The Decibel - Why Carney and Ford are talking about a federal election

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

The Globe exclusively reported that Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford discussed the possibility of a snap federal election this spring. The next federal election is scheduled for no later than 2029, though historically, minority governments usually last around two years. But just how realistic is this speculation of another election?Laura Stone, who broke the story, and Shannon Proudfoot, a feature writer and columnist based in Ottawa, join host Sherrill Sutherland for a political roundtable about whether Canadians will head to the polls this spring.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's one thing that always plagues minority governments in Canada. Rumors of an election. And that's what's happening now. The Globus reporter that Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Mark Carney have recently talked about the possibility of a snap election in casual conversations. But if you ask the Prime Minister directly, he'll pivot away from the question. Good morning, Prime Minister McKenzie Grape, Global News. Are you considering calling a snap election this spring?

I'm going to go back to the previous answer. What we're focused on is solutions for Canadians. So today's announcement... Well, we are going to focus on this question of an election today because if we're launched into a second one in 12 months, it'll affect all of us. So we've assembled one of our political panels to talk about the reasons for and against having a snap election. Joining me on the panel today are my colleagues.

Hi, I'm Laura Stone. I cover provincial politics for the Globe and Mail. Hi, I'm Shannon Proudfoot, and I cover federal politics as a feature writer in the Ottawa Bureau. And I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Laura. Hi, Shannon. Thanks so much for joining us. Hi there. Hey, thanks for having us. So to start, Laura, can you tell us about these conversations between the Prime Minister and Ontario Premier Doug Ford?

What exactly did they talk about? Well, wouldn't we all like to be a fly on the wall, those conversations. We know that they talked broadly, according to our sources, and the Premier himself, who confirmed this recently in a scrum with reporters, that they talked about the idea of calling

an early election. Premier, can you comment on your conversations with the Prime Minister about a possible early election? Why you said that stability is necessary right now? Well, you know, something, I don't devolve or conversations, but I'll be very frank with you

when you get 13 premiers in a room. politics comes up and politics of every type comes up. That came up, but that's going to be up to the prime minister. It's going to be up to the people to decide. If they do decide to call the election, has nothing to do with me. I called my election. I'm good. We're moving forward. And that's, that's it. And according to our sources, that was presented by Premier Ford as a way to gain a majority government and to provide economic stability for the country. And so whether it was more of a one-way conversation on the part of the premier kind of talking at the prime minister, we're not exactly sure about the dynamic, but we know that this did come up. So they talked about

this idea of a staff election. We have one source that even said that Mr. Ford told Mr. Carney he should trigger one. The premier has not confirmed that himself. He said he won't get into private conversations with the prime minister. But it sounds like all the premiers were gossiping, quite frankly, and talking about the polling numbers that have shifted significantly in the favor of Mark Cardi. But we don't know exactly what Prime Minister Cardi is thinking about it. Obviously, publicly he said he's not going to do that. Okay. You mentioned polling there. And I do want to get into some of the polling in a bit. But before we do, let's talk about, you know, why this moment might be different. So we do hear about election speculation all the time,

especially with minority governments. But make the case, like what makes this moment different? Shannon, why don't you start? Yeah, I mean, it is certainly something of a parlor game in Ottawa, a round of election speculation went around back in the fall. But you know what? Parlor games are fun, so let's play it, because there are lots of reasons to kind of walk it out in this moment.

The most obvious one is the polls right now. The liberals sit, I think, about five points ahead of the conservatives federally. The much bigger and maybe more meaningful gap is when you ask people, their preferred prime minister, and their Carney is about 29 percentage points ahead of Pierre Polyev. And Carney is sort of subtly on the rise and Polyev subtly falling even after his leadership convention in Calgary a couple of weeks back where he took a very convincing 87% of the delegates. So it's clear that in-house, Pierre Polyev has enormous support, but in the Canadian electorate at large, not so much. And so you look at those numbers and you think if I was

Mark Carney and I was just a few seats short of a majority and, you know, kind of came within a hair's breadth of it last spring. And the world at large is sort of explosive, difficult to deal with place. Maybe I would want to do that and see if I could get that majority this time because it does make it a lot harder to kind of have your way to get things done. The other thing I think might be motivating this right now is a few weeks ago, we had a lot of talk about speculation about more floor crossers from the conservatives to the liberals that would have pushed them into that majority territory. That's kind of died down now. So maybe there's a sense of, you know, Carney might not get his majority through this kind of piecemeal effort. So maybe he should

roll the dice on another election to try to get over that hump. Laura? Well, I think a couple of things have happened. I think it's always a bit of a red flag when the government is giving more money back to people. And that happened recently with the government's announcement that it was increasing this GST tax credit, which will impact millions of people across the country. And the prime minister was set up in a grocery store. He had, you know, his members behind him. And it was kind of this quote unquote good news announcement about how everyone in this certain kind of middle income bracket or lower income is going to now be getting more money for groceries. And that's where he was asked the question point blank. This looks like an election announcement.

Are you calling an early election? And he said he's not. But I think that perk. up a lot of years in the Ottawa scene. I think also coming off of the Prime Minister's speech in Davos, which gained worldwide attention was well received across the political spectrum as well. That raised the prime minister's profile significantly, not just in this country, but globally. And he earned a lot of praise for that. So maybe people thought that he had garnered a lot of goodwill as a result of that speech. And maybe that would push him to potentially consider. that are at an early campaign. So there seems to be a sense as to why perhaps Carney would like to call an election now.

But can we talk about what the reasons would be to not do this? Like, what could be the drawbacks of a snap election? I think the greatest political risk for Carney kind of cuts against what has been his biggest political strength over the last year. The thing that I think propelled him into the prime minister's office and continues to buy him a lot of benefit of the doubt from Canadians is this idea that he's the adult in the the room, that it is a calm, cooler head, a sort of technocratic approach to things. And he seems very aware of that. It's worth remembering that after Pierre Polyev lost his seat in the April

election, very soon after at a press conference, people like us asked Carney, what are you going to do about that by-election? And he made a point of saying, we will call a new by-election for Polyev to get his seat back as soon as possible, quote, no games. So he seems aware and wanting to capitalize on this idea that he's sort of above crass cynical politics. Of course, no one is. But I think it would be very problematic for his political persona and brand to do something really cynical and crass, particularly in a moment of sort of ongoing, slow, unfurling crisis in Canada. If his electoral offering would be, give me a majority so I can be a steady hand at the tiller while, you know, everything is going on around us, Trump included and well beyond that, then I think there's the risk that you get punished by. voters who think, well, okay, but why are you making a power grab in this moment? But at the same time,

there's also polling, like Abacus did a poll recently, where they sort of gave people different scenarios, different reasons for an election, and people were sort of not into the idea just for the sake of it, but they said, what do you think about the idea for a majority, for stability, for the country? And more than half of people were okay with it under those circumstances. But I think maybe the biggest kind of data point that tells us maybe they're not headed that way is just this change in tone where the leaders are talking about cooperating. Even if that's lip service, you know, they're always sort of trying to position themselves and give themselves plausible deniability. But the fall was just a mess of obstruction and recrimination and lots of

acrimony. And now all of a sudden we're hearing purring sounds between the two main federal parties. And that to me, I think, is a tell. You know, Carney really fumbled that answer there and kind of scuttled away from it. But it seems pretty obvious that conservatives don't want to head to the polls anytime soon and won't do something to precipitate that. On this point of cooperation, recently the prime minister had a meeting with Pierre Poliyev and now there's talk that the conservatives may try to find ways to cooperate with Mark Carney's government to avoid an election. Laura, how likely do you think this will actually happen, this talk of cooperation?

I think it will certainly happen in the short term, maybe the medium term. We'll see what happens in the long term. And the conservative House leader Andrew Shear kind of did the rounds on political talk shows recently and talked about the need to cooperate on common issues that both parties agree on in terms of affordability or crime and the fact that the conservatives want to work in good faith with the liberals in order to pursue these agenda items. So I think certainly Shannon's correct in pointing out that the conservatives appear to be running away from this idea of having an election. They clearly don't want to poke the bear here because the polling,

does not look great for their leader at this particular moment. And I do think there is now, compared to what happened with the Trudeau government, there is not a lot of daylight or not as much daylight between the conservatives and the liberals as there used to be on major issues, right? I mean, Cardi has eaten a lot of the conservatives lunch in terms of moving the party to the center, you know, promoting a pipeline, ridding of the carbon tax, changing some of these environmental policies, talking about the economy. And, And I think the conservatives play now is to pressure the government on results as opposed to vision. And so I think they need more time, quite frankly, to prove their point, which they believe

the government's going to let people down and is not going to succeed in their mission to diversify Canada's economy and to get a deal with Donald Trump and to solve the country's economic ills. But I do think that this potential agreement, maybe it's not a formal one like we saw with the NDP and the liberals under the troops. Trudeau government, but I do think there is some sort of deal here to at least get some of these major pieces of legislation through, such as the budget, in order to avoid a snap election or a vote that would trigger an election.

On that point, you brought up the agreement between the liberals and the NDP, and the NDP seemed to get punished for it. So is there a risk for the conservatives in terms of cooperating, Shannon? I think there is, I hate to be a fence sitter. I think there is less of a risk for them along the lines of what the NDP suffered, but it's a more uncomfortable fit. I mean, the very obvious question of the conservatives is you have spent certainly the last year or two and even the last 10 years telling us that the liberal government is ruining this country, driving it into a ditch. Why not bring them down? And you saw Andrew Shearer in one of his interviews this week kind of dancing around that a bit and saying he sort of invoked this like weird political hypocritical.

oath. Like, as long as they're passing legislation that does no harm to Canada, we will cooperate to get it done. But there's a very obvious conflict there and a hard question to answer, which is, if you think your ideas are better and you would be running the country better than why are you kind of allowing them to continue. But they face a different political risk than the NDP did because they're so different from the liberals, although Laura's point is a good one, that ideologically and sort of in policy right now, there is much less daylight between them. But the NDP, I think, suffered. from sort of riding sidecar and pushing the liberals to do maybe a heftier version of policies that they would have done otherwise. And then the governing party, the kind of big fish,

gets to take all the credit for it. The conservatives don't have the same problem of being seen as just like sort of a liberal appendage because they are a very different political party. But Laura is absolutely right, that Carney has been gobbling up their lunch in terms of stealing all their good ideas. I mean, I note that Pierre Pollyov, I don't think is using that line so much anymore. It was a cute line. You know, we'd love them to take all our good ideas. Like, go for it. I don't think he thinks that it is not saying that anymore because they really, really, really are. We'll be right back. Since we're talking about the NDP, let's stay on that subject. How would the NDP compete if this hypothetical snap election comes before they've picked a new leader? What's their

best strategy if they are leaderless? Save the furniture, I guess, which was kind of their strategy you last time. I really don't think in any plausible scenario this would happen, although this is politics. So we can't discount anything from happening. But there's a certain amount of time that has to occur for an election. Yeah, I mean, the NDP are in it tough right now, right? They've really struggled to kind of break through beyond their base of supporters in terms of relevance. But it is, it is a chance for the party to remake itself. And if Avi Lewis, who looks to be the front runner now in the race is able to to win that and take the party in a much more progressive direction that could have implications for the liberals.

You know, I think there are some political watchers who would want an election, some liberals potentially who are saying strike while the NDP is low, right? I mean, that's the best opportunity for the liberals. And that hurts the conservatives, right? And we've heard from conservatives about what happened in the last campaign with the collapse of the NDP and the vote split there may have hurt their chances of forming government because they did get this record about of support and were unable to break through or ultimately win. But no, I mean, the NDP at this stage, I think they're trying to kind of save the seats that

they have. I don't think anyone sees them as really a power player right now, but in a minority situation, they do still have relevance. And so certainly for them, it wouldn't be in their interest to have an election right now. That's for sure. Shan, you want anything there? Yeah, I think maybe the most relevant thing Laura highlights there is how bad a flailing NDP is for the conservatives and how good it is for the liberals. There's no vote split there.

The NDP presumably could if they had to run with Don Davies, like the interim leader as their leader, but they really are in no position to do this right now. Although that might be another sort of subtle point in the column of reasons Mark Carney might want to go for it now because we saw in that very strange. April result, when Canada becomes sort of a two-party race, the liberals really, really win from that and the Tories lose. Okay. So we talked about the parties here. I'm curious more broadly about the public, right? Because it sounds like there is not really an appetite for an election at this point. But I'm curious about what are the issues that are facing Canadians right now? Like, what are the most pressing issues for Canadians right now? You know, when we talk about the economics, we talk about US, like, has that changed at all? Like, what would these politicians be talking to? Canadians about right now? I think the top issues are still the top issues. Economy and Trump and inflation and affordability. It's the things that they're all talking about now. I think the conservatives certainly are focusing a lot on the affordability question and they believe that that is the pressing domestic issue. But you always have that elephant in the room, which is

Trump and the trade deals and how Canada is going to deal with its largest trading part. and what the strategy is there. So I do think we're an election to be called, and if the liberals want to go for it, they have to have a compelling narrative as to why they need to be in an election right now and why they need more stability for the country. Yeah, that's interesting because, you know,

it sounds like the messaging hasn't really changed for Carney, right? Like he'd be kind of arguing the same points that he was at the previous elections. Well, that might be a difficult sell. Yeah, April was such a fascinating campaign because it was almost two elections run in parallel. always talk about the ballot box question, which I sometimes wonder if that's a real thing for real people or just a thing people like us like to bat around, which is fine. But you had these

sort of two different elections going on. One was about Trump and about Canada facing the world, and Carney was the clear winner there as far as Canadians were concerned. And that was the dominant question. That was the dominant kind of rubric on which the election was fought through most of the campaign. The other underlying issue that had been dominant for a year or two before this time last year was cost of living. And there are the conservatives were the clear winners. And I think we saw what happened is through the campaign, the first one of those started to become less salient. Trump went a little quieter. People's panic calmed a little. And cost of living reasserted itself as the big issue. And that's when we saw the conservatives kind of gaining ground.

So as Laura said, the question would be in a potential snap election now, what would be the question? But then there's also what is the plausible reason the government gives for having an election? And to make an argument like we need a stable majority government to deal with things, I think runs the risk of sounding to voters like, well, that's an argument for you, for what you guys want up there on Parliament Hill. That does nothing for me. Like I need to know what's going to help me, what's going to help my family. And at a certain point, too, the issue of Trump and tariffs becomes an affordability issue, right?

Like I think we're only just seeing that damage kind of accumulate because the economy is an ecosystem. And if you poison one part of the pond, it's not good for the rest of it. And so at a certain point, those kind of overlapping storylines kind of bleed into each other. I don't know. It has been a very interesting year in politics. Well, this one so far, six weeks in. But last year taught me to never, ever think I know what's going to happen next. And so I sort of like live with that humility right now about making any sort of predictions, even inside my own

head. Definitely tough to predict anything right now, that's for sure. But if Carney's pitch would be something along the lines of, I need a majority to deal with Trump, how true is that? How does a spring election help Canada in terms of its free trade negotiations with the U.S. and Mexico? Well, I mean, I guess you could argue that there is instability or unknown in a minority parliament situation. And, I mean, even recently, Bloomberg is now reporting that Trump might even pull out of the USMCA, right? So there's kind of another complicating factor of it. This is just about reviewing our trade deal and maybe sharpening a few edges. This is the guy could blow it up. I think it sort of depends on on what happens. And I know that's kind of a lame answer. But if if this USMCA review

blows up or heats up or Trump pulls the plug or, you know, who knows what will happen? I think it's possible that Carney could take that to the electorate and say, look, I mean, we might have to live in a world without this trade deal at the U.S. And I need to hear from voters and to talk to you about how we're going to go forward on that and build on his strategy so far. So there are ways to do it. I'm not sure that they're there now in terms of bringing this forward. But, I mean, we'll see.

I know it's the source of vigorous debate among those in government and those in the party. So there's a concept in politics called a trial balloon. So it's where politicians float an idea with the public to see how it lands before they commit to it. Could these conversations around a snap election be that? Like, could this be a trial balloon to see the public has an appetite for an election this spring? I mean, Carney's discomfort in that clip we heard where McKenzie Gray asked him, point blank, is this what you're doing? I find the way Carney talks so fascinating because he's normally so smooth and so confident. And when he sort of shuffles and trips over himself, it's such a tell that he's not comfortable and

and he doesn't really have a great answer and would really prefer to move on to something else. I mean, this could be a very active conversation for them. You'd have to be a fool to look at these numbers and not think to yourself, well, what if we just, you know, went for it? But there's many more kind of intelligent conversations that have to go into that risk-benefit analysis. I think the real tell will be if, and even if it's not super sincere, even if it's just talking points, But all this talk right now about cooperation and the conservatives using phrases like good faith to refer to the liberals, that was not something we were seeing in the fall. And it's two way.

Like even the fact that Carney is sort of tripping over himself to say, I'm focused on the issues that face the country right now, not an election. And then people like Andrew Scheer are talking about, you know, we'll take the good from the liberals, we'll hold their feet to the fire and we'll work together. When and if that evaporates, I think that's a real tell. Because right now they're still working very hard, each in their own way to just. justify why we're not going to the polls, which tells us that for their own self-interested reasons, they don't particularly want to right now. And when they give up that pretext, even if it is just a total pretext, I feel like that will be a bit of a tip of the hand. Laura, let's end with you, a final thought. What do you think will be the signs that this

is really going to happen, that we really will have a snap election? I think there's behind the seas machinations that happen that aren't super, maybe not super sexy to talk about, but like people will start getting called to volunteer on a campaign. Staffers will start to, you know, take leaves. Like offices will start getting rented. I mean, we're even seeing now nominations heating up. We're waiting for a carni to call two by-elections. And if that doesn't happen, is he just rolling that into a general?

Like, I think there's just, there's, there's things that happen behind the scenes that aren't massively consequential, maybe to the general public, but there, there's movement and and whispers that happen. And I think that's when things start to get real, right? Like, there's actual organization that needs to take place. It's not just a matter of Cardi strolling down the street and asking for an election. Like, there's planning. And so that just starts to leak. That just starts to come out. I'm not sure that we're there yet or that we will get there. This could just not be a thing this year or not until later. So I think Shannon's absolutely right that when things start to break down in Parliament, when there's a massive rupture, even larger

that we've seen and with the Trump administration, the situation could start getting more real. Well, it seems like a good place to end. So Laura, Shannon, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. That was Laura Stone, one of the Globe's reporters covering Ontario politics. And Shannon Proudfoot, an Ottawa-based feature writer for The Globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Rachel Levy McLaughlin. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.