The Conservatives had been planning for months, if not years, to campaign against the unpopular and increasingly out-of-touch Trudeau. It was to be a campaign that naturally emphasized the issues where Tory polling revealed government weakness: the carbon tax, affordability, crime, resources extraction, housing and, perhaps most of all, Trudeau himself. Canadians had badly soured on a prime minister who had enjoyed so many years of celebrity. Trudeau seemed blithe about the painful rise in the cost of living since the pandemic, the increase in dangerous crime that seemed to trace back to his permissive legal reforms, and the worsening housing crisis. He stubbornly continued to defend his carbon tax, despite polls showing more than two-thirds of Canadians had turned against it.