There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing what’s coming and watching everyone else miss it – not because you’re smarter, but because you’re paying attention to things they’re not.
For the past six months, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen that the Liberals weren’t as done as people thought. At the time, it wasn’t because I had insider information or a political bet to hedge. It was simply because I understand how Canadians move. How they feel. How they sit in discomfort. How they express change – not with grand declarations, but with subtle, almost invisible shifts in posture.
It wasn’t Carney I was pointing to back then. We didn’t even know it would be Carney. It wasn’t about any one name. It was about sentiment. About the quiet recalibrations I could feel in conversations, in interviews, in offhand remarks and disclaimers. It was the tone, not the take. At the time, it was pure intuition. I wasn’t reading polls or dissecting headlines – I was listening. To people. To what wasn’t being said. To how people in this country actually think, and how little anyone seems to understand that. And what struck me most wasn’t that others disagreed with me – it was that they seemed blind to the rhythm of the country entirely.
It always catches me off guard – how little we seem to understand ourselves. Especially in this country. We confuse civility with passivity. We mistake quiet discontent for indifference. And we continue to treat Canadian public opinion as if it will behave like an algorithm: predictable, sharp, obvious.
But Canada doesn’t move like that. It doesn’t shout. It murmurs. And unless you’re listening closely – really listening – you’ll miss the fact that the country has already moved on from something long before it becomes visible in a poll or a headline.
When I said the Liberals weren’t finished, I wasn’t clinging to a political hope. I was reading a cultural map. I was watching how people softened when you gave them an alternative to Trudeau within the Liberal frame. I was hearing the way lifelong conservatives would mutter, almost sheepishly, that they were “fiscally conservative,” not “socially.” That distinction isn’t accidental. It’s deeply Canadian. We are allergic to ideological extremes. We prefer nuance. We hedge. We caveat. And we often vote for the least offensive option, not the most exciting one.
Which is why I find it so baffling that our pollsters, pundits, and even my friends and acquaintances keep treating the public like a machine to be measured, rather than a mood to be felt. The mistake wasn’t in missing a Liberal resurgence – it was in assuming that dissatisfaction with Trudeau meant a wholesale rejection of the party. That’s not how Canada works. We don’t burn things down. We quietly exit, quietly return, quietly reposition. And in that stillness, there is a rich, untapped complexity that most people in media and politics continue to overlook.
This piece is not an endorsement of any party, nor is it a prediction. I’m not calling the election in favour of anyone – not even Carney. What I am pointing to is the emotional undercurrent, the collective readjustment, the temperature shift. It’s the reason I wrote in January that Carney’s entry completely changed the landscape – not because he would win, but because it gave Canadians a new way to reimagine an outcome they weren’t yet ready to talk about. That article, The Inevitable Rise of Mark Carney, wasn’t about endorsement either. It was about watching how a single name can give shape to sentiment that had been floating just beneath the surface.
What I’ve always found fascinating is that for a country as large and diverse as ours, our political movements are rarely loud. We drift, and then we decide. But the drift is meaningful. And to watch people miss that – especially people whose job it is to listen – is disheartening.
This article isn’t about being right. It’s about being tuned in. It’s about trusting your sense of the public not as an abstraction, but as a reflection of the people you live among. And more than that, it’s about acknowledging how out of touch we can become with our own temperament when we allow polls and headlines to substitute for cultural understanding.
Canada is not a place of extremes. Even those who call themselves conservatives rarely do so without a softening phrase. It’s not a country that thrives on confrontation – it leans toward stability, compassion, and decency. And so when people started insisting that we were heading toward some massive rightward swing, I couldn’t help but feel that they were mistaking noise for narrative.
It’s easy to read numbers. It’s harder to read tone. But in Canada, tone is everything. We don’t like to be told what we’re thinking. We like to arrive at it ourselves, slowly, with grace.
So yes, now we’re a couple of weeks away, and everyone’s catching up to what was already obvious months ago. Not because they suddenly got smarter, but because the story has finally become “safe” to tell. That’s always how it goes. By the time the narrative becomes consensus, it’s no longer insight – it’s inertia. When calls for Trudeau’s resignation started emerging from within the party, I said aloud – again – that the tide was going to turn. Not for the Conservatives, but against a narrative that had grown stale. And I said it often enough to get those gentle smirks, the kind that say “That’s cute, but let’s be serious.”
Yet here we are. The results are near, and suddenly, the mood has shifted. Now people say “Oh yeah, of course,” as if it was always obvious. But it wasn’t. Not to most.
I’m sharing all this not to say “I told you so,” but to say: this country is alive, and it speaks. Not always loudly, not always clearly. But it speaks. And the ones who listen – not just to the noise, but to the texture of things – those are the ones who usually see what’s coming.
Because sometimes, all it takes to see the future is to be still enough in the present. And to trust that what feels true often is, even if no one else sees it yet.
That’s not insight. That’s attention. That’s what Canada deserves.