Canada's lost opportunity
Has a foreign leader ever impacted a major election this much?
In yesterday’s federal elections in Canada, the Liberal Party has ended up with about a 20-seat lead over the Conservative Party, in a result that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago. However, the Liberals appear (with a few districts not quite certain of outcomes yet) to be slightly short of a majority which might mean some deal-making will be necessary (likely with parties further to the left, not Conservatives) to pass legislation, making the outcome for Canada potentially even worse than this already is (at least if you like sane policy on freedom, economics, and energy.)
Such a shame that Donald Trump's repeated idiotic comments about Canada handed their election to a leftist government, or rather a continuation of a government that might remind you of the government of Colorado in its insipid wokeness, opposition to fossil fuels, antipathy to free speech, and more. Obviously, the result of the vote is the fault/responsibility of voters but I really wish I understood why Trump seemed intentionally to be trying to push the vote toward the Liberals and away from the Conservatives.
And I have to give the winner, Mark Carney, who has been serving as prime minister by temporary appointment after the resignation of the cringeworthy Justin Trudeau, a lot of credit for calling for elections so quickly after Trump began his lunatic verbal assault on Canada. Just prior to Trump’s attacks, Conservatives were something like a 10-to-1 favorite to win the election and have their leader, Pierre Polievre, become prime minister. Trump basically reversed the betting odds, and the election.
A fascinating dynamic (that really doesn't exist at nearly the same scale in the US which is basically a two-party system) was that LOTS of people who might normally have voted for what Americans would call a "third party" instead voted for the Liberals in order to ensure that the major party which seemed stronger in its resistance to Trump won the election.
Pierre Polievre, a talented politician who just a few months ago seemed a shoo-in to be the next prime minister, actually lost his own seat in Parliament.
From Newsweek: “His loss in Carleton, a federal electoral district in the Ottawa area of Ontario, signaled deep voter dissatisfaction in a region where Conservatives have traditionally dominated, and where a Liberal Party has not had a Member of Parliament in 60 years.” A friend of mine who pays closer attention to Canadian politics than I do notes that while Conservatives have held this seat for a long time, it was not truly a safe seat in terms of having a much higher percentage of Conservative voters; rather it was a narrowly-divided district and my friend says that “it was to Polievre’s credit that he did not look for a safer seat to run in.”
(If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Polievre runs again and wins the next time and may yet become prime minister, especially after Trump is out of office.)
Polievre made what some think was a significant strategic error of not pushing back enough against Trump or, to put it another way, standing up for Canada. I say that with the understanding that it would have been something of a challenge to do that while keeping conservative/rural voters who don't hate Trump motivated to vote. It's weird to see a Liberal candidate seem more patriotic than a Conservative. You wouldn't normally expect that in the US either but that's how it played out in Canada.) But even when the gadfly isn’t local, all politics is. And Polievre clearly (not just in retrospect) should have been more aggressive, as Carney was, against Trump’s insipid bullying (that Marco Rubio has shamefully been co-opted into rationalizing).
In his victory speech, Mark Carney said, "As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never ever happen. But we also must recognize the reality that our world has fundamentally changed."
This is obviously the rhetoric that wins elections. Polievre just wouldn’t do it forcefully enough and, to be fair, there was an extent to which he was (mostly unfairly) seen as a Trump ally just because he’s a conservative so it was more difficult for him to separate himself from the offensive bluster from the south.
Again, it's the voters' fault more than Trump's fault, but however you place the responsibility/blame it's going to cause years of bad government, high taxes, wokeness, and financially punishing anti-energy policies for our long-suffering neighbors to the north.
For more reading, here’s a good piece from
, one of my favorite publications: How Canada's Conservatives Blew the Election of a Lifetime