'Unprecedented' Carney leads polls after Trump turns election on its head

Every election, the message from exasperated pundits and pedants is the same: Canadians don't actually vote directly for their prime minister.

- Leyland Cecco

But on a rural intersection south of Ottawa, residents could be mistaken for thinking otherwise. Hammered into the freshly thawed mud and gravel are campaign signs for the Liberal leader, Mark Carney, and the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, at the only place in the country where the dividing line between parties is as literal as two signs facing off on opposite sides of the road.

The figurative showdown between the leaders is a rare instance of two frontrunners running for parliamentary seats in adjacent electoral districts. And the intersection, the briefest of meeting points for the two districts, captures the stakes of a "highly presidentialised" race.

For nearly two years, Poilievre, a brazen and belligerent seven-term legislator, was the heir apparent to Canada's top job. In poll after poll after poll, his party trounced the governing Liberals in a hypothetical matchup. Poilievre's attacks on Justin Trudeau were effective and relentless. He took the unpopular prime minister to task over a cost of living crisis, unaffordable housing, mass immigration and a controversial tax on carbon emissions.

The approach appeared to be paying off. In early January, Trudeau announced he was resigning after more than a decade in power. The Liberal leader's reputation was tarnished by party infighting and an increasingly fatigued electorate. In the days after, the Conservatives hit their highest polling to date and, with an election looming, looked poised for a generation-defining win.

And then Donald Trump barrelled into Canadian politics. The unpredictable US president began threatening to impose tariffs on Canada and even to annex the country to make it the 51st state. He addressed Trudeau as "governor" and threatened to use economic coercion. The impact for the Conservatives was devastating: within weeks, the party's 25-point lead evaporated, and it now enters the final stretch of the campaign trailing well behind the Liberals.