Gentlemen, start your engines

We now know the players. The long campaign begins.

In the past week, we’ve heard from Conservatives that Pierre Poilievre will be their leader in the next election, and from Liberals that Justin Trudeau will stick around for that fight. We don’t know how the next election will end but we know who’s playing.

When Poilievre won the Conservative leadership on Saturday night there was some discussion on the social networks about whether his victory speech, excerpted here, constituted a “pivot” from scary subjects to more practical ones.

I’m not sure how he could be said to pivot, since he said things he’s been saying for months.

There were things he didn’t say, on the big night or in his speech to the national Conservative caucus on Monday. There was no mention of cryptocurrencies or of the perils of the World Economic Forum in Davos. There was no talk of defunding the CBC, no starting pistol fired to get Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem packing his bags. No evaluation of February’s “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa. Poilievre has been spending less, though still some, time talking about these issues for several weeks.

Of course when you stop saying something, you’re not un-saying it. You can’t. It hangs in the air. The Liberals will not be shy about raising Poilievre’s comments on these matters frequently, from now to an eventual election and beyond, just as the Harper Conservatives used everything Michael Ignatieff and his opponents ever said about value-added taxes and carbon pricing against the hapless Liberal.

But what Poilievre has been saying since Saturday will be trouble for the Liberals even if they prefer to talk about other stuff. I’d have been curious to see a dial group of uncommitted voters respond to Poilievre’s acceptance speech in real time. I bet they’d have liked a lot of it, the stuff about fixing “heavy fees and long delays for building permits” in housing, of requiring “affordable homes around all new transit stations,” or the promise to “repeal Trudeau’s anti-energy laws” and “replace them with a law that protects the environment, consults First Nations and gets things built.” It would be even better if such a law existed or could ever be made to, but boundless optimism is the peculiar province of newly-elevated party leaders.

Poilievre’s message to Canadians won’t be much different from his message to Conservatives, a difference more of emphasis than of content. He’ll keep talking about a bloated, sanctimonious Liberal government that seems unable to improve its game, and Justin Trudeau will keep providing one.

Predicting the outcome is a parlour trick. Could statistics help? Trudeau has already defeated three different opposition leaders, a feat Stephen Harper and Jean Chrétien and not a lot of other party leaders have managed. He’d be seeking to beat a fourth, something only Mackenzie King and John Macdonald have ever done. That’s rare territory.

But as I’ve said before, only one leader of the Official Opposition has won a federal election since 1997. Ignatieff and Stockwell Day and Tom Mulcair had great first caucus meetings too. Didn’t help much. So we have an incumbent government of uncertain shelf life, facing a leader freshly elevated to a position whose occupants usually lose.

One more consideration. The last two Conservative leaders won after multiple ballots, with real difficulty. So did Mulcair in the 2012 NDP leadership. Poilievre’s first-ballot victory was much clearer. Conservatives like him, and the ones I know who weren’t sold before he became leader have been encouraged by his early moves. Liberals are right to worry.