Compared to Justin Trudeau & Jagmeet Singh, Pierre Poilievre & The Conservatives Are The Centrist Choice

The Liberals & NDP have become completely detached from the political centre.

By Spencer Fernando, Exclusive to the National Citizens Coalition

Take a moment and imagine someone describing two political parties to you.

One party is running on policies like endless budget deficits, huge state subsidies to businesses, radical policies that go easy on criminals, distributing hard drugs, class warfare, huge immigration increases far beyond the Canadian norm, pandering to anti-Semitism, and a narrowing of free expression.

The other party is running on policies like a return to balanced budgets, promoting entrepreneurship, reasonable immigration levels, standing up for the Jewish community, keeping dangerous people behind bars, getting the government out of the personal lives of Canadian individuals and Canadian families, prioritizing treatment - rather than enablement - to deal with addiction, and protecting freedom of expression.

If you knew nothing about Canadian politics, you would likely conclude that the first party was a left-wing party, while the other was a centrist party.

The first party would seem quite out of touch with mainstream sentiment, while the latter party would seem almost boringly normal.

Without years of built-up political tribalism, it would be quite easy to see that only one of those parties was reaching out to the broad middle of the political spectrum.

As you may have guessed, the situation mentioned above is not hypothetical.

It’s the situation we face right now.

The Liberals & NDP have moved so far to the left that the Conservatives are now very much the only major party that is in tune with most Canadians.

This is something Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre alluded to recently when he spoke to the Calgary Herald:

“I’m the normal guy. Trudeau and the NDP are the wackos. They are the extremists. I’m the normal centrist mainstream leader, the only one running. The other guys are absolute raving wackos. They are ideological lunatics.”

Upon hearing this, the first reaction of some Canadians will be surprise, as it seems to clash with with how we’ve thought about politics in this country

For quite a long time, Canadians have seen politics through the left-centre-right lens.

The NDP is on the left, the Liberals are in the centre, and the Conservatives are on the right.

Or at least, that’s been the perception.

This perception has benefitted the Liberals, giving them the ability to win votes from both the right and the left.

But what happens when this perception – and reality – changes?

What happens when Canada has two left-wing parties in power?

What happens when the Liberal Party goes so far to the left that it ceases to be ‘liberal,’ and the NDP abandons its working-class base?

What happens when Canadians stay where they are, but the Liberals & NDP abandon a huge swath of the country?

Well, it leaves the door open to a massive political realignment, the kind we only see once in a generation.

And that’s what we’re seeing right now.

The Liberals have ceded the centre to the Conservatives, who are now taking full advantage of this opening.

And Canadians are responding.

Recent polls indicate the Conservatives are continuing to expand their already massive lead, even as the desperate Liberals launch every attack they can think of.

In fact, they’re so desperate that they’re now stealing more of Poilievre’s ideas.

On Wednesday, the Liberals announced a public transit fund that “will complement the Housing Accelerator Fund by tying housing money to projects that are near public transit. The plan includes eliminating mandatory minimum parking requirements for new construction and allowing high-density housing projects near transit.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Pierre Poilievre proposed the idea in September of 2023 as part of his “Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act”:

“It also requires housing to be near public transit, specifying that federal transit funding provided to certain cities would be “held in trust” until “high-density residential housing is substantially occupied on available land around federally funded transit projects’ stations. And the bill makes it a condition that in order for certain cities to receive federal infrastructure and transit funding they “not unduly restrict or delay the approval of building permits for housing.”

Provincial parties are also trying to distance themselves from the Liberals and tie themselves to the Conservatives. In B.C., the crumbling B.C. United Party is desperately trying to convince people not to tie the federal Conservative brand to the B.C. Conservative brand, knowing that the federal Conservatives are so popular that their brand power could put the B.C. Conservatives over the top and relegate B.C. United to the ash heap of political history. Notably, B.C. United was once the B.C. Liberal Party, another sign of how badly the Liberal brand has declined under Trudeau.

When parties across the country are trying to tie themselves to the Conservatives, that tells us something important about what is happening in this country.

Without abandoning centre-right Canadians, the Conservatives have become the centrist and moderate party.

The Liberals can deny this all they want, but every time they copy Pierre Poilievre, they indicate through their actions that they see his ideas as reasonable. And this only further serves to enhance the credibility of the Conservatives.

If the best ideas the Liberals have – after nearly nine years in power – are ideas they’ve stolen from Poilievre, that says a lot about the fact that the Liberals have no ideas of their own.

The Liberals bet it all on a hard-left shift, and hoped to fool Canadians into thinking they were still centrists by riding on the ‘Liberal’ brand.

Clearly, that’s not working.

At the end of the day, Canadians just want a normal, reasonable, common-sense government.

Trudeau has failed to provide that, and Jagmeet Singh would push the radicalism of the Trudeau era even further.

Canadians expected moderation from Trudeau and got radicalism instead.

After such a breaking of trust, Canadians are ready to fire Trudeau and move our nation back to the common-sense centre.

Spencer Fernando is one of the most popular and prolific political voices in Canada. He is a writer and campaign fellow for the National Citizens Coalition. Join the mailing list to receive his exclusive weekly columns in your inbox.

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