Even if Canadians haven’t been taking Donald Trump literally when he promises to make their country the “cherished 51st state,” they have been taking him seriously.
Trump personally played an enormous role in returning an incompetent and ideologically bankrupt Liberal Party to power, after a campaign where Prime Minister Mark Carney made himself the anti-Trump and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre couldn’t adjust to Trump’s truly bizarre late intervention.
The deceiving part of Canadian politics is that a majority-left country can look more competitive than it is because of the existence of minor parties. In the last election in 2021, the Liberals won 160 seats, a plurality, short of the 170 seats required that year for a majority. But the New Democratic Party (NDP), a progressive alternative to the Liberals, won 25 seats. If Canada had a true two-party system as in the U.S., those voters would probably vote Liberal, which would have likely given Justin Trudeau a comfortable majority in 2021.
Then there’s the Bloc Quebecois (BQ), which runs candidates only in Quebec, the province with the second-largest number of seats. In 2021, the BQ won 32 of Quebec’s 78 seats. That means in any given election, voters in Quebec could choose to abandon their regional party and vote for one of the national parties and swing many seats. This time, they swung to the Liberals.
When the Conservatives won three consecutive federal elections in 2006, 2008, and 2011 under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, they never earned more than 40 percent of the national popular vote. They were able to win in part because the NDP and the BQ performed very well, taking many seats the Liberals would have probably won otherwise, especially in 2011 when the NDP was the second-largest party.
Splitting an opposing electorate is a political skill, one at which Harper excelled. But that’s the only way Conservatives have to win elections in Canada. The major non-Liberal party has not won a majority of the popular vote in a federal election since 1984, and even then only barely. The last non-Liberal popular majority before that was 1958.
Poilievre was able to enlarge the Conservatives’ vote share by a significant margin. They won the most votes in 2021, with 34 percent nationally, but they were heavily concentrated in western Canada where there are fewer seats. At press time, Conservatives appear to be on pace to win about 41 percent of the votes, more than Harper ever did and certainly enough to win the most seats — if the Canadian left is divided.
Conservatives flipped seats in Ontario near Toronto previously held by the Liberals and the NDP. That would ordinarily be a great sign for Conservatives’ chances of winning the most seats nationally. They romped in western Canada, winning almost every seat in Alberta and Saskatchewan, similar to the last few elections.
What Donald Trump did more than anything was unify the Canadian left and elevate the issue of who the prime minister would be. In parliamentary systems, it can be common for voters to choose parties over leaders. NDP and BQ voters know their party leaders will not be prime minister, but they vote for those parties anyway because they support their party platforms or want to register a protest vote against the major parties.
Fewer voters did so than normal this year. It wasn’t because of Carney’s charisma and affability. The retired central banker had never run for public office before, and Canadian commentators have praised him for doing the barest basics of campaigning, such as taking photos with voters and being comfortable in crowds.
Carney’s case to voters was that he was the guy to trust in tough times because he would stand up to Donald Trump. And that was just barely enough to get voters to overlook ten years of economic stagnation under Liberal governments and cast their ballots for Carney.
Poilievre deserved better. Despite Conservatives’ gaining far more seats than Liberals and recording their best popular vote share in a generation, he lost his seat by just 3,000 votes in a race with over 90 candidates on the ballot. His platform of law and order, free markets, tighter control of immigration, and pushing back on the left’s social excesses was the exact medicine that Canada needed. And voters were responding to it positively, with polls earlier this year predicting a Conservative majority.
Then, Donald Trump gave the Liberals a gift. They no longer had to worry about defending their abysmal record. They could run defending their country’s existence. Canadian nationalism is anti-American and left-wing. When Canadians rally around the flag, they rally around the Liberals, who designed the current Canadian flag and imposed it on the country in 1965 over right-wing opposition.
In the end, the ultimate responsibility for Canada’s direction lies with its own voters. They have chosen to do the same thing once again. That they let themselves get baited into it by Trump is no excuse and won’t lead to any better outcomes.