Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday, we had an item on the elections that produced a new leader for Canada's Liberal Party and, as a consequence, a (soon-to-be) new PM in Mark Carney. While that piece was brilliant and incisive, as with everything we write, there are some (mostly trivial) limits to our vast—indeed, stunning—knowledge of world affairs. So, we asked for some thoughts from readers, and we got a number of good ones. Here is the first round of those (one or two of them get pretty weedy, but if you don't like weedy political analysis, what are you doing reading this site?):
L.H. in Vancouver, BC, Canada, writes: The upcoming Canadian election looked like a foregone conclusion a few months ago, but everything has been shaken up. It's anyone's race to win right now, at least between the two major parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. The other parties may yet get a chance to influence policy after the election.
For readers not familiar with the Canadian political parties, going roughly left to right, along the political spectrum:
Greens: About what you'd expect; they often win a few seats, and can split the vote enough in certain ridings (districts) to occasionally affect outcomes. But the federal wing has had many internal problems lately.
New Democratic Party (NDP): Left-wing party, socially and economically. In the case of a minority government (such as now), they can hold the balance of power and exert influence on policy. They have been a bit too focused on being doctrine-purists lately to suit many Canadians' tastes.
Liberals: Closest thing to moderates in Canada. Fairly conservative financially, more liberal socially. Generally the most business-friendly in terms of stability, which can peeve some of the left-wing voters. Often not anti-regulation enough to satisfy more conservative businesspeople.
Conservatives: An amalgamation of the old Progressive Conservative Party and the very conservative Reform/Alliance Party, the latter of which dominates party leadership and is significantly more socially conservative than the PC's were. Removing "Progressive" from the name was deliberate. They have a socially conservative wing that is trying to fly under the radar, though as with MAGA, they often accidentally say the quiet part out loud.
People's Party: Pretty conservative in most ways, can potentially act as a spoiler by bleeding off Conservative votes. But probably not a big factor this year.
Bloc Quebecois: A Quebec-only party that advocates for the sovereignty and rights of Quebec and French-speakers. They are a little harder to classify, but are not really right-wing, so don't generally align with the Conservatives. While they only get a small percentage of the national vote, they often get a large chunk of the Quebec vote and so win enough seats to have influence in Parliament.The current government is a minority government composed of the Liberals with the support of the NDP.
Regarding the polls you published in graphical form yesterday, you can see that some growth in Liberal support comes from the collapse of NDP support. The NDP is not doing a great job of communicating about the realities of dealing with Donald Trump, at least not yet. In addition, they have talked of bringing down the government (i.e., voting against the Liberals on a confidence vote and forcing an election). This is really rubbing a lot of even their most ardent supporters the wrong way, given the antics of the U.S. right now.
With Elon Musk, Trump and J.D. Vance vocally supporting Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre (or PP, as he's often called), PP has really found his credibility sinking with Canadians. He's been hewing to a MAGA-lite line for quite some time, but he clearly doesn't have Trump's instincts. Instead, he's been hammering at the unpopularity of the Liberals while proposing very little of his own, just throwing out rehashes of Republican campaign slogans. Circumstances have changed recently, of course, and he has not yet adapted sufficiently to the fact that being Trump-adjacent is now a liability.
Both Poilievre and his U.S. backers have toned things down a bit to try and make the connection less blatant. In my opinion, the best evidence of PP's approval by the current U.S. administration is that, unlike with other Canadian leaders, Trump has no silly nickname or insulting diminutive for PP, but refers to him respectfully by name.
It's difficult to overstate how the tariffs, "51st state" talk and mention of re-drawing the border have angered Canadians and made MAGA-lite proponents suspect.
That said, this will be a tight election. How much Carney will boost the Liberals in the polls is difficult to say.
In recent years, the Conservatives have never gotten even close to a majority of the vote, whereas the combined left-wing vote usually tops 60%. But the left-wing vote is often split, and when that happens, the Conservatives can get enough seats to win. This may happen again if the Liberals aren't very careful and thoughtful. There is still a lot of lingering resentment, whether fair or not, about COVID, inflation, housing, and other kitchen-table issues, and it's directed at them.
As (Z) noted, Carney is the anti-Trump, so he broadly appeals to many Canadians on that basis alone. That also brings the possibility that he and his team will make the same mistake the Democrats have, and they'll campaign on rational, sensible issues that only appeal to their current supporters. Those ideas may be too abstract to speak to the wavering and undecided voters on both the left and the right, and the Liberals badly need to peel off a number of those. This can be done, provided the Liberal campaign shows understanding of their concerns.
A lot of small-c conservative voters tend to be insular, and they will be hard to reach. And there are some left-wing voters who want to hear that their niche issues will be addressed, or else they'll vote NDP and split the vote to "send a message" to the Liberals, which would help the Conservatives.
In the end, the more Trump attacks, the more unified Canadians are, and at this point, this favors the Liberals. The more the Liberals tie PP to Trump/Musk/MAGA, the worse he and the Conservatives will do. For the Conservatives to succeed, PP has to disassociate himself from the Maple MAGA enough to be palatable, but without annoying his base, and also without looking indecisive or flip-floppy, as the fear is that he'll immediately cave to Trump's demands.
M.J. in Ottawa, ON, Canada, writes: I'm writing to comment on your item about Canadian politics and Mark Carney's election as PM-designate. I've been a reader of the site for close to two decades, but only writing for the first time.
I think you largely captured the dynamics of the situation here, but missed the mark on one crucial point. You refer to Justin Trudeau as radioactive and that "[c]learly, Liberal voters want no piece of Trudeau." I don't think Liberal voters dislike Trudeau. It is true that he was forced out as Liberal leader, but this was due to his poll numbers, not a loss of support by Liberal members, as far as I can tell. When the Liberal Party collectively determined that they did not believe he could win the next election, it led to his eventual resignation. However, had his poll numbers not been so low, I suspect that he would have survived to run in this year's election, as he repeatedly stated that he wanted to do (Trudeau believed that he was the best chance for the Liberals of beating the Conservative Party). Although both Carney and former Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland repudiated certain of Trudeau's policies, I suspect they needed to do so to establish that they are not just continuing the Trudeau government (case in point: Yesterday, Carney hired Marco Mendicino, a Liberal MP and former Cabinet Minister as Chief of Staff, and the Conservatives immediately attempted to use that to tie Carney to Trudeau).
The reception received by Trudau on Sunday suggests that he was still well-liked by the Liberal Party. He pulled the Liberals from third place and the brink of electoral annihilation. My friends who lean Liberal generally think that he did a good job (though most would probably agree that it was time for him to go).
All this to say: Trudeau is not toxic within the Liberal party, but the Liberals understand that his support among the general population is low (notwithstanding recent responses to his handling of the recent tariff chaos). Freeland lost primarily because she was not seen as being as strong a candidate to win the next election (where the ballot question will be dealing with Trump), not because of her connection to Trudeau. Once head-to-head polling showed Carney with the best chance in a hypothetical upcoming election, the contest was effectively over. That hypothetical upcoming election will now be called very soon.
M.S. in Greenfield, MA, writes: (I'm a Canadian who's lived in Massachusetts since 1997 and has had dual citizenship since the week before Trump got in the first time. So, half a Canadian now? Can I still say "elbows up" or have I gone the way of Gretzky now in their eyes?)
The striking thing to me about the graph you showed of the increasing Liberal support is how much of it is coming from the NDP, who fall to the left of the Liberals. This with Carney being an ex-banker, ex-Goldman Sachs no less, and with him not liking capital gains taxes. It emphasizes the obvious to me again, that people are putting aside their usual concerns to focus on the trade war.
Another facet I'd like to know more about is how French Canadians view Carney. I listen to Moncton, New Brunswick's Radio Canada, but my French is still too poor to make out fully the sentiment. According to my Mom in Nova Scotia, Carney's French isn't much better than mine (i.e., it doesn't go that much beyond saying joie de vivre and the like). Traditionally, to be prime minister, you had to know both languages. It's part of what, I think, makes the Canadian system superior, that the leaders have at least that hurdle to jump.
J.R. in Ottawa, ON Canada, writes: The Canadian election is going to be interesting and completely different from what was expected even two months ago. Until Justin Trudeau resigned on January 6, a landslide victory for the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre seemed all but assured. But, as you pointed out, the Trump ascendancy has changed everything. This shift was already clear in Ontario, where the Conservative Party there won big on a primarily anti-Trump platform in spite of a number of serious other political issues in the province.
The fact that the federal Conservative Party has been leading the Liberal Party in the polls for over a year and a half was in large part due to the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau, who embodied the arrogance of the Liberal Party in the last couple of years while also adding his own political missteps to this feeling of arrogance.
With the Liberal Party choosing Mark Carney as its new leader and new prime minister, the situation has changed to an extent that the moribund Liberal Party is now in contention for winning the next federal election, which will likely be called very quickly, in part to channel the immense Canadian anger with the Trump regime while it is continuing on its disastrous path of tariffs and the ludicrous notion of Canada as a 51st state.
The difference between Carney and Poilievre could not be more stark, with the latter being a career politician with no job experience outside the government and being known as the attack dog for Stephen Harper, Canada's Conservative prime minister between 2006 and 2015. On the other hand, Mark Carney has vast experience in the economic matters, including governor of both the bank of Canada and the United Kingdom, plus jobs with the United Nations and in private practice; he has no political experience, although he was asked by Harper to serve as his minister of finance, which he refused.
The campaigns will be predictable. Poilievre will, as he has already done, try on one hand to associate Carney with the Liberal government and its policies since 2015, which were in effect a mixed bag in terms of popularity (he had already called Carney "Carbon Carney" to link him with the unpopular consumer carbon tax to deal with the environmental crisis Canada is facing); on the other hand, he and his cronies have begun to do diminish Carney's accomplishments as the governor of the Bank of Canada.
Carney will do his utmost to characterize Poilievre as mini-Trump and will point to statements made by Poliviere regarding cutting foreign aid, cutting the civil services and abolishing the CBC. It is also likely that he will remind voters of the fact that Poilievre supported the infamous truckers' convoy, which paralyzed Ottawa for three weeks in the winter of 2022 in order to protest the COVID restrictions in Canada. I think that his campaign messages of unity against the Trump regime, combined with his experience in economic matters, will resonate better with Canadians than Poilievre's sloganism ("Axe the Tax") and reliance on divisions within Canada, especially if Carney will also come up with a solid and substantive election agenda, which has been lacking on the part of the Conservative Party so far and which has had difficulty pivoting from a purely anti-Trudeau message.
It would seem that a miracle in Ottawa might be in the making, in that the Liberal Party might actual get within reach of a majority in the House of Commons, or at a minimum, might have enough seats to form a minority government with two other parties, which will have far fewer seats but could hold the balance of power, namely the socialist NDP and/or the Bloc Quebecois. The Conservative Party is in big trouble, especially since Poilievre has been lukewarm against Trump tariffs and only recently came out against the 51st state rhetoric.
We doubt that readers are surprised to learn that Trump likes PP.
Anyhow, thanks to the readers who wrote in, eh! We'll have some more on Friday, most likely. If not, then next week. (Z)