Two narratives were at play in Canada’s election: either the Great White North was going to continue on its liberal sonderweg, rejecting the Right-populist surge that has erupted elsewhere in the West — or it was going to take the same plunge into the unknown that their American and British cousins had taken with Trump and Brexit.
Instead, they have delivered a muddled, mixed result that neither fully confirms nor denies either of these projections. With the long, dramatic count not yet completed, it looks like the parliament will be divided between a returned but humbled Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney, holding on to minority status, and a rising but still not triumphant opposition Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Both these parties made sizeable gains, the more consequential performance likely coming from Poilievre, who stole a number of working-class seats from progressive parties. But both will nonetheless also have to deal with the sting of dashed expectations. Neither side was handed a decisive victory: Carney and Poilievre each fumbled the historic leads they held at different turns of the campaign, failing to provide a compelling or unifying vision of leadership before the electorate.
This is a sharp turnaround in fortune for the Tories. Not long ago, they enjoyed a 25-point lead, with an expected 200-seat landslide; but the resignation of Justin Trudeau powered-up by Donald Trump’s tariff war scrambled their strategy. As a result, the ruling Liberals were sufficiently emboldened to expect their own mega majority at the outset of the race.
At the time of writing, the Liberals had 167 seats, just five short of the 172 needed for a majority in the House of Commons; the Conservatives had 145 seats, the separatist Bloc Quebecois had 23, the left-wing New Democrats seven, and the Greens one. One leader, Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, has lost his seat, and remarkably, despite his party’s upward movement, Poilievre is in danger of losing his own — which is located next to the constituency that elected Carney to parliament for the first time.
All those hoping for a return to stability after a half-decade of minority rule face only further volatility. There was neither a Blue nor a Red Wave — only more uncertainty, as Canadians face an aggressive threat to their independence in Washington, and a dangerously divided parliament in Ottawa. This would be a trying enough in ordinary times, but these are not normal days.
Roughly two and a half years ago, Poilievre’s Conservatives began their steady ascent to frontrunner status, where they would stay until just a few months ago. The headwinds were with him, as he looked set to become the Canadian incarnation of a global wave of revolt against liberal elites. Poilievre found a formula for translating the populist energies that roiled America and Europe into a distinct local context: he downplayed culture war concerns, which never really took off in Canada, and instead played up the cost of living, tying creeping inflation and spiralling housing costs to Trudeau.
A singular focus on Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax, distilled by the slogan “Axe the Tax”, seemed to resonate with working-class voters; indeed, it was so effective that it caused the Liberals to cave in the middle of 2023, catalysing a chain of events that would end with the ousting of Trudeau in January of this year. But success came too early, as the party proved too slow to react to the change at the top, sticking to their anti-Trudeau playbook even as Carney succeeded him; then Trump began issuing threats of annexation, followed by a barrage of tariffs, declaring economic war.
Poilievre had ample opportunity to shift his narrative to one of existential national defence but only did so belatedly or half-heartedly. Instead, the Tory leader banked on affordability, which he intended to hang like a millstone around Carney’s neck: after all, Trump may be the issue of the moment, but how could Canadians forget the “lost Liberal decade” during which Trudeau’s policies, as Poilievre tells it, exploded the cost of living?
Carney, though, cancelled Trudeau’s carbon tax on day one, distancing himself from the former PM and rendering useless Poilievre’s Trumpian schoolyard taunt (“Carbon Tax Carney”). Outflanked on patriotism and weakened on affordability, the Conservatives were backed into a political corner.
“Outflanked on patriotism and weakened on affordability, the Conservatives were backed into a political corner.”
Meanwhile, Poilievre’s provincial counterpart in Ontario, Doug Ford — with whom a blood feud has now broken out — proved how Canada’s Tories could win in the age of Trump: weeks before, he called and decisively won a snap election centered on tariffs, precisely what Poilievre didn’t do. The federal party had also managed to antagonise provincial sister parties in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which could have boosted Poilievre’s chances. Repairing the fissures of the conservative movement will be vital for the Canadian Right if they are to continue their quest for national power.
An earlier Poilievre pivot away from his Trudeau-era slogans and towards recognition of the Trump threat could have prevented the bleeding of support. Poilievre was shown to be right, however, in refusing to choose between affordability and Trump, as the spate of working-class votes he stole from the New Democrats in industrial and suburban Ontario can attest. These seats, some held by the union-backed NDP, were expected to defect to Carney rather than Poilievre, who ended up benefiting handsomely.
But the Tory leader could still have been more creative in blending the two issues, that is, showing how the US trade war would compound an already weakened economy. But he was much too cautious in scaling back his counterpunches against the Yankees, as if fearing to cross a line with parts of his base who might still admire the president. In any event, while Poilievre may have secured the best conservative result since 1988, he fell short. If he loses his own Ottawa-area seat, it will be a desperate (but not fatal) embarrassment.
Not that Mark Carney has covered himself with glory. He also had a reasonable hope of marching to power with a thumping majority. When the campaign started, the Liberals were heavily favoured to pull off the impossible: a majority after a decade in government. But though they have secured a fourth mandate, it is a vulnerable one. It can survive only by scrapping together ad hoc supply-and-confidence deals with New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois MPs — precisely the dynamic that exhausted the energies of the late Trudeau government, while at the same time facing an aggressive and empowered Conservative opposition.
In the end, Carney’s professions of a new direction for the Liberal government failed to move the needle. The baggage of the Trudeau era proved too much: too many families and young people felt as if they aren’t getting ahead; working-class Canadians in industrial cities such as Hamilton and Windsor identified with Polievre’s “boots-not-suits” message, rather than the expert reassurances of Carney and the old Trudeau ministers; and crucially, the multicultural “905” Greater Toronto Area suburbs, where Canadian elections are won and lost, broke the Liberal “red wall” there to elect just enough Conservatives to deny Liberals the advantage in Ontario, effectively blocking the Liberal Party’s path to a majority.
The government’s disastrous mismanagement of the housing, immigration, and law-and-order files has hit hard in these suburbs, where immigrant communities themselves felt the brunt of overpopulation and a surplus of non-integrable newcomers. Indeed, the surge in crime rates and the appearance of tent cities in these otherwise respectable middle- and working-class neighbourhoods are what may have lost the Liberals their formerly reliable and vital bedrock of support.
Only in Quebec did Carney’s Liberals make significant gains, mostly at the expense of the separatist Bloc Québécois, whose social democratic base feared the prospect of a Poilievre government so much that they voted against their nationalist inclinations to hand Carney enough to claim the win. With 24 seats, however, the same Bloc, which rejects the very idea of Canada, as it exists, may play the part of kingmaker in the hung parliament, further testing national unity in this already fractious federation.
With these results, governing will be far from easy for Carney, and after a short, raucous 45th parliament, Canadians may well have to return to the polls later this year or next to dispel the indecision that has descended over Ottawa. While there were no decisive winners, the loser of this race may just be the national interest, which desperately needs a stable majority government as Canada fights for its sovereign existence and standard of living against a vicious and implacable foe.
At the start of his ministry, Mark Carney made a bizarre gesture: he winked at the camera as if to cross the fourth wall and communicate something to those watching; on social media, Carney was then compared with the protagonist of House of Cards: a shrewd Machiavellian figure who comes in from the shadows to seize and hold power against great odds. Instead, what we Canadians got was a House of Cards in the more literal sense, a fundamentally unstable structure that can be blown away at any time by a strong gust of wind. And a storm is brewing across the border.
