World

The Liberals’ astonishing turnaround victory in Canada’s election (with thanks to Trump)

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at his Rideau Cottage residence in Ottawa, confirming to reporters his intention to step down. REUTERS/Patrick Doyle

By Terence McNamee

29 Apr 2025

Canada is one of many nations where Trump has served as a mirror, held up in a way that reveals its strengths and failings – its true nature – in fresh perspective.

When future historians pronounce on Donald Trump’s greatest foreign policy blunders, the Liberals’ victory in Canada’s election yesterday will not be at the top of their list. But it might be close. The Liberals won both the popular vote and the most seats in the country’s parliament.

Presumably, Trump did not want the centrist Liberal Party to defeat the opposition Conservatives, a party more broadly aligned to his own domestic policy agenda than any other in Canada. Nor for Liberal leader Mark Carney, one of the world’s most connected and respected financial leaders, who has been scathingly critical of the US administration’s attempt to rewire the global economy in America’s favour, to defeat Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, a career politician whose relatively tame right-wing populism had been tacking towards President Trump’s until only a few months ago.

carney Prime Minister of Canada and Liberal Party leader Mark Carney delivers a speech to supporters during a rally on 23 April 2025 in Surrey, Canada. (Photo: Rich Lam / Getty Images)

When trying to get behind Trump’s geopolitical lens, “presumably” is not an optional word: safer to assume that his view of the world will always be mercurial. What is beyond doubt, however, is that Trump’s incessant talk of annexation and making Canada the “51st state” helped engineer one of the most remarkable turnarounds of any political party in a Western democracy since the end of the Cold War.

On the day Justin Trudeau announced that he would step down as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada, his party trailed a seemingly insurmountable 26 percentage points behind the Conservatives in voter intention. That was just 15 weeks ago, a blip in any normal political calendar.

But nothing is normal about politics in 2025.

For starters, no one foresaw that Trudeau could be anything other than an electoral liability for the Liberals so long as he remained in the public eye. By the time once-loyal allies finally convinced him that his time was up, it was a settled assumption among experts that by overstaying his welcome, Trudeau had ruined any chance of his successor defeating Poilievre.

Trudeau’s shot at redemption

Without realising it – presumably? – Trump gave Trudeau one last shot at redemption. He seized it vigorously.

Freed from electoral pressures and the inevitable ignominies that would have been inflicted on him from opposition benches in the House of Commons – in announcing his resignation, he shrewdly prorogued parliament until after he left office – Trudeau came out swinging.

Every wild threat on tariffs or Canada’s sovereignty by Trump was smacked down with uncommon clarity and bluntness from Trudeau. Canadians cheered him on.

Political leadership requires hard and soft skills, but there will be times when the soft skills are the hard skills. This was Trudeau’s sweet spot.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at his Rideau Cottage residence in Ottawa, confirming to reporters his intention to step down. (Photo: REUTERS/Patrick Doyle)

The soaring patriotism and unity channelled by Trudeau caught the Conservatives flat-footed. The red Maga hats beloved of their hardliners had to be metaphorically burnt. “Unpatriotic” slogans that once had purchase on the national psyche were ditched. Poilievre professed that “Canada is broken”, relentlessly, for years. Then suddenly, it wasn’t. He knew that the Conservatives needed a new message once Trump started reimagining Canada’s borders and deriding Trudeau as “governor”, which galvanised Canadians into something close to an economic war footing. US holidays were cancelled, Californian wine was pulled off the shelves.

And yet, inexplicably, the campaign motto devised by the Conservatives – “Canada First” – had more than faint echoes of Trump’s unabashed jingoism. It was, perhaps, a reminder to voters who ultimately switched back to the Liberals that relations with the US had changed, but Poilievre’s political instincts had not.

As for Trudeau, Canadians could warm to him again, safe in the knowledge that someone else would be running the economy,

Mark Carney

Enter Mark Carney, boasting economics degrees from Harvard and Oxford, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, lauded for helping steer Canada through the global financial crisis and the UK through Brexit. He knew a thing or two about managing a country’s finances.

Yet there was still a mountain to climb for the Liberals. Trudeau helped arrest the party’s slide in the polls by standing up to Trump during his final months in office. But defeating the Conservatives was another matter.

Before Carney announced his intention to run for the Liberal leadership in mid-January, he was recognised by less than one in four Canadians.

Internationally, Carney had a reputation for being the adult in the room during a crisis. And more often than not, for being the smartest person in the room, too. But there were huge question marks over whether this political newcomer could do retail politics, of the kind Trudeau excelled at over three election victories.

Canada and the Liberals had been here before.

In 2009, Michael Ignatieff, a renowned public intellectual and telegenic Harvard professor, first elected to parliament only a few years earlier, won the leadership of the party on a wave of Liberal optimism that he would lead them back into power and become a transformative prime minister.

Like Carney, Ignatieff had also spent significant chunks of his professional life away from Canada, opening him up to charges of being an outsider and out of touch with ordinary Canadians. The charges stuck – and stuck hard. Ignatieff lost his seat and led the Liberals to the worst defeat in the party’s history. Try as he might, he could not connect with voters. Ignatieff later described the loss as a “crucifixion” by voters.

Carney proved an entirely different animal on the campaign trail: self-effacing, down to earth, almost preternaturally calm in the face of media scrutiny. All the while, he oozed gravitas.

Carney’s likeability ratings quickly soared over his opponents, even in French-speaking Quebec where much was initially made of his inferior (to the other candidates) French, which he disarmingly conceded was only a “six out of 10”, but he hoped to get to “eight or nine” within a few years.

Based on his performance over the past few months, you wouldn’t bet against him. The Liberals took 55% of the seats in Quebec.

In keeping with the odd politics of 2025, though Poilievre lost his seat and may himself be dumped as leader of the Conservatives, his party took a greater share of the popular vote than it did in 2011 when it won a majority. It also performed better with Canadians between the ages of 18-34, suggesting that young people affected most heavily by Canada’s soaring house prices and cost of living were inclined to blame the Liberals.

The New Democratic Party (NDP) was the night’s biggest loser. Canada’s social-democratic, left-wing party took just over 6% of the popular vote and fell to a catastrophically low seven seats, losing its official party status (which requires 12 seats). The NDP haemorrhaged voters to the Liberals, who they saw as the only party capable of stopping Poilievre and countering Trump.

Ominous headwinds

For all Mark Carney’s formidable talents, he faces a daunting task navigating Canada through ominous political and economic headwinds in the coming years. A tariff-induced recession lurks on the horizon. For a huge exporter of primary products like Canada, the global trading environment has never been more challenging. At home, Canada’s acute housing crisis will not abate without swift and decisive policy interventions.

The election results revealed a country “divided but not polarised”, according to Andrew Coyne, one of Canada’s most admired political commentators. In the resource-rich prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Liberals were largely shut out.

The separatist movement based in Alberta, which feeds off periodic spikes in so-called “Western alienation”, a perception that the federal government exploits Canada’s western provinces for their oil, gas and other resources, but marginalises them politically, will feel emboldened. While there is no immediate prospect of success for separatists in Alberta – or Quebec, where more substantive drives for independence from Canada also tend to ebb and flow – yesterday’s result will, at the very least, put wind in their sails.

The reason Coyne rightly described Canada as not polarised, despite its internal rifts, is that, for now at least, a robust consensus exists across all parties on the core national values that must be defended in the face of Trump’s efforts to destabilise Canada.

Canada is one of many nations where Trump has served as a mirror, held up in a way that reveals its strengths and failings – its true nature – in fresh perspective. Broadly speaking, Canadians liked what they saw. If they didn’t, Carney’s upbeat vision for Canada would not have resonated as it did.

But this reflection evoked by Trump will need to evolve. In some ways, the rallying cry of “Never 51” (state) had such potency across the country because it aligned seamlessly with the age-old tendency of Canadians to define themselves by who they are not – Americans – rather than who they are.

Like much else, Carney seems to get that. DM

Dr Terence McNamee is a writer and consultant to various international organisations and governments. He was raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

Categories:

World

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

World

Trudeau’s shot at redemption

Mark Carney

Ominous headwinds