It is a personal, visceral fight neither Pierre Poilievre nor Mark Carney can afford to lose, and an election the country cannot afford to get wrong.

Ideally, this 45th general election will infuse optimism into Canada as we chart our most uncertain course since the Quebec Crisis tore into our psyche and instilled existential fear about our country’s stability more than a half-century ago.

How this election’s winner leads the nation may not necessarily decide on Canada’s survival, but certainly will shape and define our immediate standards of living, the role of government in withstanding what appears today to be imminent economic attack from America, and our willingness to forge both a more independent and a better networked place in the world.

It will matter as no election in memory has, so it will matter that we pay the closest possible attention.

If the vote were held today, it would bust the conventional wisdom that longstanding governments cannot help but unelect themselves. The near-decade-old Liberal government was doing all it could to head down that path for nearly three years in public opinion – out of ideas, out of favour, out of hope – but in the last three months has experienced a renaissance (on paper, anyway) unseen in our time. A 20-point-plus deficit in every national survey has become a tie, even a lead in some gauges.

As........

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