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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks in the small hours of April 29, 2025, in Ottawa after his Liberal Party won the general election the previous day.
Mark Carney leads Canada’s Liberals to victory
The Liberals have won the battle to lead Canada. On Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s party completed a stunning turnaround, with projections showing it secured 168 of 343 parliamentary seats.
Just months ago, with Justin Trudeau at the helm, the Liberals — who have been in power for a decade — were underwater in the polls, down as far as 25 points compared to the Conservatives. But Carney, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, and New Democrat Jagmeet Singh all had a mutual opponent in Donald Trump, and a surge in Canadian nationalism helped flip the momentum for the Liberals. The US president’s trade war and threats of using “economic force” to push Canada into becoming the “51st state” fueled much of the “Canada Strong” and “Restore the Promise of Canada” campaign promises of the Liberals and Conservatives, respectively.
A closer race than expected. The Liberals and Conservatives both gained seats compared to the last race in 2021. Led by Poilievre – who notably lost his seat in Ottawa – the Conservatives did better than many predicted, winning roughly 42% of the vote share and at least 144 seats. But the New Democratic Party and Bloc Québécois (which only runs candidates in Quebec) saw their parties lose seats. The NDP secured only seven ridings, down from 25, while the BQ won 23 ridings compared to 32 the last time. Despite losing in his riding, Poilievre has said he will stay on as opposition leader, while Singh has resigned as party leader in the wake of Monday’s crushing results for the NDP.
With the Liberals coming up just shy of the 172 ridings needed for a majority government, they can forge a coalition with the NDP, Bloc Québécois, or the Green Party, or they can go it alone and simply seek votes from other parties on an as-needed basis, issue by issue. Historically, the NDP has collaborated with the Liberals in confidence-and-supply agreements, while the BQ has focused on one-off support for specific issues.
In his victory speech, Carney focused on unity. “Let’s put an end to the division and anger of the past. We are all Canadian and my government will work for and with everyone,” he said.
He also pointed to the job ahead: tackling US-Canada tensions. “When I sit down with President Trump,” Carney said, “it will be to discuss the future economy and security relationship between two sovereign nations.”
“It will be our full knowledge that we have many, many other options to build prosperity for all Canadians.”
Canadians head to the polls for federal election.
Race tightens as Canadians head to the polls. Will Liberals pull off the ultimate comeback?
It’s Election Day in Canada on Monday, and many are wondering whether newly installed Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney will complete a shocking comeback for the party of former PM Justin Trudeau.
The Liberals were skating deep in their own zone just a few months ago — down a whopping 25 points in the polls as recently as January — but Trudeau’s resignation and Donald Trump’s trade war and aggressive rhetoric sparked a surge in Canadian nationalism and flipped the momentum. Since the end of February, Carney’s Liberals have been on a power play, polling ahead of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party — at one point stretching the lead to 15 points.
Over the long Easter weekend, Canadians broke advance voting records as 7.3 million turned up at the polls — a 25% jump from the 2021 election — and that early vote, according to David Coletto of Abacus Data, likely gave the Liberals a critical first-period lead.
While the Liberals hope to score a majority — a clear mandate to effect change and wrangle Donald Trump — the match isn’t over yet. The gap between the two teams, er, parties, has narrowed in recent weeks, with the Liberals polling slightly ahead at 42.9%, and the Conservatives at 39.3%. The ground game will be key: With the Liberals enjoying a more efficient distribution of support in key cities and regions – particularly Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Atlantic Canada - the Conservatives need all their players on the ice if they hope to clinch a win.
Final-day campaigning was impacted by a deadly car-ramming attack in Vancouver late Saturday that killed 11 people. On Sunday, Carney, Poilievre, and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh expressed their condolences and outrage, and they rescheduled final events ahead of the polls opening on Monday.
This Graphic Truth lays bare how a party in political freefall has roared back to life.
The Graphic Truth: Tracking the Liberal comeback
Despite the two parties narrowing by a point in the polls since they released their platforms this past week, looking at the arc of the race overall, it appears that the Conservatives peaked too early and the Liberals have made an impressive resurgence.
When Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned — accusing the Liberal leadership of being unprepared to face the growing threat of Donald Trump — it sent shockwaves through the party and delivered a major blow to Justin Trudeau’s leadership. The Liberals were already tanking in the polls, and many saw no way back.
But since Trudeau stepped down, the party has been on a sharp upswing. Trump’s renewed threats against Canada have sparked a surge in Canadian nationalism — a momentum the Liberals have tapped into. It’s too soon to call the results, but as the election comes to a close, this Graphic Truth lays bare how a party in political freefall has roared back to life.
Canada’s political parties are united in offering plans to hit back against Donald Trump
Albertan Keith Gardner has been a member of the New Democratic Party his entire adult life. He’s the provincial riding association president for Lethbridge West, and he has worked on previous federal campaigns for the NDP. But in this year’s federal election, which takes place Monday, April 28, he’s voting for Mark Carney and the Liberal Party — and the reason is Donald Trump.
“There’s a kind of existential moment going on,” Gardner says. “I think the Trump piece elevates the stakes of the election.”
The election has been dominated by concerns like Gardner’s. Trump has shaped voter intentions, party strategies, and policy platforms. The two parties most likely to win, the Liberals and Conservatives, broadly agree on what needs to be done. Each supports reciprocal tariffs, reducing internal trade barriers, using government procurement to buy Canadian, and building infrastructure. They are also promising support for workers affected by Trump’s tariffs and Canadian counter-tariffs. While the parties’ methods differ — to varying degrees — the message is clear: Canada must protect its economy from its largest trading partner.
Canada looks inward — and plans to build
The Liberal Party’s platform mentions Trump eight times. Carney argues that Trump’s economic program is restructuring the global trade system, a move that threatens to hit Canada hard since the US-Canada trade relationship is worth roughly $1 trillion a year.
The Liberals are promising to reduce internal trade barriers, lowering costs by “up to 15%,” and build an internal trade corridor so goods, services, and workers can move freely and easily. To do so, they’ll undertake “nation-building projects,” including ports, airports, highways, and high-speed rail in Ontario and Quebec. They’ll also “build out” Canada’s east-west electricity grid.
Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party mention Trump six times in their platform. Their plan aims to “rebuild [Canada’s] economy and open new markets so we can reduce our reliance on the US and stand up to Trump from a position of strength.” The crux of the platform rests on fast-tracking approvals for infrastructure, including rail, roads, and power transmission lines — projects they say Canada can’t build now because of regulations.
The Conservatives are also all-in on pipelines, vowing to repeal the Trudeau-era Bill C-69, which requires impact assessment reviews for major projects. The Tories call it the “No More Development” law, claiming it “makes it impossible to build the mines, pipelines, and other major energy infrastructure Canada needs.” Carney supports the law. In contrast to the Liberals, the Conservatives are pledging to eliminate the emissions cap on oil and gas production and double oil production in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Looking outward … a bit
Foreign trade is getting less attention than internal trade, but the front-runners have some plans for boosting external commerce. The Conservatives will pursue a free trade and mobility agreement, CANZUK, with the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. They would also push to export “cleaner” Canadian resources under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which allows countries to transfer carbon credits across borders.
While the Conservatives look to CANZUK, the Liberals are talking about new deals with MERCOSUR in South America and ASEAN in Asia. The Liberals would launch a CA$25 billion export credit facility to help foreign buyers finance Canadian goods. They would also fund efforts to make better use of existing trade, including Canada’s free trade deal with Europe and its deal with trans-Pacific states. The latter captures Australia and New Zealand but is a more limited deal than what the Conservatives are promising.
Weathering the Trump storm
After Trump leveled tariffs on Canadian goods, Canada hit back with reciprocal tariffs. The Liberals promise that “every dollar” from those duties will be used to protect workers and businesses. They’re speeding up and easing access to employment insurance – which, as the governing party, they started to do pre-election. They’re also looking to launch a CA$2 billion fund for the country’s auto sector for worker upskilling, shoring up the domestic supply chain, and protecting industry jobs from layoffs. Their plan includes an “All-in-Canada network” for making car parts, reducing the frequency with which components must cross the border.
The Conservatives will maintain “existing government supports” for the auto industry while removing sales tax on vehicles made in Canada for as long as the Trump tariffs are in effect. They’re promising a “Keep Canadians Working Fund” that uses reciprocal tariff money to support workers affected by the duties. The party says it will also “drastically” reduce the number of temporary foreign workers the country admits and ensure Canadian workers get a first crack at jobs, which could strengthen domestic wages for citizens and permanent residents.
Can the parties get it done, and will it be enough?
It’s easy to make promises during an election. It’s harder to deliver on them. Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's global macro-geopolitics practice, says that some promises are easier to deliver on than others.
“I think internal trade is a low-hanging fruit if you can get the provinces aligned, which it seems like they are,” he says. “There is no question that non-tariff barriers within Canada are an impediment to domestic trade.”
But even if the government does deliver on that, the shadow of the US will continue to loom large.
“The problem is that in absolute terms, internal trade is minute compared to the value gained from trade with the United States,” Thompson says. “So, a hit to the Canadian economy because of tariffs could only very partially be recouped by domestic efficiencies in terms of trade.”
He says recouping losses by boosting external trade with non-US countries is easier said than done. Canada has other trade agreements, but Canadian businesses are still attracted to the US market, which is large, rich, next door, and culturally familiar.
“Until that changes, it’s going to be hard for Canada to diversify its trade by governmental efforts.” Thompson’s waiting to see if industry follows the government’s lead. “Until then, it’s just talk.”
For all that talk, whichever party wins next week will be expected to deliver. Gardner hopes that will be the Liberals, kept in check by the NDP. Looking south, he says, “One of the things I think we can do is we can have a federal government that clearly stands up, that preserves the things about Canadian society that we have achieved together, protects our notions of person and peacekeeping, protects public health care, protects all these things that frankly the NDP helped create and instill into Canadian political culture.”
It could be the Liberals who win, or it could be the Conservatives. But, either way, the message from voters during the election has been clear: They want a government that takes a firm stance against Trump’s threats.
Canada’s Liberals and Conservatives are neck and neck as election begins, and running on similar promises
Canada’s federal election is on. The polls show a polarized contest between the Liberals and Conservatives, one dominated by Donald Trump and the question of who’s best-suited to deal with his tariff and annexation threats. Canadian nationalism has surged. The Liberal Party, recently down 25 points in the polls to the Conservatives, have seen their fortunes turn around under new leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney — a manwho’s been all too keen to, ahem, adapt ideas from his top rival.
Liberal, Tory, same old story?
A Trump-centric campaign risks obscuring other important policy issues. But how much does it matter when the two front-runners are so close together? So far, both parties — one of which is running on the slogan “Canada Strong” and the other on “Canada First” – have adopted similar proposals for a range of issues.
Both Liberal and Conservative campaigns launched with promises to cut personal income taxes. The Liberals are offering a 1% cut to the lowest bracket, and the Conservatives are putting forward a 2.25% cut. Both parties are also promising to cut federal sales taxes on new homes for first-time buyers, with Liberals including new builds worth as much as CA$1 million and the Conservatives ramping it all the way up to … $1.3 million, but they’ll expand eligibility to non-first-time buyers, including investors.
On defense, Carney is promising to spend 2% of GDP on the military by 2030 and expand Arctic security. Poilievre has promised more or less the same, with details to come. Both say they’ll speed up the building of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines, though Carney would keep a Trudeau-era emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, while Poilievre would not.
Affordability remains a major concern, even more so with tariffs threatening the economy. Poilievre even says he’d keep (though perhaps not expand) the Liberals’ public prescription drug, daycare, and dental care programs. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of Canadians can’t afford food. In 2024, the Liberals launched a food lunch program, which the Conservatives attacked as a headline grab but didn’t outright oppose. The parties haven’t released more on food security and affordability yet, but they almost certainly will.
Can the Liberals rewrite the past?
While the Liberals are now led by Carney, with former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gone, they’re still the same party that has governed for nearly a decade and earned ire from voters for policy shortcomings. With a policy agenda that, so far, looks similar to that of the Conservatives, the Liberals must persuade voters they’re not just better on policy, but that their guy is better on character and competence, and that his team is fit for purpose.
It’s a tricky task, and it’s fair to ask how much the Liberal Party has changed. Many top candidates and current Cabinet ministers are the same faces from Trudeau’s years, including Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, Bill Blair, and François-Philippe Champagne. The Liberal surge even persuaded a handful of candidates who’d served in the caucus to run again after saying they were out under Trudeau, including high-profile players Anita Anand, Sean Fraser, and Nate Erskine-Smith.
When Carney announced his Cabinet just before he triggered the election, Conservatives were quick to point out that the group contained 87% of the same faces from Trudeau’s table. Among the faces are those who supported, just weeks earlier, policies Carney is now reversing, including the Liberals’ signature consumer carbon price and its planned increase to the capital gains inclusion rate (reversals Conservatives were calling for).
Canada’s “presidentialized” election
A leader-focused campaign in the face of Trump’s threats will, perhaps ironically, be thoroughly American. Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice, notes that the tricky thing for the Liberals is this is a change campaign, with voters looking to reset after the Trudeau years. Carney will have to present himself as that change – which could mean an intense focus on him as leader.
Thompson calls it a “presidentialized” campaign, one that comes with a risk for the neophyte Liberal leader. “It opens the question of Carney’s political experience, or rather lack thereof – and the fact that he has never run an election campaign before, let alone a national general election campaign. It’s an open question whether his political inexperience comes out in a negative way.”
But a focus on character could also set Carney apart from Poilievre, even if the two don’t have much daylight between them on policy. Voters see Carney as the best person to be prime minister, and he enjoys high favorability ratings — over half the country likes him. The Conservative Party leader, on the other hand, isn’t particularly well-liked, with his unfavorables sitting at 59%.
Promise now, worry later?
For all the talk of character, Conservatives, including Poilievre himself, have accused the Liberals of stealing their ideas. That’s a fair criticism. As Thompson puts it, the Liberals have caught the Conservatives out and, indeed, have adopted their positions. But how far will that take the Liberals? And at what cost?
“These are all Conservative policies that were being wielded against Trudeau,” Thompson says, “which Carney has now adopted as his own. And it’s shrewd politicking.” But it’s also risky. “If the Liberals win, they need to deliver very quickly on showing that this is a new government and that they have new policies. The honeymoon period would be, I think, quite short.”
The Liberals will be happy to worry about all of this later. For now, they’re the beneficiaries of an election in which the very issues that were set to spell their doom have become temporarily incidental to Trump and to questions of character and competence – questions to which voters seem to think Carney is the answer.
The policy challenges that got Liberals into trouble in the first place are still lurking and waiting to reassert themselves in short order. But for the Liberals, those are problems for another day.
Canada's Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada September 25, 2024.
Conservative leader fights with broadcaster
While Trudeau was enjoying a New York broadcast, his opponent, Pierre Poilievre, was getting deeper into a fight with a Canadian broadcaster.
Poilievre’s Conservative Party announced Tuesday that it will no longer give interviews to reporters at CTV, the country’s top-rated private news channel. The Conservatives are furious about a Sunday report in which the network put together several clips of Poilievre speaking to present a misleading quote. The network apologized, but the apology did not go far enough for the Conservatives, since it presented it as an error, not an effort to deceive the public.
Poilievre’s disagreement with the broadcaster predates this incident. Last week, he celebrated the downgrading of the parent company’s credit rating. BCE, which owns CTV, is a landline and wireless phone company, and often the target of Canadians’ ire because of complaints about service.
Attacks like this on a big company, which employs 40,000, are unusual in Canadian politics and may be disquieting for BCE management, since Poilievre’s party may soon be in charge of its regulator. Poilievre often complains about Canadian media coverage of his party, alleging that outlets are tailoring their coverage because of subsidies from Trudeau’s government. He has often promised to defund public broadcaster CBC, but the new focus on Bell signals a wider and even more confrontational approach to media relations.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a Conservative general election campaign event, in London, on June 24, 2024.
Viewpoint: Expect more drubbings for incumbents in France and the UK
Upcoming elections in France and the UK appear likely to deliver historic defeats for both countries’ ruling parties in a challenging electoral cycle for incumbents around the world. The polling shows the centrist alliance led by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Rennaissance party trailing both the far-right National Rally and the left-wing New Popular Front ahead of the legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 – pointing to an extremely difficult government formation process.
Meanwhile, the UK’s ruling Conservative party's dire polling ahead of the July 4 elections has prompted speculation of an “extinction event” that renders it virtually irrelevant in the next parliament. These votes follow others in countries including South Africa and India where the incumbents performed worse than expected.
What’s going on here? Eurasia Group expert Lindsay Newman says it’s a “long-COVID story” of the pandemic’s economic aftershocks fueling a political backlash. We asked her to explain.
This year is shaping up to be a bad one for incumbents. What are the lessons from elections so far?
In a series of surprise electoral outcomes, the ruling parties in South Africa and India both lost their parliamentary majorities, while the government-backed candidate lost Senegal’s presidential election to a little-known opposition figure. The driving narrative in all three is the long-COVID story – more specifically, historically high inflation levels.
Mexico, where ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum easily won the presidential election, is one country that bucked the trend. Sheinbaum benefited as the hand-picked successor of the popular President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has advanced an agenda focused on addressing economic headwinds through job creation and wage increases.
Can you explain the long Covid effect a little more?
Following the economic dislocations of the pandemic, inflation has been elevated and persistent around the world. We have higher-for-longer cost of living pressures and unemployment rates – factors that are shaping how voters think and particularly what they think about their governments. Pocketbook issues always tend to be salient during elections, and many peoples’ pocketbooks seem especially light in the aftermath of the pandemic.
So, do you think this trend will continue this year — for example, in the outcomes of the elections in France, the UK, and the US?
That’s what the polling is telling us. The electoral reckoning with post-pandemic conditions, including the inflation shock, is a global story. The outcomes thus far in 2024 suggest this will remain a difficult cycle for incumbents. We have to expect more of the same in these upcoming elections.
Interestingly, the political backlash seems to be coming even in relatively healthy economic environments, right?
There is nuance to what we are seeing. Voters are responding to how they feel about the economic environment they find themselves in, rather than the statistics or the nuts and bolts of the economic outlook. In the case of the US, for example, the country’s economic recovery has been one of the bright spots of the post-pandemic period, yet it’s not perceived that way domestically, and surveys show that inflation, the economy, and immigration are key concerns for voters going into the fall.
There was a similar dynamic at play in India, which has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, yet the felt experience of unemployment, rising prices, and inequities is likely behind the election results.
How worried are you about the potential for this backlash to destabilize political systems around the world? Where do we go from here?
Given the disruption and disorder we have seen over the last five to ten years, we have to expect more rather than less uncertainty ahead. This year’s voter backlash ties into another trendline I have been watching: a rising new radicalization of attitudes as well as actions. It has its roots in tectonic shifts in well-established public opinion, such as the 18.5-point average decline in support for Israel across dozens of countries registered by a January poll. Another driver is a broad political realignment away from the center and toward the poles.
The political consequences of these shifts are seen in the US in President Joe Biden’s outreach to younger and more progressive voting blocs and in Donald Trump’s appeals to his base. In Europe, nearly one-third of voters now opt for antiestablishment parties, either on the far right or far left, while in Latin America, antiestablishment candidates have secured a wave of victories in the post-pandemic period. We will get through the 2024 election cycle, but the risky times are likely to persist as these dynamics continue to ripple through the global system.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor at Eurasia Group.
Dem bias in Ottawa has Trudeau targeting Trump
The most intense debate in the Canadian House of Commons of late has been about a humdrum trade deal update between Canada and Ukraine. It is being disputed by the opposition Conservatives because it contains reference to a carbon tax.
Since Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has made “axing the tax” in Canada his number one priority, he has removed his party’s support from the deal, even though Ukraine has had a carbon tax since 2011.
But the governing Liberals say they detect an ulterior motive: the rise of right-wing, MAGA-style conservatism in Canada that has undermined the Conservative Party’s support for Ukraine.
Trudeau’s camp takes aim at MAGA bull's-eye
The Liberals ran an online ad on Monday, ahead of a Canada-Ukraine free trade deal vote in the House, that featured a photo of Justin Trudeau shaking hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while claiming Poilievre’s party is “importing far-right, American-style politics and refusing to stand with our ally in their time of need.”
Conservatives say they support Ukraine and have just called on Ottawa to send surplus weapons – specifically 83,000 CRV7 rockets slated for disposal – to Kyiv. But the Liberals need to disrupt Poilievre’s momentum and seem convinced that comparing him to Donald Trump might do it.
After the former president won the New Hampshire primary in January, the Liberals made a direct comparison between the two men in an online ad, which said that Trump was one step closer to the White House and that Poilievre was ripping a page from his playbook. The ad noted that both men referenced “corrupt media,” their countries being “broken” and used the slogan “bring it home.”
Trump’s eye-for-an-eye approach
This is a dangerous game, given Trump is ahead in most polls and is an Old Testament-style politician, more inclined to take an eye for an eye than to turn the other cheek.
Why would Trudeau risk baiting the man who could be in the White House this time next year, where he would wield the power to enervate the Canadian economy?
The prime minister knows Trump takes note of every slight and pays everyone back with interest. After the G7 meeting in Charlevoix, Quebec, in 2018, Trudeau gave a closing press conference in which he said Canada would not be pushed around in trade negotiations by the US. According to Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, in his book “The Room Where It Happened,” the president raged against Trudeau, calling the prime minister a “behind your back guy” and ordering his aides to bad mouth Trudeau on the Sunday talk shows.
But Trudeau’s Liberals are trailing the Conservatives by up to 16 percentage points in every public opinion poll, and this tactic may work.
An Abacus data poll from Jan. 28 suggested there is some evidence to suggest that associating Poilievre and Trump correlates with voting intentions, with those who feel that the two men are different more likely to vote Conservative. Tying the two men together in a pejorative fashion is good for the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party, so the thinking seems to go.
That remains to be seen. Attacking a political rival is always a challenge when the target is held in more esteem than the source of the attack, which is the case here, according to another Abacus poll that found Poilievre much more liked than Trudeau.
Canada’s former man in Washington says to hold fire
The risk is amplified in that the Canadian public may well see through such a transparent tactic and decide that Trudeau is putting his party’s interests ahead of the country’s.
That was the warning issued at the weekend by David MacNaughton, whom Trudeau once appointed as Canada’s ambassador in Washington. He told the Toronto Star that Trudeau is taking a risk by taking indirect shots at Trump.
Doing so will make it harder to fight Trump’s promised 10% tariffs on US imports if he comes to power, he said.
“We used to be seen by the Americans as a trusted friend, ally, and partner, and right now, I don’t think that feeling is as strong as it used to be,” he said.
That MacNaughton has been forced to say this in public suggests he is being ignored in private.
Trudeau revives Team Canada
Trudeau has revived the Team Canada approach to relations with the US that served his government well during the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that yielded the U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal in 2018.
The new effort will be led by Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s current ambassador in Washington, Francois-Philippe Champagne, the industry minister, and Mary Ng, the trade minister (notably not Mélanie Joly, the foreign minister, or Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister who fell foul of Trump during the USMCA negotiations. “We don’t like their representative,” Trump said at the time).
Municipal mayors, provincial politicians, and business leaders will all be urged to reach out to their contacts to sell the message that the two economies are more integrated than ever. Trade statistics based on the first three years of the new USMCA show that total US trade with Canada and Mexico totaled $1.78 trillion in 2022, a 27% increase over 2019 levels.
When not criticizing “ideologically driven MAGA Conservatives” in Parliament, Trudeau has tried to sound civil.
But as professional diplomats who have worked with Republicans in the US point out, “no amount of Team Canada can overcome those ill-advised MAGA statements.”
Libs and GOP on different planets
Another problem is that the two are on different political planets.
The Liberal government is not keen on engaging with Republican politicians and officials, in part because of an aversion that dates back to the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the US Capitol.
The lack of readiness evokes memories of November 2016, when Trump was elected and the Canadian government was caught completely off-guard. The professional bureaucrats who are meant to advise governments had provided no contingency plan for a Trump administration and Trudeau had even invited the sitting Democratic vice president, Joe Biden, to Ottawa for a state dinner the following month. “They were so excited at the prospect of Hillary (Clinton), even better than Obama because she was a woman. They couldn’t wait for the transition,” said one person involved in the planning process. After Trump was elected, the Canadian government couldn’t even reach him to arrange a congratulatory call.
Louise Blais, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, was consul general in the southeast US at the time – MAGA land – and had built up an array of contacts among Republicans that proved invaluable. Among other things, she secured a phone number for the president-elect.
As she wrote in the Globe and Mail last weekend, even the most conservative Republicans are friendly towards Canada, realizing the relationship is a net positive for them. But they value a rapport built up over the years, not arranged in a panic, and they cherish mutual respect.
Blais recalled how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told her in 2016 that Republicans were hearing what Canada was saying about then-candidate Trump. “Be careful because you are picking sides,” he said.
Trade deal no protection against Trump’s tariffs
The long-standing Democratic bias at the official level is a luxury Canada can ill afford. Ottawa has a free-trade agreement with the US, but if the new president wants to impose a double-digit tariff on everything that crosses into America, Canada would be dragged into an expensive, retaliatory trade war.
Veteran Conservative MP Randy Hoback wrote on his Substack that the Canada-U.S. relationship is too critical to be jeopardized by domestic political concerns. “Trudeau’s actions are hazardous to our economy and national security,” he said.
Trudeau’s current emissaries don’t speak the same language as Trump’s party. A real Team Canada needs to include some people, like Hoback, who can speak Republican.