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Doorstep Postings: The role-playing is the point as the federal election gets leavened

The most certain outcome is that things won't feel any different after this dough has risen.
Prime Minister Mark Carney on the campaign rounds at Schwartz's Deli in Montreal before the federal election debate on April 17, 2025. (via @MarkJCarney)
Prime Minister Mark Carney on the campaign rounds at Schwartz's Deli in Montreal before the federal election debate on April 17, 2025. (via @MarkJCarney)

This is another weekly 2025 federal election edition of Doorstep Postings, the political column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

I promised you all a prediction after the debates, and now I will make good on my promise. But unfortunately, since Liberal lifers will continue to support Mark Carney no matter how poorly he performs, I will have to offer two possible but similar scenarios: the status quo under the Liberals, or a Conservative government that is so effectively boxed in by everyone—including other nominally conservative governments—that it has no other choice but to maintain status quo. 

I once quipped to an American friend that Canada was the most conservative country in the world, provided your definition of “conservative” is “don’t change anything, anywhere, anytime, unless everyone has already agreed to the change.” Canadians also talk a good game when it comes to Liberal Values, but when it comes down to it, they’re not about to endure any sort of pain or sacrifice to demonstrate them. 

It sounds amazing to say it, but it looks like the last few years where the Trudeau government was looking about as appetizing as a box of matzah on the seventh day of Passover—where the Natural Governing Party was polling in the teens—was nothing more than an extended protest at the Liberal government’s continued insistence on playing at this social justice silliness. It’s one thing to hire the likes of David Suzuki to come into our kids’ classrooms and give them anxiety disorders about the coming environmental collapse. It’s entirely another for the government to tax people for the purpose of (so we were told) saving the planet. You mean we actually have to pay for this stuff? 

Guys like Pierre Poilievre, as we are told with increasing frequency as E-Day draws near, get into trouble when they forget that this is all just a game. The voters are excited by the idea of some brash outsider charging into Ottawa and flipping tables until it actually looks like a reality, in which case they panic and start yelling out the safe word. Doug Ford and other provincial premiers who won’t get onside with PP’s crusade to stop the crime and build the homes have already found this out the hard way, which is why they have opened up a shooting war with their own team. Excuses abound, from the existential threat posed by Trump to the fact that Poilievre didn’t call to congratulate Ford on his recent re-election.

Everybody forgets about the first act of the Doug Ford administration, where he brutally cut Toronto City Council in half and ripped out a bunch of EV chargers and perpetrated all sorts of other crimes against humanity until COVID came along and he developed a lifelong friendship with Chrystia Freeland and realized that head pats from Liberals was worth a lot more than accolades from the grassroots. And today, DoFo gets to show up on American cable news opposing the sale of a country which Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in annexing, not buying, and everyone praises him for it. 

The powers that be realized that Ontario’s premier can be negotiated with, which of course led to him (willingly!) becoming utterly neutralized. And as it turns out, even the grassroots aren’t willing to step out of line over Doug’s turning, because they’re content to complain over their convenience-store-bought beers about how they would set the province right, if only. 

We in the Jewish community have no patience for such monkeyshines, which is why we are still in “we will work with anyone who is willing to work with us” mode for this election. Carney’s candidate in Forest Hill sports a prominent yellow ribbon pin while one of his MPs accused Israel of genocide when speaking at a mosque in Milton. Anthony Housefather sits down at the Snowdon Deli with the man trying to put him out of a job and effortlessly deflects from the fact that Neil Oberman smoked him like the meat itself with a comment about “one-sided conservative rants.” Even the Bloc Québecois leader gets praised for the simple act of mentioning Jewish safety during the debate!

Liberal Zionists believe they can come out on top of the three-ring circus currently taking place in the big red tent, because they have a new Carney who isn’t afraid to crack the whip by “reassigning” some anonymous clowns sent out on a false flag button-pushing mission—after the usual dithering for a few days. 

And when you look at the self-proclaimed radicals begging Carney to p-p-p-please sir, please recognize what is taking place in Gaza as a genocide, you might begin to think those Liberal Zionists have a point. We can all breathe a sigh of relief, because underneath it all: the marchers, the flag wavers, the slogan-shouters, the window-smashers, are mostly engaged in the same kind of role-play. Their rallies are as reflective of reality as Poilievre’s—the only difference is that you might find Canadian flags at the latter. 

Depending on who you ask, Carney himself may have gotten too far out over on his skis in claiming the U.S.-Canada relationship was over after we didn’t get blasted as hard as some others with tariffs, and has gone back to “governing” until Trump does something else stupid to scare the voters again. And who’s to say whether Trump himself got too caught up this 51st State nonsense? I mean, we can only hope that the past few months was just a scary movie scenario. Incredibly, that’s actually the best case outcome! Sure there’ll probably be some lasting damage and trauma, but since when have we had a few months where that wasn’t the case? 

Maybe at some point in the near future we will realize that things actually are bad and scary—and that ‘normal’ was the thing we were pretending at. Hopefully not before the voting happens, though!

Josh Lieblein can be reached at [email protected] for your response to Doorstep Postings.

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