the current Liberal administration under Mark Carney, “ he says, “the first thing you discover is that they basically be- lieve they elected the right people to manage this moment.” The Conservatives, under interim leader Andrew Scheer, spent the first several months after the election trying out, and often dispensing with, attack lines against the Liber- als, such as the EV sales mandate, which Lantsman in the House derided as “insane.” But they also quietly supported key pieces of Carney’s plan to fire up major nation-building projects that will, in theory, compensate for the Trump ad- ministration’s blows to the Canadian economy. Poilievre stepped back into the spotlight after his Sep- tember by-election. He’s now flanked by a giant shadow cabinet (it’s twice the size of the Liberals’ actual cabinet) and a team of conspicuously diverse deputies that includes Lantsman as well as veteran Edmonton MP Tim Uppal (who is Sikh) and the hard-right former leadership chal- lenger Leslyn Lewis (who is Black). In Question Period, the new MP for Battle River–Crowfoot has been grilling the government on issues such as temporary foreign workers, the ballooning deficit, and Carney’s travel habits. After Par- liament resumed in September, he briefly dialled down the acid insults ever so slightly. But by mid-fall, Poilievre once again was back in the mud, trolling about DEI and (base- lessly) accusing the RCMP of having run a cover operation for Trudeau instead of charging him with crimes. Those at- tacks brought plenty of pushback. Lantsman, meanwhile, talked mainly about the Blue Jays as Tory heavyweights sparred over Poilievre’s fitness for duty. When I asked Lantsman to itemize the problems that loom largest for her in the coming months, she said the gov- ernment’s “vulnerability is largely what it was before the election—a housing crisis where young people don’t ever believe they’ll even be able to afford a home, let alone the supply-side issues [such as] immigration, wage subversion in the workforce, a massive amount of foreign labour com- ing here, effectively being treated as slave labour.” (Poilievre has since said the federal government’s temporary foreign worker program should be eliminated outright.) Such arguments have found a receptive audience among many Canadians. But the elephant in this room is to what extent are they being fanned by what’s happen- ing in the US, where masked ICE agents are capturing un- documented workers in Home Depot parking lots as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to deport millions of immigrants. Lantsman, however, rejects the suggestion that the politics of immigration in the US is influencing the politics of immigration here. “We’re a very, very different country,” she says. “Everybody got here. I’m a product of somebody who got here. But there is a real conversation about resource scarcity, spaces in hospitals, housing avail- ability and affordability.” Nor does she think the Trump administration’s surreal approach to science, public health, and vaccinations has spilled over the border, despite the fact that record-breaking
Thornhill’s Tory MPP Gila Martow also wanted the po- sition. Lantsman, who still had a limited public profile but plenty of chutzpah, let it be known that she planned to win. “In a nomination battle, you call everybody you know, everybody you ever played softball with or went to high school with, or your mom ever got her nails done with,” she says. “I just outworked them.” Lantsman won the seat in the 2021 snap election and had such a firm grip on the riding by the 2025 race that the Tory war room sent her to forty-one ridings to stump for other candidates.
MERGING FROM A RACE they were sup- posed to crush, the Conservatives won lots of new seats and garnered over 40 percent of the vote — an almost unheard-of feat for a party that ended up on the losing side. Yet the emotionally fraught campaign was all about Donald Trump and his fifty-first-state trolling; despite the Tories riding high in
the polls for much of 2023 and 2024, by the time election day came around, many centrist voters felt Poilievre was far too Trumpian for their liking and backed the Liberals. Since taking office, however, Prime Minister Mark Carney has governed like an old-school Red Tory who has gladly shed almost all of his predecessor’s atmospherics. Ken Boessenkool, a veteran Harper policy adviser, likes to joke mordantly that Carney, heading into last spring’s election, was like a “candidate made in a lab.” He had the re- sumé, the vibe shift, and the perfect proxy villain to take on in Poilievre. With Trudeau history and the leadership in the bag, Carney quickly axed the (carbon) tax, and thus effec- tively stripped Poilievre of the two punching bags that had made his victory look so much like a sure thing. The former central banker, as Boessenkool says, “was the candidate. It wasn’t what he proposed at any moment in the campaign. It was who he was.” What’s a Conservative to do, given that the Liberals have, since then, helped themselves to some of the Tories’ favoured talking points, such as removing regulatory ob- stacles to major natural resource projects and ending the so-called catch-and-release bail system? “We’re very hap- py to see Liberals take on Conservative policies,” Lantsman told the CBC over the summer. “I don’t think that’s a repu- diation of policy at all.” But nor it is a go-forward plan for a political party trying to define itself as an alternative to the current government. Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, expects that, in the coming months, the Tories will hammer the Liber- als on issues such as housing, affordability, and crime. But he points out that his firm’s latest public opinion research shows that Canadians, unlike in 2022 or 2023, are not in an especially partisan mood right now. This is at least in part because of the shadows cast by political chaos in the US. “When you go out and do polling on what people think of
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