Trump Broke Canada's Conservatives

As New Election Looms, The Once Dead Liberal Party Rises Like Yeast

It’s election time in Canada.

Less than four years after Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau limped to a third victory, Canadians will go to the polls on April 28 to elect a new government, and this campaign has already been a shocker.

Three months ago, the ruling Liberal Party looked utterly dead. After nearly a decade in power under the increasingly unpopular Trudeau, the Liberals barely held second place in polls, well behind the opposition Conservatives, also known as the Tories. The Conservatives looked like they would sweep to their most significant majority in history under their leader Pierre Polievere, the “hot nerd” 45-year-old from Alberta who was co-opting the post-pandemic right-wing populist movement that had bubbled up globally and was finally crashing onto Canadian shores.

Then, like a bad case of herpes that the world contracted one regrettable night eight years ago, Donald Trump returned to Washington, D.C.

Engaging in nonsensical attempts to humiliate Trudeau and America’s northern neighbor with threats of massive tariffs and demands for Canada to submit to becoming an American state¹, Trump single-handedly caused a seismic shift in Canadian politics. Seemingly out of nowhere, Conservatives, who had been warming up to Trumpism in the later Trudeau years due to backlash to the Liberals’ COVID-19 Pandemic policies, inflation, immigration, and “wokeism,” saw their fortunes collapse almost overnight. Trump’s favorability rating in Canada was recently recorded at about 12 percent. Even in Canada’s conservative stronghold of Alberta, often described as the Canadian version of Texas, Trump’s favorable ratings are below 20 percent. Pollivere and his party’s attempts to latch on to Trump’s movement, only to have Trump put Canada in his crosshairs, appears to have been a massive miscalculation. Even some of Canada’s most prominent Conservative politicians, like former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, have not openly supported Pollivere and/or are combative with Trump. Ford even threatened to cut off electricity to the United States over tariffs.

Things got even worse for the Conservatives when Trudeau resigned after nine and a half years as prime minister, and the Liberals chose a new leader—former Bank of Canada and Bank of England head Mark Carney, an economist and technocrat, who like Pollivere is originally from Alberta. Carney has never held elected office². With its unpopular leader out of the way, Canadian voters, looking for someone to stand up to Trump and not collaborate with him like Pollivere had promised his base he’d do, took a fresh look at Carney. Unlike his main rival for the Liberal Party leadership, former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Carney has no direct connection to the Trudeau government. He spent most of the Trudeau premiership working in England and the private sector in Toronto, only advising the former prime minister informally during the pandemic. Carney also immediately shifted some of the Liberal Party’s positions on damaging issues, such as immigration, to the right. He also ended Canada’s unpopular carbon tax.

Canada's new Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, has seen his party erase a 25-point deficit against Conservative leader Pierre Pollivere, right, likely a result of US President Donald Trump's antagonization of Canada since taking office in January.

Several close ridings that Conservatives won in 2021 and the party expected to hold easily are already being triaged, including Central Newfoundland, a seat Tories won in an upset, South Shore—St. Margarets in Nova Scotia, Winnipeg West in Manitoba, and Tory seats in Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta. The closest riding in 2021, Châteauguay—Les Jardins-de-Napierville³, in the Montreal exurbs, which the Liberals won by only 12 votes, is likely to stay in Liberal hands, as is the adjacent Brome—Missisquoi riding. The second closest riding, Davenport, in Toronto, is now considered safe for Liberals. The Liberal-held seat in Yukon, where the party was polling third in late January, will likely stay theirs. These seats were supposed to be certain losses for the Liberals just a few months ago.

The apparent collapse of the New Democratic Party is also helping liberals. The left-wing party was polling at just under 20 percent all year and nearly overtaking the Liberals for official opposition party status in late January. Now, the NDP is polling at around 11 percent, and only three of its seats – London—Fanshawe and Hamilton Centre in Ontario and Vancouver East in British Columbia – are likely to retain their NDP members. Even the party’s embattled leader, Jagmeet Singh, appears to have little chance to keep his seat in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.

It’s already tricky for Conservatives to win in Canada. Unlike other Western democracies post-World War II, Canada’s default political position has been on the political left. Conservatives have only governed the country for 20 of the last 60 years, and several of Canada’s most prominent leaders in the 20th Century – including William Lyon Mackenzie King, Louis St-Laurent, Lester Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father – were Liberals. Canada’s only Conservative eras were in the 1980s under Brian Mulroney, coinciding with the late-Cold War global conservative consensus led by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and America’s Ronald Reagan, and under Stephen Harper from 2005 to 2015 when the Liberal Party was at its nadir nationally. In the 1990s, the Conservative Party was completely wiped out, losing opposition status to the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec-only party that supported its independence. Conservatives were not resurrected as a serious party until the 21st Century. That the Tories under Pollivere appeared to be poised for a massive victory, unprecedented in Canada since its independence, seemed like a tremendous realignment in Canadian politics.

Then came Trump.

In his first term, Trump’s global unpopularity stunted the right-wing trend of Western democracies triggered in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the refugee crisis in Europe during and after the Arab Spring. However, Trump’s defeat in 2020, the fallout from the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the continuing refugee crisis in Europe and North America triggered another right-wing shift globally.

With the collapse of Canada’s Conservatives, coming on the heels of the underperformance of Germany’s far-right AFD party last month and right-wing pro-Trump Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party falling behind the Hungarian Socialists in recent polling, we may be seeing that Trump effect building again, starting next month in Ottawa.

1. Trump and members of his inner circle would refer to Trudeau as Governor Trudeau, the title of the chief executive of American states, a childish way of suggesting Canada was a state. He has not done the same to Carney since he took office.

2. To serve as prime minister in the new government, Carney must run for and win a seat in the House of Commons, his first political campaign. He is slated to run in the Nepean constituency outside of Ottawa. In this safe Liberal seat, Liberal MP Chandra Arya, who ran an aborted race for prime minister, is being pushed out due to long-standing controversies.

3. Fun Sports Fact: This riding is the childhood home of MMA fighter Georges St-Pierre. It and the next-door Brome—Missisquoi are also located along the American border with New York, where the tariff issue will likely be significant.