For the hard-luck Conservatives, the Trump trap is a killer

OPINION For the hard-luck Conservatives, the Trump trap is a killer LAWRENCE MARTIN PUBLIC AFFAIRS COLUMNIST SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO Open this photo in gallery: U.S. President Donald Trump reacts during a meeting with U.S. travel executives in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Yet more terrible tidings for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. They were going to do badly in the federal by-elections Monday anyway. But the President of the United States made the result a lot worse. In the week before the electoral tests, he took over the news cycle in Canada by announcing he was draping the Stars and Stripes over Lake Ontario. The infantile water-grab played perfectly into the Liberals’ hands because the greater the mad king’s threats the more they profit. He was key to the Liberals winning the last election after they were about to be drubbed and with his sovereignty encroachments overshadowing all of Canada’s domestic woes, he’s staked them to a large lead in the polls ever since. Opinion: The shocking implosion of B.C.’s Conservative Party As strange as it sounds, this man is arguably the biggest vote-getter the Liberal Party has ever had. Some might give Kim Campbell the prize for reducing her Tories to two seats in the 1993 election. But a great number of the lost seats went to the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois, not the Liberals. Being a gift horse for the Liberals, Mr. Trump, ipso facto, is hell on wheels for the Conservatives. In the by-elections the Conservatives’ pain was most felt in Quebec where they were trounced in a riding they previously held. Pollsters whose national rankings have the party trailing the Liberals by miles say it’s on account of the Trump trap. For the Conservatives, it appears there is no getting out of it. Mr. Poilievre’s being on the rigid right, being a parochial career politician, makes him unsuited in the minds of most Canadians compared to Mark Carney, whose global stature, they believe, gives him the effectiveness to deal with the Trump White House. The Trump effect serves to gag Mr. Poilievre. Opposition parties are supposed to oppose. But the country is in such a patriotic frame of mind that it doesn’t want to hear the harsh criticisms Mr. Poilievre was so effective at levelling…