as Trumpy does.

In keeping with his broader softening of tone in an effort to stop alienating voters beyond his base, Poilievre had offered, as the Star’s Althia Raj put it, a more “nuanced” position on CBC in the English language debate, maintaining he would defund it but it could still exist as a not-for-profit. Presumably, funding for its mandated responsibilities of providing news coverage to small communities across the country as well as large – and crucially in both languages – would be reliant on deep pocketed, public-spirited donors rather than taxpayers. During the April 16th French debate, Poilievre had said he’d defund the CBC but protect Radio-Canada.

What Canadians might have cause to be truly hopeful about, after this campaign is over and we’ve lived through a few more crises catalyzed from and replicating Trump’s America, is that there might be a new appreciation for the value of truth, and the importance of supporting it.

And it might be of a piece with a larger project: restoring trust in government and its institutions, motivated by pride in who we are and how different we remain from the corruption-captured autocracy next door.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa.