Are We Getting Canada Wrong Again?
The Liberals' Mark Carney didn't win because of Donald Trump. He won because Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives lost, which is exactly what Trump wanted.
Special American edition!
Well, almost anyway. If there’s one thing Canadians of all political inclinations agree on it’s that what’s happened up here these past few weeks has been really, really strange, and the federal election result was very odd. You can’t blame Americans for being just as confused. So this Sunday’s Real Story edition is mainly for American subscribers.
Be skeptical about the received wisdom. Be very skeptical.
The Washington Post went with “Trump helped elect a liberal leader in Canada.” Vox went with “How Trump lost Canada.” Rolling Stone magazine: “Trump Inserts Himself Into Canada’s Election and Liberals Can’t Stop Saying Merci.”
CNN went with three Canadian stereotypes: A they-them woman with weird hair, a hoser at a hockey rink and an ageing “maple-syrup farmer,” all three voting Liberal because of Trump.
After the votes were counted, MSNBC declared: “Canada’s Liberal Party wins election fueled by Trump’s threats.” Overseas, there was a lot of that too. Al Jazeera: “Canada’s Carney should thank Trump for his victory.” In Britain, The Spectator declared: “Mark Carney owes his victory to Trump.” Britain’s iPaper: “Mark Carney owes his win entirely to Donald Trump.”
There was a good bit of that sort of thing in Canada’s mainline pro-Liberal news media as well. The Toronto Star: “On election day, Canada proved it was not the U.S. This is why Poilievre lost.” Really? Is that why?
Is any of this actually true?
Put another way, is it possible that great swathes of official opinion in the mass media is getting the story wrong? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time one of those biggest-story-of-the-year events ended up being nothing like what it said on the tin.
My own tentative conclusion appeared in the National Post a couple of days ago. Long story short: If Carney “owes” anyone for his narrow win and the Liberals’ firm grasp on a minority position in the House of Commons for the third election in a row, he owes Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party. The NDP had been propping up the Liberals in the House for the past six years, and just enough of the NDP vote fled to the Liberals this time around to ensure a continuation of the status quo.
Canada is definitely not the United States. Mind you, you’d never have known it by the Liberal government’s behaviour over the past few years. It had got to the point that Prime Minister’s Office communiqués were sometimes indistinguishable from the Instagram accounts of American Ivy League student social justice committees.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal got it right three years ago under the headline Justin Trudeau Runs For Congress: “One of the oddities of Canadian politics is that its Liberal party politicians so often sound like they’re running for office in the U.S.” There’s one thing that makes an obscene kind of sense in Trump’s tauntings and provocations in the early innings of his on-again, off-again tariff war on Canada. It was his insistence on referring to our prime minister as “Governor Trudeau.”
There are definitely several important grains of truth to what is becoming embedded as a kind of folk wisdom among blue-chip analysts and opinion makers, that Trump incited a patriotic fervour among Canadians so effectively as to make an electoral miracle happen.
I’d prefer to believe this was true, myself. Even so, it’s both too easy and too convenient to overlook the fact that by last December, when the Liberal Party establishment began its hurried and elaborately ritualized succession of power from Trudeau to Carney, a deep well of suppressed and pent-up patriotism was full to bursting.
The Trudeau government had spent nine years devoted to faddish American-style racial reckonings and national shaming and constant denigration of Canada’s patrimony as the relic of an Islamophobic and systemically racist colonial settler state.
It was never going to take much to light the fuse. When President Trump decided to blow up the rules-based world order that had guaranteed Canada’s prosperity for 75 years and to eviscerate North America’s deeply integrated economy to what the White House brains trust reckoned would be America’s advantage, well, holy cow, game on.
I was as enraged as any Canadian about the unhinged American president’s jingoistic threats to apply economic presssure to force an annexation of Canada as America’s “51st state,” and as disgusted as any civilized person about Trump’s episodic avalanches of vulgarity and lies about my country. I was delighted with the sturdy Canadian response to these Yankee provocations, and I said so. But enough about me.
What were Canadians most concerned about on voting day?
The Trump factor was indeed a big deal in the election. That would have been the case even if Carney had not so heavily leaned into Trump’s outbursts and bimbo tariff eruptions as an existential threat to Canadian sovereignty. Even if Carney did resort to histrionics and melodrama and exxageration - and he did - Canadians were clearly up for the fight.
The Poilievre campaign has been rightly criticized for failing to get out in front of it all, but that’s almost beside the point. The Carney campaign brazenly ripped off plank after plank of Poilievre’s platform. It was as though the Liberal Party was running against its own record, to the point of plagiarizing Conservative policy and even copying Conservative speeches.
The Liberal war room successfully exploited Canadians’ national anxieties in a cynically opportunistic fashion. But hey, that’s politics, so fair play to the Liberals, but it’s also beside the point.
Here’s the point:
Well before the Trump White House began to trot out Marco Rubio to downplay and reinterpret Trump’s avaricious designs on Canada, and even as far back as February and March when Trump’s provocations were flying particularly thick and fast, the top issue for Canadian voters was the wretched state of the Canadian economy. And it stayed that way, especially for younger, working-class Canadians, right up to election day.
Here’s an Abacus Data poll on voting intentions from late March. Dealing with Donald Trump was scored as the top issue by only 50 percent of the “boomer” generation, and that was the highest anxiety across age groups. Among everyone else, the Trump factor wasn’t close. The cost of living and the housing affordability crisis scored as much higher issues of concern.
Similarly, a Leger poll around the same time found the Conservatives leading with everyone except the over-55 crowd.
A week before Canadians went to the polls, a deep dive by the United Kingdom pollster Focaldata for Politico found that while three-quarters of Canadian respondents said they had come to distrust the United States, 60 per cent of Canadians said “inflation and the cost of living” was their top concern. Only 39 per cent rated Canada-U.S. relations as their big worry.
A post-election poll of the youth vote undertaken by Abacus Data and CIVIX, crunched in collaboration with Elections Canada, presents what is probably the most dramatic illustration of the vast gulf between “conservative” America and Canadian conservatives.
If it were only students voting in the polls that closed last Monday, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives would have won hands down.
And now for a whole lot of reality-based information I’m sure our American comrades in the anti-Trump resistance will find unsettling. . .