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CANADA GOES TO the polls today in an election that will be watched closely by governments around the world and anyone with an eye on how events shape voting.
The election of President Donald Trump in the United States four years after he was voted out has transformed the political climate north of the longest border in the world.
As recently as mid-February, Canadian state broadcaster CBC had given the opposition Conservative party a 99% chance of winning parliamentary elections and kicking the Liberals out after 10 years and three terms in office.
That probability has now completely flipped, with the Liberals being given a 96% chance of victory as of last week.
The polling numbers underlying those probabilities are stark, with the Conservatives enjoying a 23 point lead in the polls in January and seeing that collapse to a point where they are now trailing by about 5 points.
On the face of it, that indicates a tight race but the momentum is all one way and the geographic concentration of where the Liberal support is means forecasters know who they think will win.
There are 343 seats up for grabs in Canada’s House of Commons, meaning the magic number to win a majority is 172.
As of last week, CBC was forecasting that the Liberals were on course to earn 194 seats and a majority, with the Conservatives about 50 seats short of a majority.
Again, to put the shift in context, back in January the same poll tracker had the Conservatives at a projected 225 seats and clearly well on course for that majority.
Whatever the result, there has been a stunning reversal in public sentiment that will likely be studied for years to come.
Indeed, one top Conservative campaigner based in the most-populous province of Ontario recently called the campaign of leader Pierre Poilievre “the biggest fucking disaster” and “malpractice at the highest fucking level”.
Whether Poilievre’s tactics are to blame or not, a succession of events have conspired to allow new Prime Minister Mark Carney eke out a timely lead.
The biggest single event has been the arrival of Carney himself and the departure of Justin Trudeau, who first led the Liberals into power with a majority victory in 2015.
The intervening 10 years saw the shine gradually and then dramatically come off Trudeau, who was forced to preside over minority governments after elections in 2019 and 2021.
Those elections were fought against two previous Tory leaders and Poilievre’s arrival onto the national stage had seemingly set the stage for the Conservatives to return to government.
Poilievre was born in the western city of Calgary and advances policies supported by the region’s oil industry, including new pipeline construction and the removal of other environmental laws.
He also built support nationally as a critic of pandemic lockdown policies and has drawn comparisons to Trump over his attacks on the media and a previous promise to be Canada’s “anti-woke prime minister.”
The nationalist rhetoric seemed to impress even Elon Musk, who back in January shared a number of posts on X supportive of Poilievre, including labelling as a “masterpiece” a viral video of the Conservative leader dressing down a journalist while eating an apple.
The associations led to some Liberals seeking to brand him as “Maple Syrup MAGA.”
But when when the election was called last month Poilievre began his campaign by trying to create distance between himself and the US.
Stressing that Canada needed “a strong leader,” he added that his plan is to “make the economy less dependent on the United States and put Canada first.”
Such clear blue water is needed because Canadians have been overwhelmingly against any suggestion of their country becoming the 51st US state, whether such suggestions by Trump are serious or not.
With Canadian minds zeroing in on the threat from Trump, it’s mean that Poilievre’s more traditionally conservative policies have struggled to gain traction in case they are viewed as being akin to those espoused by the US Republican party.
Paul Wells, veteran journalist who has written books about the last two Canadian prime ministers, recently told a podcast by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that he would classify Poilievre’s economic policies as being more in the mould of Ronald Reagan than Donald Trump.
“Politics in Canada is sometimes not very left-right, polarised. It’s often strongly polarised on energy versus the environment and Pierre Poilievre wants to essentially dismantle all environmental policy and export aggressively our oil and natural gas wealth through pipelines,” he says.
Wells added that Poilievre’s ‘Canada first Economic Action Plan’ which was announced recently should be treated with some scepticism because it envisages a $500 billion injection into the economy mainly from free-market policies like tax cuts and not direct government investment.
Nonetheless, he believes that such policies would have been tempting to many voters were it not for the large elephant in the room, or in this case in the Oval Office.
“It would be at least interesting to a lot of voters if all other issues hadn’t been washed away by this question of, ‘What on earth are we going to do about Trumpism’,” Wells argues.
“This Canada First Economic Action Plan that Poilievre has been releasing in bits and pieces for months now. Last week, when he introduced it in its entirety, it got close to no coverage, not because Canadian news organisations refused to cover this serious campaign, but because we’re just all running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out how to survive the Trump wave.
And I know, because you can read it in his body language, that this is very frustrating for Mr. Poilievre.
New banker on the block
What’s clear is that regardless of any frustration Poilievre may feel about his policies not connecting as they may have, the main issue has been that he is not facing the opponent he and the rest of Canada was expecting.
When Trudeau stepped down as Liberal leader earlier this year, it could not have been predicted that his replacement would have been as tailored to the times as it appears.
Carney is a political novice who holds the distinction of being the only person to lead the central bank of two G7 nations, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
The first of these he led during the 2008 financial crisis and the second he led during the Brexit crisis.
His leadership during those tumultuous periods has been central to his core message. In essence, that his stewardship during two economic crises gives him the experience to navigate a third.
In this case, Trump tariffs that have targeted Canada’s steel and car production and the potential for the US administration to bring even more economic pain on its northern neighbour.
Various Canadian exports are now subject to specific US tariffs and a recent announcement that General Motors was to pause production at a 1,200-employee assembly plant brought this into stark focus.
While the election may be taking place today, Carney confirmed a number of weeks ago that Canada and the US are set to start talks on a new trade deal next month. With the implication being that he should be the man to lead those talks.
Carney has held just one phone call with Trump since he took office but afterwards did suggest that more talks would follow the election.
“We have only sketchy details of what’s happened, but since they had that phone conversation, President Trump has not called Canada the 51st state,” Wells also noted.
“I would give my teeth to know what on earth Carney said to Trump to get him to shut that down. ”
Only last Friday Carney finally revealed that Trump did in fact bring up the ’51st state’ topic during their phonecall.
Debate
The main contenders in the election went toe-to-toe in two live TV debates over two nights in the closing stages of the campaign.
The first was in French and the second in English, where Poilievre repeatedly sought to attack Carney for his support of Trudeau-era policies. Policies which he said had led to inflation and “growing chaos on our streets.”
“How can we possibly believe that you are any different than the previous ten years of Liberal government?” Poilievre said, repeatedly reminding that Carney had served as “Justin Trudeau’s economic advisor.”
Addressing Poilievre, Carney said: “I know you want to be running against Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau isn’t here.”
Carney faced sustained attacks throughout the two-hour English debate from not only Poilievre but Jagmeet Singh of the left-leaning New Democratic Party and Yves-François Blanchet of the Quebec separatist Bloc Quebecois.
In a scenario that should be familiar to Irish political watchers, the NDP had supported Trudeau’s minority government in a 2022 confidence-and-supply agreement until the NDP walked away from the deal late last year.
As the Liberal support has recovered over the past couple of months ahead of today’s vote, support for the NDP has been greatly squeezed, going from a high of 20% in December to about 8% on the eve of the election.
Canada, a country with a population of 41 million, has 28.9 million eligible voters, and record numbers have already cast early voting ballots before today.
Elections Canada estimated that 7.3 million people cast ballots over four days of early voting, a marked a 25% increase over the 5.8 million advanced ballots cast in the 2021 vote.
- With reporting by © – AFP 2025
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