'Something's going on here': On what's really happening behind the scenes and on the doors in Election 2025

The polls say one thing -- for now.

Artwork inspired by Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

“Something’s really going on here,” says word from on the ground in once-Liberal-safe Toronto.

“The polls say one thing, but we’ve never given out so many signs. We’ve had to print thousands more than usual.”

“We’re actually doing just fine,” says another source high up on the federal campaign trail.

“Don’t believe the chatter from disgruntled so-called conservatives . . . Nobody here is hanging up their skates. We’ve had a very good week — long days notwithstanding! — and are beginning to inflict solid brand damage on Carney.

“The best is yet to come. We are running the campaign we should be running. One that’s true to conservative values and principles.”

On that “chatter,” this non-profit campaigner and writer has no qualms about going weapons-hot.

For those unaware, Ford-‘conservative’ insiders in Ontario have been taking to the media circuit, issuing complaint after complaint, as both anonymous and named sources, in an effort to pull the Conservatives off of major pocketbook issues such as immigration, housing, affordability, and crime, and on to, all but exclusively, Trump, Trump, Trump.

It matters to them not, apparently, that the Liberals have lucked into booby-trapping both sides of the Trump issue, and that it forces the Conservatives onto uneven terrain.

Drag this out and make it worse, as Carney has largely chosen to do? His elbows are up!

Get shoved around by the administration to the south? See, this is why he’s the one to deal with it. He’s Trump’s enemy!

(Apparently, it also matters not that Carney has received repeated pats on the head and quasi-endorsements from #45, and now, #47.)

The real story here? Allegedly embittered that they were left out of the war-room for reasons of not being all that conservative and being untrustworthy (a point they are now proving over and over again), and wanting to neglect a youth vote they were incapable of turning out, a select few in an Ontario crew think they know best, and would rather engage in public displays of industrial sabotage than keep it private and above the belt.

It’s a ridiculous little consultant slap-fight, at a time when 5000 people are standing out in the rain, to tell a man they don’t know that their Canadian Dream is now a nightmare, that they’re now drowning in debt and don’t feel hope for the future.

“These guys have no idea what they’re talking about. When this is all over, I hope they regret ever weighing in like this.”

For Doug Ford’s campaign manager Kory Teneycke, who has been working the Liberal podcast and media circuit the hardest, it might be worth noting that not every campaign has the advantage — nor indulgence — of being able to run on Liberal-lite and solely Trump.

The Ontario PCs were granted the easy road of being able to cut the corner to the polls in February, in an election no one asked for, while running Carney-adjacent messaging, and they still couldn’t pick up a seat against the worst Ontario Liberal leader of a generation.

And it should come as little shock that for those who helped orchestrate North America’s longest lockdown, who still have Sir John A. Macdonald entombed outside Queen’s Park, and who have allowed diploma mills to destroy Ontario’s small towns and its productivity to fall below lowly Mississippi’s, that Jenni Byrne’s campaign team weren’t all that interested in giving them a prominent seat at the table.

For real conservatives, fighting real opponents, the situation is as different as the reality they’re seeing in packed halls and on the doors, than what they’re being told by knives-out insiders mewling to “get on the fucking ballot question.”

They are on the ballot question(s). There’s more than one.

Yours truly is on them, too. Take a look at the latest spot aimed at turning out the young vote and fixing the housing and immigration debacle, produced by the NCC.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that certain conservative insiders, who have a record of previously shivving Andrew Scheer with a month remaining in his campaign, and who don’t seem to want to take responsibility for the Liberal-lite approach that doomed Erin O’Toole, don’t want to talk housing or immigration.

Ontario’s housing and immigration situation is a disaster — and getting worse. In abdicating on diploma mills for far too long, in allowing their corporate supporters to engorge themselves on temporary foreign workers, and in keeping development fees high, the zoning process more onerous than it needs to be (even for gentle fourplexes and midrises outside of suburban streets), and in contributing to low housing starts, it’s easier to criticize someone else’s record than to look at one’s own.

The polls say one thing, and that’s helpful, and true, to a point.

The rest is noise, and crap, and it’s still full steam ahead for those actually doing the work.

“I’m damn proud of how this is going,” source two leaves me with. Given the ridiculous black-swan bad luck on offer and all the obstacles being thrown in their way, he should be.

Campaigns matter more than any prick from a Kathleen Wynne 2.0 butter knife.

With a month to go, this one is just getting started.

Alexander Brown is a writer, non-profit campaign director, and Substack bestseller. He’s also writing a weekly election column for the Western Standard. To support his work, consider chipping in with a free or paid subscription.