By Harry Storm
After an election entirely dominated by the spectre of Donald Trump and his annexationist threats, Carney’s victory was helped by people who would normally support the leftist New Democratic Party voting strategically.
Mark Carney’s slight victory in Monday’s election can be attributed to one factor: Donald Trump. Although it isn’t true that Trump’s wild threats about annexation and tariffs became the only issue in the election, it’s certainly true that the Conservative Party, under its leader Pierre Poilievre, was cruising to a sure win until Trump’s threats to use “economic force” to make Canada the “51st state” spooked enough Canadians to allow Carney to squeak through and become the next Canadian prime minister, albeit of a minority government.
In an article that was posted on HP in February, I wrote that Americans don’t take Canada seriously as a country and as a result, have no idea how serious Canadians are about their sovereignty and especially their opposition to becoming confused with, never mind becoming, Americans. Canadians are said to be quiet and polite (some would say boring) so their fierce underlying patriotism, especially vis-à-vis America, isn’t always evident on the surface. Trump’s threat to Canadian sovereignty scratched that surface and became the defining issue of the election.
Despite his victory, however, Carney will have to rely on other parties to pass legislation. Carney’s Liberals managed to win 165 seats to the Conservatives’ 147; the New Democratic Party took only 7 seats, losing their party status in the House of Commons, which requires a minimum of 12, while the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which only runs candidates in Quebec, garnered 23, and the Green Party just 1.
This means that Carney becomes a prime minister who will have to rely on the NDP and its paltry 7 seats to pass legislation, as the magic number for a majority in the Canadian House of Commons is 172. The NDP, despite its worst showing ever in federal elections, continues to hold the fate of the Liberal government in its hands.
The election, which had been predicted to be a Conservative walk as recently as 4 months ago, has to be a bitter disappointment for Poilievre and the Conservatives. Poilievre’s campaign strategy was already being criticized before election day: For example, his repeated and harsh attacks on the NDP and their leader, Jagmeet Singh, may have backfired by causing NDP voters to flock to the Liberals instead.
Poilievre may avoid being blamed for underperforming by his own party and by the Canadian punditariat because of a relatively strong showing: The Conservatives increased their seat count by 28 compared to 2021, whereas the Liberals were only able to add 5 seats, though of course the Liberals had more seats (160) than the Conservatives (119) in after the last election in 2021. (However, at the time of writing, Pierre Poilievre was losing in the suburban/rural Ottawa-area riding he’s held since 2004. Should he lose his seat, the pressure on him to resign will intensify big time.)
The harsh truth for Conservatives and their supporters is that Poilievre’s chances of becoming PM diminished dramatically once Canadians became convinced that Trump wasn’t fooling around, and that his threats weren’t simply bluster or trolling. Disaffected Liberal voters who had signaled their intention to vote for the Conservatives went back to the Liberals once Carney took over from Trudeau, because they felt he could better stand up to Trump.
Similarly, voters who in the past had cast their ballots for the NDP or the Greens opted this time to vote strategically ensure that Carney, not Poilievre, would go head-to-head with Trump, which led to the electoral collapse of the leftist NDP, whose leader, Jagmeet Singh, lost his own seat and has already resigned as party leader.
Simply put, too many Canadians were not inclined to vote for a Conservative whose policies they believed aligned too closely with Trump’s. Mark Carney’s resume as a financial bigwig who headed both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England also comforted Canadians, who might still have voted for Poilievre (or for the NDP or Greens), despite Trump, had former PM Justin Trudeau remained Liberal leader.
As for Trump, he clearly did not expect Canadians to react to his threats as they have. During the campaign, Trump said he believed Canadians welcomed his initiative. He also said he actually preferred to deal with Carney rather than Poilievre, though many speculated he said this after realizing his annexationist talk could cost the Conservative party the election, and that by saying he preferred Carney, the Canadian electorate would return to Poilievre. It didn’t work, and Trump has only himself to blame for Carney’s victory.
I’ve heard lots of talk that Carney will be Trudeau 2.0 because it’s still the same Liberal Party, but I don’t agree, if only because Carney is much more intelligent and has infinitely more economic and financial experience. Since taking office as PM after Trudeau’s resignation, he’s already shown himself to be a serious player and someone who shouldn’t be easily written off.
Unfortunately, Carney also appears to want to continue the Liberal embrace of identity politics, so the big losers in Monday’s election are those, like me, who hoped that government-supported wokism, DEI, and identity politics would be scaled back or eliminated entirely by a Conservative government. And that’s a loss that Canadians may come to rue in the months and years ahead.
