LILLEY: Time for Canadians to put lost Liberal decade in rear-view

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On Sunday morning, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will get the one thing he’s been calling for repeatedly – an election.

It won’t be the campaign Poilievre has been envisioning over the past several months, but despite what many Liberal cheering media types are saying, he still has a shot at winning a strong, stable, national Conservative government.

Most polls of late have the Liberals in the lead by a few points – the betting odds have shifted in favour of the Liberals and the latest Leger poll for Postmedia has the Liberals leading 42% voter support to 39% for the Conservatives and the NDP collapsing down to 9%.

After months of the Conservatives holding a 15-20 point lead, the departure of Justin Trudeau and the arrival of Donald Trump have changed everything.

Mark Carney’s arrival as Liberal Leader appears to have sucked the life out Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, so that party is now on life support.

The next five weeks will be a race to 172 seats, that’s how many will be required to form a majority government after this election. Candidates will be contesting 343 ridings this campaign rather than the 338 ridings we’ve seen over the last three elections.

Alberta is getting three new seats to recognize its population growth, meaning the province will now have 37 seats in the House of Commons. British Columbia will increase by one additional seat to 43 and Ontario will increase from 121 seats to 122.

As it currently stands, the Liberals have 152 seats, the Conservatives 130, the Bloc Quebecois 33, the NDP 24, there are two Green MPs, three independents and four vacant seats.

For Poilievre to win, he needs to convince voters that this election is about more than Donald Trump. He needs to remind voters that the Liberals have been in power for the last decade as the cost of living has skyrocketed, housing prices have doubled, violent crime has increased dramatically, and the Toronto area has become a global hub of auto thefts and carjackings.

Across several polls, the support the Liberals have gained has come from women and voters over the age of 55. Poilievre has held onto support from men and younger and middle-aged voters.

He needs to remind suburban mothers that the gun violence they have seen play out over the last several years is a direct result of the soft-on-crime policies the Liberals adopted. Carney can hardly distance himself from that – he’s brought in Trudeau’s former justice minister, David Lametti, as an advisor.

Lametti was the architect of Bill C-5, which got rid of mandatory minimum sentences for those convicted a second and third time on serious charges like gun smuggling. He saw Bill C-75, which made bail a revolving door for repeat offenders, through its implementation.

On crime, as in so many other areas, the Carney Liberals are no different than the Trudeau Liberals. The players are the same, the policies are the same and the results will be the same.

Poilievre needs to sell this message in the areas that ring Toronto and Vancouver to attract voters who were fed up with Trudeau and who right now might be seeing Carney as something he’s not – an agent of change.

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The Liberals will undoubtedly see a boost in support in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, so the Conservatives need to hold onto what they currently have in those two regions.

And in Ontario, they need to win big if they want a shot at forming government.

They need to sweep as much of the Prairies as possible – getting to 10-12 seats in Manitoba, all 14 seats in Saskatchewan with at least 32 seats in Alberta. In British Columbia, the Conservatives need to take more than 20 seats.

The landscape has changed over the past couple of months, and it could very well change by the end of April. Canadians have an opportunity to turn the page of the lost Liberal decade, on April 28, let’s do it.

blilley@postmedia.com