The writer is in Australia.
The Left-of-centre (make that Left-of-the-Canadian-centre, which is mightily Left wing) Liberal Party has won Monday’s federal election in Canada. Mark Carney, who was substituted in to replace Justin Trudeau, brought the Liberals back from 20 points down in the polls. As of writing, Carney and the Liberals look likely to win 168 or 169 seats. That’s short of the needed 172 for a majority. The Poilievre Tories have won 145 or so seats. They won’t ever vote to keep the Liberals in office. The Greens may get one seat, no more. So they won’t be able to help Carney win confidence votes. There are only two options. One is the French separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois. It ended up losing seats this election but still will have 22 or so. That gives it the balance of power unless Carney and the Libs try to rely on the NDP party. But this ‘even further Left than the Liberals’ party was decimated. It is down to six, maybe seven seats. It performed so woefully it has lost party status in the Parliament. And its leader, Jagmeet Singh, not only lost his own seat, he came third. This was the man that for almost a year held the fate of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party in his hand. He could have brought down the Trudeau minority government last October, say, when the NDP was basically level pegging with the Liberals. But he chose not to do so.
In my view a lot of wrong-headed bumpf is being written about the Canadian election. So here are some background facts:
- Poilievre and the Conservative Party scored about 41.5% of the popular vote. Canada is a very, very Left-wing country – the median Canadian voter being way to the Left of Australia’s median voter and to the Left even of California’s, meaning Donald Trump has no serious desire to make 38 million ‘Left-of-California’ voters part of the US. My point here is that Poilievre’s 41.5% of the vote is the best result for the Tories since 1988. The Right-of-centre vote did not collapse. It gained.
- The further Left NDP party saw its share of the vote collapse from more or less 15% to 6%. Virtually all those votes went to Carney and the Liberals. As well, the Green Party did really poorly, in part because it opted not to run candidates in many constituencies. The truth of Canada’s election is that the Left-wing vote coalesced around Carney. To have any chance of winning the Conservatives – remember that Canada has First-Past-the-Post voting – need the progressive vote to splinter between the Libs, the NDP and the Greens. Then their candidate can get the most votes in the seat. When Stephen Harper won a big Conservative majority in 2011 he got about 39.5% of the vote. The Liberals and NDP split the progressive vote and Harper romped home. This past Monday Poilievre and the Conservatives won two full points more of the popular vote than Harper in 2011, indeed Poilievre pulled in the best showing in the popular vote in almost four decades, and he lost badly.
- Canada has a massive voting split along geographical lines. The provinces (their name for our states) of Alberta and Saskatchewan had been virtually ‘no-win’ areas for Trudeau and the Liberals. That didn’t change on Monday. The entire province of Saskatchewan had, for the prior two elections, elected conservatives in every single constituency. On Monday Carney and the Libs won one seat there. In Alberta it was much the same story. These two provinces hold huge pools of conservative voters. That makes the Tory vote too concentrated and not spread out enough. It also has given rise to some large feelings of disaffection there after four terms of Left-wing Liberal governments. Last year well under 10% of Albertans told pollsters they would vote to leave Canada. That figure is now up into the mid-30s in some polls. The prairie provinces of the West, especially oil and gas producing Alberta, feels it has been shafted by what Canadians call ‘the Laurentian elites’ – meaning the voters of Ontario and Quebec. It is there that the Net Zero religion has a real hold and it is then imposed on Alberta and the prairie provinces. Mark Carney is going to find this simmering dislike of the East very hard to deal with. Some of the mentors of Stephen Harper such as Preston Manning have already said that they think there is a real chance that Alberta could vote to leave Canada. We’ll see. Certainly it is not good to have whole provinces vote almost entirely one way for election after election and lose repeatedly.
- That brings us to Trump’s effect on the Canadian election. From what I’ve said already it is obviously false to think that Trump’s tariffs and taunting drove conservative voters to the Left. Again, Poilievre scored the highest popular vote tally of any Conservative going back almost 40 years. What happened, as I said, is that the Left-of-centre vote coalesced around the Davos Man, ex-central banker, investment banker millionaire Mark Carney. In part a bit of that would have happened as soon as Justin Trudeau stepped down because he was loathed by many (and because a lot of Canadians didn’t link Carney to Trudeau even though the former was an unofficial advisor of the latter). The rest of the Left-wing coalescing was driven by Trump.
So here we have to step back and seriously question the Right-of-centre pearl-clutchers in the media, on Sky and across the anglosphere who blame Trump for Poilievre’s loss. Trump’s taunting of Canada and his global tariff policies have unified the Left in their hatred of the Orange Man. But for the life of me I can’t see why an American President should care about that. He certainly wasn’t elected President of the US to help Canada’s or Australia’s Right-of-centre leaders. Moreover, Trump had strong grounds for a personal dislike of Justin Trudeau. As with a good few Left-wing politicians here, Trudeau and some in his Cabinet had called Trump a racist, a white nationalist, deranged. All are patently false. But the TDS sufferers on the conservative side of politics seem to think that Trump should be running the US to help fellow conservative parties around the anglosphere. Why? Poilievre made a tactical error in dealing with Trump. He should have come out hard and argued to Canadians that he and the Conservatives would do far better negotiating with Trump than the party that was calling Trump a racist and had been attacking him personally for years. Ad after ad detailing what Trudeau and his team had been saying about Trump and how he, Poilievre, would lower the temperature. Instead, Poilievre tried to ignore the problem while forming a sort of unity ticket against the US and Trump. This played right into Carney’s hand. Incumbents generally do better in such situations. And given the total lack of shame or embarrassment the Liberal Party that had for years argued that multiculturalism meant that Canadian flags and national pride were oh so icky, all of a sudden went all in on both. It worked. Or rather it worked in cleaving the country into two voting blocks, one on the Left but also a four decade high conservative voting one on the Right. The problem for Poilievre (who looks likely to lose his seat because it was on the outskirts of the national capital Ottawa, the most Lefty part of the country) boiled down to the fact that Canada is simply a very Left-wing place. Toronto in Ontario is much bigger than Sydney and it voted for Carney. Montreal is nearly the size of Sydney and it saw the Libs do very well indeed. And that was the election right there. As it always is in Canada. Which is the point all of the disaffected Albertans are making.
Let me conclude with a few observations. If the final tally leaves Carney and the Liberals in minority government territory I don’t think this Carney minority government will last anywhere near a full five year term. The NDP will have learned its lesson about the perils of unconditional support. And the Quebec Bloc party will do whatever helps its Quebec separatist agenda. Relatedly, this is not a strong position from which to bargain with Trump and the US. Left of centre Canadians may have flocked to Carney to stand up to Trump. But Carney heads up a minority government, of the Left. Carney insulted Trump repeatedly during the election campaign to help his chances and will now try to downplay all that as he attempts to negotiate with the US President on tariffs, the border and Canada’s truly pathetic level of defence spending (that manages to make Australia look good). The simple truth is that the US holds all the bargaining chips. Trudeau blocked all attempts to build oil and gas pipelines to the sea. The only place Canada can send its biggest export, oil and gas, is straight south to the US. Three-quarters of Canada’s exports go to the US but only 15% of the US’s to Canada. Moreover only a bit over a tenth of the US economy is on the export side. It’s well over 30% for the EU and Canada’s is higher again. Plus Canada runs a very big surplus (think oil and gas sales) with the US. Trade wars are not won by the country with the surplus.
All in all, then, for this Canadian born writer it was yet another election win for the Lefty Liberal party that has dominated Canadian politics for the last 120 years, being in office for over two-thirds of that time. Canadian voters like to vote Left. They did so again on Monday, despite the last decade of Liberal Party rule delivering a massive drop in living standards that resulted in such a precipitous decline that the richest Canadian province is today poorer, per capita, than the poorest US state. Canada’s Liberals did that, not Donald Trump. So if Canada’s voters are so stupid that none of that economic carnage matters one whit to them as long as they can vote for an ex-central banker who is calling Trump names, whose fault is this election result? Was it really Trump’s fault? Or that of the voters whose TDS feelings overcame rational thought? Or, maybe, Poilievre should have gone all in pointing out the fakery of Carney and the Libs wrapping themselves in a flag they used to despise and how he would be miles better placed to negotiate? Readers can decide for themselves. My view is that the softly-softly, let’s play the Left’s game approach is for losers. Always.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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Thanks for this analysis.
Of course DJT was not elected to help Canadian conservatives but if conservatives do not support each other around the world the already operating left globalists will continue to thrive.
I do not follow Canadian politics but do conservatives there talk about the superiority of free markets, capitalism and freedom generally. Or do they do as UK Tories do and try to outflank the left on the left.
“Of course DJT was not elected to help Canadian conservatives but if conservatives do not support each other around the world the already operating left globalists will continue to thrive.”
I agree. Canadian voters are to blame, but I don’t think it unreasonable to hope that Trump bears in mind the wider cause, provided that is compatible with his duty to his own people.
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/04/canada-liberals-squeak-back-into-office-claiming-to-stand-up-to-american-ogre/?vgo_ee=wTU1JIyyAPTVXArZ0R79F5NGvI0eiowWoUpEb36K3lEGNVpV361Y%3AOCZHVfhNLpDG18fuG10MdmT9jYf95emm
Capitalism is the Marxist term for Business, and capital exists, no matter the political analysis.
I remember when ITV started, there was a newspaper article about a new TV series, quoting the cost per episode. I was amazed at the quoted amount. Yet, the BBC must have had at least similar costs, but we never heard them mentioned.
It their term for capital they can’t get their sticky fingers on.
Like you, I don’t follow Canadian politics, but I know a man does. Mark Steyn holds the Conservative leader in contempt, as a Cameronian CINO. That’s good enough for me.
https://www.steynonline.com/15249/losers-gotta-lose
I’m having a tough time seeing any “Conservatives” around the World to support. The -isms, Socialism, Fascism, National Socialism share the common roots of collectivism, statism, elevation of the State above the people, central economic planning and control.
List those “Conservative” Parties which do not share those common roots. Which ones aren’t for Net Zero, CoVid imprisonment and mandatory vaccinations, welfare states, redistribution of wealth via the tax system, uncontrolled immigration, same-sex marriage, demotion of the importance of the nuclear family, equality, social justices women don’t need a womb but can have a penis?
In Canada they are much more like the failed Tory party 2010 to 2024.
Talking about the so-called popular vote for countries whose voting system isn’t based on proportional representation (of parties, not voters) is meaningless. It’s also wrong to state that Carney won the election. The real outcome is hung parliament.
That said, Trumps war of words and angry gestures against all of the world because Americans voluntarily spend their money in a certain way is ridicolous on its own and will certainly help foreign politicans who can at least pose as being credibly opposed to Trump’s verbal and fincancial attacks on the country they’re standing in. Whether or not it’ll help the USA to be increasingly seen as a country which pisses on all its so-called allies because it can will remain to be seen. It’s certain that this makes the prospect of being allied to this country and suffer from all its idiotic policies — like the trade war against Russia — look a lot less attractive.
Who will be the PM?
Nobody knows his yet. The outcome will either be a coalition or a minority government and both are theoretically possible for both large parties.
There is no necessity to form a coalition in Canada as a minority government can manage with occasional support from other MP’s.
That’s always possible in such a situation. As is a formal cooperation agreement between different parties. It will have to be either of both or a new election. Carney can’t just govern alone, ie, just with support from his party. For Anglo-Saxon/ FPTP terms, this means he didn’t really win the election as they Conservatives could also govern without him in the same way.
Mentioning the popular vote is not meaningless – it shows how opinion is split ,which electoral results do not. It is in fact the MOST meaningful fact, showing that the the majority of Canadians are getting a government they do not want. Like us in the UK!
It is meaningless because the voting system in Canada is not based on proportional representation of parties (not voters, mind you). People who believe that voting systems should all use proportional representation because that’s the only system which is fair to parties (and still not to voters) like to employ this statistic, but that’s because of a political agenda of theirs and not because it’s somehow the only voting system endorsed by God.
As to getting a government nobody wants, the next German government is set to be a CDU/CSU – SPD coalition based on an agreement which abolishes all manifesto promises of the CDU/CSU in favour of an energetic Keep going in the old direction of travel! That’s a government and political course nobody in Germany wanted, yet, it’s the inevitable outcome of any German election. Some faces are shuffled around. Anything else stays as it was before.
The so-called representative system never delivers what voters want because they have no say over anything save electing the people who’ll end up governing the country in whichever ways they want. See also Boris the Jelly Comes to Town or how Get Brexit done! morphed into Lockdowns and mask mandates because the international experts know better and we must defer to them!
Great synopsis, thanks, basically then Pierre failed at the final fence & the Canadian Turkey population has just voted for Christmas 😵💫
Indeed a turkey voted in for a few more Christmases to come.
Like its southern neighbour, Canada is clearly divided on geographical lines – common sense on the open plains, progressive claptrap in the cities of Ontario and Quebec.
Sounds about right 👍
Cities used to be where most of the creative arts and technological innovations flourished.
Ah, those were the days.
He basically got all is safe seats and thus, didn’t achieve any kind of landslide. As the left-leaning voters found a common enemy in Trump, they put their internal squabbles mostly aside and hence, he didn’t win a Starmer-style victory, either.
The people his voters believe to be the Canadian Turkey population voted for what his voters believe to be Christmas. But the people who did vote in this way obviously neither consider themselves Turkeys nor having voted for Christmas. Their idea is probably more along the line that the conservative voters are the turkeys and that they (the left-leaning voters) voted for Christmas-with-turkeys for themselves.
Short: Poilievre or his successor need to convince the left-leaning voters that he’s also good choice for them if he wants to win. Playing the partisan card alone will not work.
Poilievre leant a bit left right at the end ! He should have put the boot in ! , Canada had the Truckers crushed by the Libtards & still they are in power 🤦🏼♂️
Excellent point! How can the Canadian People forget the valiant Truckers Freedom Convoy? It was one of the Canadian People’s finest moments, admired and imitated around the world.
That’s what we believe (I certainly did at that time). But we weren’t the manic maskers and rabid repeat perforated.
Canadian turkey? Canada geese… lots of shite everywhere.
Very helpful article, thank you! The US news media didn’t report these critical details. Surprising, eh?
We are of course seeing a similar phenomenon in England. The country is basically small c conservative outside the vast paki dominated metropolises but it is these that dominate politics, the law the civil service and the media.
So the productive, culturally English part of the country’s opinions and votes count for zero.
A recipe for severe unrest.
And in the mean while, everything that made England great has been torched.
I know it makes no sense to us, but there are large numbers of people who think woke is just dandy, they don’t see the dangers of runaway immigration, and they fear the far right with its crazy ideas on the environment. (Their perceptions…). The fact that the left wing vote in the UK is 65% split across Labour, LibDem and Green, ought to tell you that we have a long way to go, if we can get there at all.
Very interesting take on the Canadian elections. One public commenter also suggested that the reason Poilievre lost was because he abandoned true Right Wing = Conservative policies that made him so popular, and tried to appeal from a Centre-Right approach, in a similar way to Nigel Farage.
Good report on the state of play in Canada.
It’s been over eight years and so many people in politics, media, the useful idiotocracy still haven’t figured out Trump’s modus operandi – he the bell, they Pavlov’s dog.
He is expert at winding people up, jerking their chains, damning them with praise, leading them up the garden path, he makes every news cycle about him – $million free publicity – he’s a disrupter, he is outrageous to establish a negotiating position from which he can withdraw in return for concessions.
One flaw: he thinks everything can be negotiated. Not necessarily so, because others are independent agents capable of sometimes non-rational behaviour, nor can he have enough detailed information in multivariable, interactive situations.
On the other have, lobbing a live grenade into the middle of things can bring about favourable opportunities.
He’s just smarter than most who are too dumb and up themselves to see it.
Looking further into this, I was shocked to find out that there has been a strong movement in the western provinces of Canada to
SECEDE FROM CANADA COMPLETELY!!! This is just astonishing to me.
This movement they call “Wexit” was established in 2014, two years before the Brexit vote to leave the EU. And the mainstream media have suddenly blocked their previous articles on this, such as the BBC’s “WE HAVE MORE IN COMMON WITH AMERICA THAN THE REST OF CANADA” from five days ago on MSN, now blocked and unavailable to read.
Here are some Canadian articles that hopefully won’t be blocked for UK readers:
Why Western Canada Wants To Separate | Business Factors
‘Hockey and nostalgia’ won’t keep us together: Some Albertans say they’re serious about separation after Liberal win
The quiet threat to Canadian unity isn’t Quebec — it’s Alberta
Here’s a map showing the proposed Wexit “Republic of Western Canada”:
Hold on! Trump is responsible for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Everywhere. Yesterday our supermarket ran out of my favourite coffee beans.
Asked why?
Trump.
And of course, Canada has a death wish. To elect Carney after that prancing, preening Narcissist is an an act of grievous self harm
I am somewhat surprised to hear Canada described as ‘mighty left wing’ as if it were an offshoot of the communist party. As somebody whose family has had close relations living there since 1925 I can assure you it is not! But the Trump vitriol is just as strong over there as it is in this country. Hating the Orange Man is just as much a pastime over there as it is over here. It doesn’t mean they are all raving commies.
As a Canadian that has worked on multiple provincial and federal election campaigns I can tell you that you have enough idea what you are talking about. Canada is a fundamentally left wing country. This has become even more than case after a decade of unfettered immigration which has transformed the country’s ethnic demography and moved the country even further left.
Canadians seem to have the same mentality as the Welsh.
Keep voting for a left wing Party which implements policies that impoverish your country and then complain that you have been impoverished …. and vote for more of it.
Yes, like the Welsh, they vote for more of it, but still somehow Blame the English. 🙂
A good analysis of the situation but one that dismayed Canadian Conservative’s are struggling with today.
At this juncture, most Conservative Party members in Canada remain in denial about their own shortcomings that opened the door for Carney to get a minority government when they should have received a good kicking.
The Conservatives repeated the same mistake in 2025 that they made in 1979 in that they thought that they could just back into government using a “softly-softly” campaign strategy. This produced a Conservative minority government that lasted less than a year before returning the Liberals to power.
In 1984 under Brian Mulroney the Conservatives abandoned softly-softly in favour or a robust policy agenda coupled with aggressive attacks on the Liberal leader, John Tuner. This produce a record parliamentary majority with over 50% of the vote from coast to coast.
I experienced both 1979 and 1984 elections first hand as a senior campaign employee of the Canadian Conservative party which is how I recognise the shortcomings of their 2025 campaign.
Most interesting analysis. Explains a lot.
The historic Liberal Party was always around the centre as was the Conservative Party. They both represented fiscal responsibility, social programs if you could afford them, a strong well managed economy and banking and tolerance. As the WEF cabal has done in the UK they insert their members in existing parties and draw the whole party left to meet the crazy policies of these elite. Trudeau and his WEF friends took the Liberal Party so far left and attacked the golden goose of Canada the resource sector. Unfortunately, like in many countries, people select a Party and blindly vote for that party. Trudeau and Carney Liberal Party is no longer the old Liberal Party of Canada. One very significant issue that had a huge outcome is the Liberal Party funded main stream media which is all centered in Southern Ontario. These went full throttle propaganda mode for Carney. They vilified Poilievre, who has threatened to cut funding, while promoting Trump as evil and only Carney could protect them from him. This did have a huge effect on the outcome of the election contrary to what the author tries to prove. Canada has never been far left wing and was always around the centre. As has happened with the Democrats in the US and Conservative Party in the UK, hidden WEF based forces have dragged these parties to the far left while attacking responsible conservatism. It’s going on everywhere.
Very interesting point you made about these political parties being “dragged to the far left by hidden WEF forces”.
I remember reading years ago that the Globalist plan was to infiltrate every political party and first drag them towards the centre, and then left, while still fooling the voters into thinking there was a Left-Right division in politics.
In Canada much of the media is subsidized by the Liberal government so that gives the media an incentive to support the Liberals.