The name of this blog is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to National Affairs, and as Canada is a nation (and not the 51st state, but if it was a state, even more the reason to include it in this blog), covering the Canadian election seems pretty pertinent, especially since our President's been meddling in it.
As I’m writing this, polls have now closed across Atlantic Canada. It’s April 28, 2025 at 6 p.m. and I’m going to predict a Canadian victory for the Liberal Party. The Liberals are up 14 seats to 6 Conservative seats, which is not great, but it’s way better than they were doing just four months ago, given that the third parties have collapsed into a base of Liberal support.
Update: Mark Carney will serve a full term as Prime Minister leading a minority Liberal Government. The Conservative Party turned out better than it ever had (since 1988) but they lost the bid for Prime Minister, and the conservative candidate actually lost their own MP (Member of Parliament) seat.
How the election process in Canada works is that each riding (essentially a district) votes red or blue (or any other color, as aforementioned, they have a multitude of smaller third parties), and the party that has the most representatives installs the Prime Minister.
This means that Prime Minister Mark Carney will continue to lead Canada through its tumultuous economy in an election upset that will go down in history with as much notoriety as the 2017 Super Bowl.
Now, I don't really know anything about football, but that’s one of Tom Brady’s most legendary games, with the Patriots overcoming a 3-28 deficit, and it’s also the largest comeback in Super Bowl history.
The Falcons were up 25 points, the same number of points that Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Opposition and the Conservative nominee, was leading by.
But a lot changes in a few months. Famously unpopular former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a nine-year term was marked with an increase in housing costs, a suffering economy, and frankly, Canadians had begun to get tired of him.
So in comes Mark Carney flying in to save the day.
Carney has a pretty solid record. He was the governor of the Bank of Canada, then, the governor of the Bank of England (the first-ever non-British person to be appointed to the role). It’s important to note that neither of these positions are elected by the people, and thus, he is the first serving prime minister to have never before been elected. Carney also graduated from both Harvard University and Oxford University, and he worked 13 years at Goldman Sachs. So in this election, he was pitching his strong economic record in response to Trump tariff madness, and also highlighting that he could stand up to Trump in the first place.
But Carney is no Tom Brady. So what happened?
Well, Trump sold out the entire Conservative Party of Canada to make a few “51st state” jokes.
CPC leader Poilievre had been holding a strong lead throughout most of 2024. He catapulted to popularity post-COVID by leveraging media sound bites, where he’s arguably the quickest thinker and sharpest tongue Trudeau had ever faced (and Trudeau had run and won quite a few times, leaving waste to the Conservative Party candidate each time). That’s how I discovered him, and that's also probably why you will detect some bias when I'm writing this, so please take this blog with a grain of salt as I'm not writing this from a completely unbiased perspective. Anyway, you can see what I mean here when I talk about his strong speaking ability:
Poilievre calls out Trudeau for being a hypocritePoilievre sparring with Trudeau on Trump tariffsPeople like to call Poilievre a mini-Trump, but I honestly disagree. I will make the point that Poilievre is a conservative, but he is also in support of abortion (without restrictions) and same-sex marriage, which I think highlights a culture of tolerance, acceptance, and progressiveness even from the right side of the aisle which I think is a good thing, no matter where the party lines are drawn.
Either way, Poilievre had built a really strong message around two things. The first is no more Trudeau: he’s been in office for nine years and people were overall tired of him, plus housing and food had gotten more expensive and Poilievre really railed at the economic populism aspect, hard. He attacked Justin Trudeau for breaking the Canadian Promise (I suppose that’s their version of the American Dream).
“Politicians break promises all the time. But you know what was bad about this promise? This promise didn't belong to this Prime Minister. It wasn't his promise to break. It belonged to all of us and our purpose is to bring home that promise.”
He also campaigned on “axe the tax”, a slogan representing the repeal of the carbon tax, a historically unpopular policy in the name of climate change that essentially taxed people for trying to use the heaters in their own homes, and remember, this is negative freezing Canada.
These were all incredibly popular, and he turned into a figure of hope for many Canadians. In fact, just months ago, it seemed the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) with Leader of the Opposition Pierre Poilievre at its helm would cruise to an easy victory.
But then Trudeau resigned. Poilievre lost his main talking point. He tried to talk about Trudeau during the debate, and Carney shut him down with a swift “Trudeau isn’t here tonight”, making Poilievre look pretty foolish. Plus, Carney, a conservative essentially masquerading as a Liberal in order to get the top job (previous Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was the one that appointed him to solve economic problems in Canada back in 2008), shut down the carbon tax, so now, Carney solved the other problem that Poilievre was complaining about.
And with Trump’s language, Poilievre started looking a lot like Trump. National patriotism skyrocketed in Canada like never before. Hence why my characterization of Mark Carney as Tom Brady might not be too far off… Patriots, anybody? Poilievre pointing out the real, glaring problems of Canada no longer looked so patriotic and he lost support in the eyes of his viewers. Plus, his general inability to speak up well against Trump as well as he was speaking before made him look weak and highlighted potential to be subverted by Trump.
He’s been in a very precarious scenario: much of the media that has been giving him attention flowed from American conservative media, and many of his hardcore Conservative fans also aligned with Trump, so pushing back against Trump too much could alienate his base. However, at the same time, not pushing back against Trump made the centrist/left-leaning and overall mostly newly patriotic base push back against him.
But Poilievre actually didn’t “go down” that much. If you look at the poll, it’s the Liberals that had a sharp increase. To this point, I’m not entirely sure why. But I do know that in times of war or national uncertainty, the nation doubles down on the existing government, which is why, as a generally accurate but not absolute rule of thumb, war is good for the party in power. Increased patriotism as a result of conflict from a third party connects to the current leader and floats them upwards. I’m sure you can find examples of this happening in America and around the world. You can see this with both of the Bush’s.
This is also an opportunity to plug course content from the first semester of AP Government, where we learned about political parties. When I've been writing about Canada, I've been highlighting the strong divide between the Liberals and Conservatives, but what I'm leaving out of the larger picture (partially because they've taken themselves out of the picture) is the New Democratic Party, a more progressive left-leaning party that was formerly the second-largest party and formed the Official Opposition in the 41st Canadian Parliament, highlighting that "third parties" can succeed in Canada. On the contrary, minor and “third” parties in America generally fail. There are a few reasons for this, the first of which being the winner-take-all election system, where, for example, Teddy Roosevelt and his own third party split split the vote and caused both his own 3rd party and his former affiliation which had some policy overlap to lose. Another time, Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote but got no electoral votes, highlighting how the election system is not conducive to third parties as a whole. Major parties also absorb third-party issues, for example, the Free Soil Party policy, etc. in slavery was adopted by major parties.
This is not as much the case in Canada, where the Liberals can present themselves as a more moderate left-leaning party, win the election, and if they are a minority party, then form a coalition in Parliament with the NDP, promising to achieve some of their objectives. (There's also the Bloc Québécois, but they only run candidates in Quebec.) However, due to this election's historic nature, a lot of the NDP votes were siphoned to the Liberals, simply due to the mantra that "a vote for NDP is a vote for the Conservatives". The NDP dropped to historic lows, and Jagmeet Singh (the leader of the NDP) lost his own seat. This highlights sort of the winner-take-all election system even though Canada has no electoral college, where the NDP did not want to risk splitting the vote and handing the win over to the Conservatives, since aligning themselves with the Liberals is more advantageous for the party platform. As aforementioned, Carney is seen as more patriotic and better in the fight against Trump as a Harvard-educated economist and experienced manager through the 2008 recession, so his patriotism and conviction in Canada brought people supporting multiple parties (even Bloc Québécois voters threw their name in the hat for Canada in spite of his poor connection to Quebec and even poorer French) together, highlighting the nature of patriotism behind the incumbent party in times of need.
And so, through Carney’s patriotism, he clutches the Liberal comeback by continuously bashing Trump because he has the freedom to do so. He talks about rebuilding Canadian industry in a positive image, highlighting his economic experience. Canadians see him as caring more about Canada, and whether that be real or not, his love and pride for the country have been at the center of his messaging.
So this is what it’s come down to. An economic populist focused on change, championing freedom and quality life for Canadians, falling flat in the final stretch, just like the five conservative leaders that came before him versus a never-before-elected economist. The economist has shown that he cares deeply about Canada and knows how to protect its sovereignty, in the face of Trump and a Trump-esque figure in the shape of Poilievre. A uniquely run campaign with excellent results, up 25 points in the third quarter, all coming crashing down in the final quarter at the feet of Prime Minister Mark Carney.
The Patriots win the Canadian election.
