Oh, Canada!
- Michael Cunningham
- May 5
- 4 min read
It’s been a busy week for election nerds and generally a good week for fans of liberalism. From Ottawa to Canberra, voters selected their next governments with voters in England selecting local councilors. Generally speaking, the centre-left prevailed with Mark Carney what was considered impossible just two months ago and forming a minority government (more on that for American readers) and Anthoy Albanese leading the Australian Labour party to a landslide down under. Across the Atlantic, the news was not as good for the political left, with the right-wing Reform party largely gobbling up more former Conservative voters as the latter continued its descent into irrelevancy. Are there any common threads or lessons learned from these three elections? For the next few weeks, I’ll take a closer look at each to see if we can find any common threads or lessons learned for parties to use to find victory in the future.
Oh, Canada! Last week voters went to the polls to choose the 45th Parliament. This election was remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney has only been in office a few months, replacing an increasingly toxic Justin Trudeau who had served as the Canadian Prime Minister for the past decade. The centre-left Liberal Party of Canada replaced Trudeau with Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England. That alone was highly unusual, as Carney had never held elected office, and once he became Prime Minister, he did not represent any riding (which is “district” in Canadian). After only a week in office, Carney called an election to form a mandate for his ministry.
The timing could not have been worse for the rival, centre-right Conservative Party. The Conservatives had been leading in the polls since 2022, increasing their lead to 20 points when Trudeau announced his resignation in December 2024. A Conservative victory was all but assured in the next election. Then came not only the lack of a well-defined unpopular opponent with Trudeau’s resignation, but the addition of a well-defined, unpopular American President threatening not only Canada’s economy via tariffs, but its very existence as an independent nation by suggesting they should become the “51st state”. Compounding these issues for the Conservative Party was that its leader, Pierre Poilievre, was seen more as an ally of Trump and borrowed several Republican campaign strategies. In hindsight, this was an odd move in a country where Trump has net approval of minus 61 points. Adding to this was a Trump “Truth” post on the day of the election that could have been written by the Liberal Party comms staff with Trump pontificating on Canadian annexation - which fit perfectly into Carney’s “Canada Strong” campaign. In the most shocking news of the night, Poilievre lost the seat that he held for the past 20 years and will be forced to run in a by-election to remain an effective Leader of the Opposition.
In the end, the Liberals were able to win enough seats to form a minority government. For my fellow Americans, this means that they won the most seats in the House of Commons, however as a multi-party system, they did not win a majority of seats. This means they’ll need to find an additional party to partner with to pass legislation, as they are three-seats short of a majority. In Canada, their options are limited. Let’s take the safe bet that they will not form a coalition with the Conservatives. The next largest party is the Bloc Quebecois, a nationalist party that pushes for greater Quebecois sovereignty to the point of outright secession. Aside from their raison d’etre, they generally believe in social progressivism that would also have a home in the Liberal Party. Another option would be the New Democratic Party, or NDP. They also sit along the centre-left on many issues, but an issue for them is two fold: they lost 7 out of their 10 seats, including their leader so they might not be too eager to form a coalition, which often hurts the junior partner.
Trump dominated the Canadian Campaign. Carney used this to his advantage, by portraying him to be the best position to stand up to Trump’s hostility. He was helped so much, and so often by Trump thanks to tariffs and sabre-rattling that Carney should probably consider Trump’s remarks as campaign contributions. Pierre Poilievre’s “Canada First, For a Change” message would have been more effective if he was running against Trudeau. A “change” message resonates less when massive change hasn’t just occurred with your main opposition by installing a new Prime Minister. In the end, voters largely choose between two parties, with Conservatives performing better with younger voters and the densely populated Windsor-Toronto-Ottawa corridor who were attracted to the cost-of-living argument and a leftwing spread across Greens, Bloc, and NDP shedding votes to benefit the Liberals to protect what is seen by many as an existential threat from their south.
Next week we’ll dive into Australian politics and take a look at the Labour’s landslide victory.
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