A Special To the Point for the Year 2025
A Special To the Point for the Year 2025
It’s everyone’s favourite time of the year! A time for friends and family, and a time to reflect on a year that moved quickly and carried no shortage of politically consequential moments.
Before jumping into this special edition, we want to thank you, our clients, partners, and friends, for the trust and confidence you placed in us throughout 2025. From all of us at ONpoint Strategy Group, we wish you a peaceful Christmas season and a healthy, happy start to the year ahead.
We will return with our regular To the Point weekly cadence, as well as our daily Points of Interest, beginning the week of January 4, 2026. We will be fresh and fit (perhaps more so fresh than fit), ready for what comes next as the political and policy landscape continues to evolve for the province and the nation.
A great deal of ink will be spilled in the coming days analyzing what was arguably one of the most politically tumultuous years of the twenty-first century for the Great White North. A trade war, two pivotal elections, leadership exits, and a moment of national introspection that forced Canadians to debate the nation’s values, institutions, economic performance, and global standing will dominate analysis well into the new year.
In true To the Point fashion, we are going to drill down, analyze, and assess political events and personalities that shaped 2025.
THE BIG PICTURE
Cascading Effects
It is interesting how sometimes consequential events happen as the year ends, and at other times pivotal moments begin shortly after the turnover of a new year. The latter was true in 2025.
Shortly after his inauguration on January 20, President Trump reaffirmed his November 2024 commitment to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, made official by an Executive Order on February 1, taking effect on March 4, and escalating throughout the year before culminating in October. It is, without a doubt, a consequential political decision that will reverberate throughout the remaining years of the twenty-first century.
The announcement sent fierce political and economic shockwaves across the world. Allies became economic units, counterparties to a negotiation, rather than decades-old political, economic, and security partners. Trump’s general justification for the tariffs at the time was that the rest of the world was cheating the United States, as the Stars and Stripes bore the brunt of global leadership costs, sacrificing both blood and treasure to maintain the international security and economic status quo.
Country to country, the justifications were nuanced and changed frequently. In the Canadian context, Trump first insisted that tariffs were a direct response to what he described as lax Canadian border security, a key point of entry for fentanyl into the United States. His reasoning changed in the spring. Reciprocation of tariffs imposed on U.S. goods and the cheating narrative meandered throughout Trump’s statements on the matter by late March. The shift revealed that the border rhetoric, depending on who you are speaking to, was rhetorical cover for a deeper, strategic global restructuring agenda that the Trump administration conjured in late 2024. It is essential to understand Trump’s national economic ambitions to appreciate how and why the moment completely upended Canadian politics in 2025.
We noted the significance of Trump’s current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Stephen Mirran, in a spring edition of To the Point, and his piece, A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. Forget fentanyl. A User’s Guide outlines exactly what the tariffs are intended to do: correct the structural overvaluation of the dollar that perpetuates U.S. trade deficits, force trading partners to pay for American security and global stability through currency revaluation and Treasury purchases and restructure the global trading order to prioritize American manufacturing and fiscal interests.
In other words, make other countries pay more for access to American markets so they will stop taking advantage of the United States and start investing back in America.
That is it. That is the cascading effect that turned everything on its head. January 20 was a political decision so far-reaching it cemented election victories, ended political careers, entrenched the old and the young into specific voting patterns, upended the economy, and revealed important political realities facing Ontario and Canada. It is prerequisite to everything political in 2025.
ONTARIO
A Widening Promise and Performance Gap
2025 was a historic year for Premier Doug Ford. On February 7, Ford secured a third consecutive majority government after calling an election on January 24. The last Premier to secure a third consecutive majority government was Leslie Frost, the Ontario PC Party Premier from 1946 to 1961.
The murmurs of an early election call were being whispered long before President Trump’s second victory. The Premier’s political brain trust was on the lookout for a politically defensible reason to call an election for over a year. They understood the political landscape. A politically underwhelming official opposition led by Marit Stiles and a not especially impressive Bonnie Crombie, who was leading the Ontario Liberal Party, juxtaposed with a folksy populist who had refined retail politics as pro-business in the language of everyday frustrations, meant a third majority was up for the taking.
The rest is history. Trump’s trade war provided the perfect justification for an early election call. U.S. tariffs were, and still are, a real threat to Ontario’s economy. Ford argued that he needed a fresh, strong mandate to protect Ontario’s workers and businesses, framing himself as the only candidate able to stand up to President Trump and address affordability issues in the province. Stiles bet big on scandals and character attacks against Ford. Crombie ran almost exclusively on health care. Neither could muster any kind of viable alternative to the Ford PCs. Ontarians ultimately went with the candidate and party they believed represented stability.
The election results for both the Liberals and the NDP proved to be an accurate microcosm for the centre left in Ontario throughout 2025. Marit Stiles could not muster any kind of formidable opposition following the election. She adeptly exploited a program issue highlighted by the Auditor General, but it has yet to make any significant impact. Stiles also barely survived a leadership review at the Ontario NDP convention in September, receiving 68% of the vote. Sixty percent is the unofficial number needed to maintain a leader’s legitimacy following an election loss. The final vote suggests simmering internal dissatisfaction with Stiles’ leadership that may come to a head in 2026.
Things were worse for the Ontario Liberals in 2025. The party was reduced to fourteen seats. Official party status in the legislature was attained, but without leader Bonnie Crombie’s seat. At her leadership review, Crombie maintained a defiant posture, vowing to stay on as leader and regain the confidence of the party membership. Delegates at the party’s annual general meeting in September voted 57% against holding a leadership contest. Crombie passed the party’s constitutional 50% threshold to stay at the helm of a ship that had taken on significant water. The New Leaf Liberals, an internal group of grassroots supporters with links to federal Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, argued that anything less than two-thirds of the vote was a strong signal that the faithful had lost confidence in her leadership. She formally stepped down later on September 14.
With Ford holding a dominant majority and opposition parties leaderless or structurally weakened, 2025 saw arguably the weakest accountability structure Ontario has seen in decades. It is the type of political environment any political party would dream of having. A weak opposition meant free rein to implement policy and a legislative agenda with limited roadblocks. Imagine the possibilities.
The 2025 election represents a new political order in the province. A type of small l liberal, small c conservative coalition that is less ideological and more practical. They view the Premier as stable, predictable, and competent. The stability of that coalition in 2025 gave Ford the green light to go hog wild on all the major policy issues facing the province: health care, housing, affordability, and the economy. Surely, a third majority mandate was enough to convince the Premier to spend the vast amounts of political capital afforded to him by the electorate.
Evidently, it had not.
2025 represented a widening gap between what the Premier promised and his performance on paper. To the Premier’s credit, he followed through on key pieces of legislation and policy promised during the campaign, including the Protect Ontario by Free Trade Within Canada Act (Bill 2), the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act (Bill 5), and the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act (Bill 17). These were important promises kept.
And yet it still feels like the government is afraid of its own shadow. Preferring a perceived incrementalist approach to critical, converging crises facing the province, Doug Ford’s third straight majority raises a persistent question: with commanding legislative majorities, why have signature files like housing and health care seen limited progress since 2018? The pattern suggests a governing approach defined more by caution than by the type of action a super-majority typically enables. That may have been politically appropriate in 2018, but it risks voter fatigue and the perception that the party and the Premier are out of step with implementation expectations.
The political landscape in Ontario at the end of 2025 is asymmetrical. Ford still has three years left in his mandate to turn housing around, with 1.5 million homes by 2030 now widely considered unobtainable, and to improve economic competitiveness to protect a manufacturing base under pressure. The NDP are hoping an Integrity Commissioner investigation will breathe new life into their leadership, while the Ontario Liberals embark on yet another leadership race with no top contenders emerging.
What began as a trade decision in Washington quickly became the central organizing force of Ontario’s political year, reshaping electoral timing, political narratives, and the balance of power at Queen’s Park by the end of 2025. These impacts will continue to reverberate into 2026.
FEDERAL
Instability Is the New Stability
The “normalcy of crises” describes a condition in which political instability becomes routine. It is a term that aptly describes Canada in 2025. The country lurched from one political turbulence to another over the last 365 days, largely thanks to President Trump.
President Trump’s return to the Oval Office was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership. The Liberal caucus’s resolve to remain steadfast collapsed as polling showed the party on the precipice of not just defeat, but total wipeout.
The Prime Minister announced his resignation on January 6. Trudeau’s confidence in his ability to keep American populism at bay and protect Canada’s negotiating position had finally worn out. Depending on who you speak to, the resignation was either a sacrifice or a carefully orchestrated political strategy designed to buy the Liberals time to recalibrate ahead of the next election.
Prorogation served as the legislative vehicle to provide cover. It killed signature bills on the order paper, but it gave the Liberals until March 24 to hold a leadership race. The 63-day period that followed was rife with turmoil. Trudeau remained prime minister with full legal authority but no legitimacy. Parliament did not sit. Committees did not meet. Confidence votes disappeared. There was no intent to finalize a trade deal with the United States.
Many viewed the timing and execution of the resignation as a cynical political calculation to justify the installation of Mark Carney as savior, or leader, of the Liberal Party. The resulting zombie government created a significant power vacuum. That vacuum was filled largely by Premiers, particularly Doug Ford, who bypassed Ottawa, demanded a Team Canada approach, and suggested the federal government was not taking border security seriously enough. Trudeau was no longer a shield. He was the reason Canada was being targeted. The instability lasted 63 days and set the bar for political turbulence throughout 2025.
Trudeau’s resignation paved the way for Carney’s leadership. The rules of the Liberal leadership race were announced three days later. While several Trudeau-era figures entered the contest, the outcome was never in doubt. The race was a formality. Mark Carney was going to become prime minister, come hell or high water.
Carney emerged precisely because instability had become the organizing condition of federal politics. The Liberal Party was not looking for an ideologue or a retail politician. It wanted a crisis manager. His lack of electoral experience was outweighed by his résumé as a corporate and central bank leader.
Carney governs accordingly. He is impatient with process, dismissive of consensus building, and singularly focused on institutional capacity rather than ideological coherence. That approach works well in moments of emergency, when fast decisions and centralized authority are required. It is far less effective in periods of prolonged uncertainty, where legitimacy, durability, and buy in matter as much as speed.
The record reflects that tension. His government legislated quickly on the carbon tax, the gas tax, and housing relief. It created new institutional structures, including the Major Projects Office and the Defence Investment Agency. It announced spending commitments approaching $1 trillion. Yet housing remains behind target, health care commitments remain largely unfunded, and the central political challenge of the moment, tariff negotiations with the United States, remains unresolved.
This is the paradox at the heart of Carney’s leadership. He was elected to restore stability, but his governing model is built for managing chaos rather than resolving it. Implicit in his approach is the assumption that instability is temporary and that the July 2026 USMCA renegotiation will reset the board and return politics to something resembling normalcy.
By October 2025, the strain was already visible. As the immediate sense of crisis faded, approval ratings dropped by ten points, revealing a simple reality. Once the emergency atmosphere dissipated, crisis management alone was no longer sufficient to sustain political confidence in an era of indefinite uncertainty. One might even argue that this became a political calculation. Without a trade deal, Carney and the Liberals could point to continued instability from the tariff war to justify other political moves, including closer alignment with Europe.
Mark Carney enters 2026 in a position that appears strong on paper but is quietly deteriorating. His approval rating sits at 52%, down sharply from the low 60s earlier in the year. The honeymoon ended by October, once the acute phase of the crisis gave way to prolonged and unresolved negotiation. Carney’s governing style remains impatient, dismissive of process, and openly abrasive. It proved effective during moments of emergency. It has been far less effective as instability hardened into a permanent condition.
The real political story is not polling or partisan positioning. It is the trade negotiation.
In late December, Carney made a consequential strategic concession. Canada abandoned sector-by-sector tariff negotiations in favour of rolling all outstanding disputes into the broader CUSMA review scheduled to formally begin in January 2026. The only explicitly protected red line is dairy and supply management. Everything else, including digital services, alcohol, and energy access, are now implicitly on the table.
The risk is existential. The 35% blanket tariff on Canadian goods, which would have pushed the country into recession in 2025, was avoided only because of a USMCA exemption. United States negotiators have now made clear that this exemption is not guaranteed beyond the review period. If talks fail, the exemption disappears and Canada enters a recession almost immediately.
Carney is gambling that President Trump ultimately prefers a face-saving deal to sustained economic disruption. If that assumption holds, Carney survives and likely governs into 2027 from a position of renewed strength. If Trump’s tariff agenda is ideological rather than transactional, Carney’s strategy collapses.
The domestic political landscape reflects that fragility. Nationally, the Liberals and Conservatives sit in near parity, separated by roughly two points and well within the margin of error. The decisive bloc is the centre, representing just under 40% of the electorate. Among these voters, Pierre Poilievre remains deeply unpopular, while Carney retains moderate but soft approval. Neither party has locked them in.
Poilievre’s problem is structural. He will likely survive his January leadership review. His base remains loyal, and there is no credible alternative waiting in the wings. However, he has built himself into a strategic corner. He has consolidated the right flank almost entirely, as evidenced by the collapse of the People’s Party, but in doing so has capped his electoral ceiling in the high 30s. He needs centrist voters to win yet cannot pivot without risking internal fracture. Quiet signs of caucus erosion, including a floor crossing in December and a resignation in November, suggest strain beneath the surface, even if no immediate rebellion is imminent.
The broader pattern is unmistakable. Canada has entered an era of normalized instability. The government controls Parliament but is politically eroding. The opposition is energized but structurally constrained. And the outcome of the next federal election depends less on domestic campaigning than on the result of a trade negotiation over which Canada exercises limited control.
By mid-2026, that uncertainty will resolve itself one way or another. At that point, we will know whether Carney’s bet on Trump’s pragmatism was sound, or whether the political system he now leads was built for a stability that no longer exists.
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To the Point – ONpoint Strategy Group's weekly roundup – cuts through the noise to deliver insight and analysis of key federal, provincial, and municipal stories shaping Canada's policy and political landscape. Designed for decision-makers and thought leaders, this newsletter is your go-to resource for staying ahead. Share these trusted insights with your network to spark meaningful conversations. Simply hit forward or follow ONpoint Strategy Group on X and LinkedIn to spread these valuable perspectives."
About ONpoint Strategy Group:
ONpoint Strategy Group is all about helping clients make an impact where it counts. Specializing in government relations and strategic execution, our team—Nico Fidani-Diker, Mariana Di Rezze, Krystle Caputo, David Morgado, Christopher Mourtos, Ellen Gouchman, and Brandon Falcone—works closely with clients to navigate complex political landscapes and bring their goals to life. With a practical, results-driven approach, we build strong relationships, craft winning strategies, and make sure every step brings clients closer to meaningful outcomes. We’re passionate about making sure our clients are heard, supported, and positioned for success.
