‘We Are All Canadians!’

Canada’s “natural governing party” won re-election for the fourth time in a row, led this round by a wealthy banking expert. Occupy Wall Street 2.0 this was not.

But the comeback that Mark Carney’s Liberals staged against Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who had built a commanding lead by echoing many themes and tactics employed by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, was read by many observers as maybe a bit revolutionary. At least a key victory in a global fight against autocratic illiberalism.

Anticipating the outcome in the Guardian on election eve, noted British author and historian Timothy Garton Ash sounded his bugle:

“A quarter-century ago, when the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001, the editor of Le Monde wrote a famous banner headline: ‘We are all Americans!’ Today, friends of liberty the world over should say ‘We are all Canadians!’”

The old order has been swept away by Trump and his belligerent America-first approach to global relations, Garton Ash wrote, but Canada matters in terms of what comes next.

“A liberal democratic constellation that is not fundamentally secured by the U.S.... will be something very different from what we knew between 1945 and 2025.

“Even the geography will change. Canada, for example, which once seemed — in the nicest possible way — somewhat peripheral to world affairs, comfortably tucked up there between a friendly America and a frozen Arctic, now suddenly looks like a frontline state. One of the world’s most liberal countries is, beside Ukraine, one of the most directly threatened by Trump’s anti-liberal assault. And the thawing Arctic is a major new theatre of international competition.

“Fortunately, it looks as if Canada is going to have a government that is not just Liberal in name but also combatively liberal in nature.”

At the New York-based, left-leaning the Nation, Canadian Jeet Heer read the big picture this way:

“Canada falls into the broader pattern we are seeing in many democracies: The centre-left vote is consolidating behind a pro-system politics (the Democrats under Biden and Harris, Labour under Kier Starmer, Renaissance under Emmanuel Macron) while the right consolidates under an anti-system politics (embodied by figures such as Donald Trump, Poilievre, and Marine Le Pen).

“In Canada, the liberal centrism continues to hold, but only tenuously, and whether it can ever decisively defeat the populist right remains an open question.”

Drill down, as they say, and such questions quickly rise to the surface. Take, for example, Carney’s promotion of fossil fuel extraction during our last gasp of hope to stem the climate crisis.

As Fatima Syed and Shannon Waters write at the B.C.-based environment-focused news site the Narwhal, “While Carney repeatedly emphasized the urgency and importance of natural resource and energy projects on the campaign trail, he also said he would not force projects through against the will of Indigenous nations. How he will fast-track projects while fulfilling the constitutional duty to consult remains to be seen.”

Carney campaigned for building more pipelines and opening new markets for the oilsands. Yet, “unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals used space in their platform to discuss how to help Canadians prepare for and cope with extreme weather.” Carney has promised a Youth Climate Corps, 10 new national parks, heightened wildfire response and “continuing to fund Indigenous-led conservation projects.”

Syed and Waters conclude: “Carney’s biggest challenge will be proving to voters that a former central banker is the one to address the acute pocketbook challenges voters are worried about today — while manifesting these big environmental and energy proposals Canada needs to be ready for the future.”

Musings on the right

What do minds of more right-leaning persuasions make of the moment? Looniness reached epic levels as the disgraced conspiracy-peddling fraudster Alex Jones invited Ezra Levant on his show. Their conclusions, billboarded on X:

In saner corners of the conservative universe, David Frum dusted off his Canadian pedigree in the Atlantic, opining that voters identify Liberals “as the more America-skeptical of Canada’s two major parties. When Canadians feel warm toward the United States, they look to Conservatives to bind the two countries more closely together. When they feel afraid, they look to Liberals to lock the gates against their southern neighbour.”

Free-trader Frum worried that a revved-up Canadian populace might be all too eager to battle Trump tariff for tariff.

He offered a friendly tutorial to his adopted fellow Americans. “Other countries have politics, too.” And so, “Trump’s determination to create a protected and controlled U.S. economy invites other nations to follow the same mutually impoverishing path. Even the weak have weapons. The targets of Trump’s economic aggression will accept greater hardship to preserve their dignity than American voters will for the privilege of acting like arrogant menaces.”

At the conservative Canadian website the Hub, co-founder and former Stephen Harper aide Sean Speer saw “causes for optimism” in the Conservative party’s “gains with new and different voter groups, its big numbers in the 905-area code, and the campaign’s overall energy — including the unprecedented rally attendance.”

He seemed to take solace in the fragile underpinnings of Canada’s new minority government.

“If Canadian voters — particularly older ones — went to the polls in search of order and stability, it’s far from obvious that that’s what they’ve gotten. At the time of writing, the Liberal party under Mark Carney will have a narrow win in the popular vote and a plurality of parliamentary seats but it’s hard to argue that it’s a decisive victory. It’s more rightly seen as an uncertain one.”

But Speer worried about Poilievre’s lopsided base. “If the Conservatives will have to compete in two-party races in the future, do they have depth of support — particularly among urbanites and women — to consistently compete in national elections? Put differently: if the party had conceived of the latest race as a two-party competition with the Liberals, how would it have changed its message, messengers, policies, ideas, and so on?”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, in an election-eve interview with U.S.-based Politico, was not nearly as delicate. He skewered Poilievre for failing to build bridges with regional Conservative leaders, including himself, and narrow-casting his pitch. “But there’s four or five different types of conservatives across the country. You’re focusing on your base when you should be focusing maybe on other areas like Ontario.”

Veteran Canadian political journalist Paul Wells, on his Substack, took his own stick to Poilievre, who “lost his riding, convincingly.”

“The voters’ rebuke of Poilievre in Carleton was personal and richly earned,” Wells wrote. “He was their MP for most of his adult life. Yet he refused to use the time they gave him to learn basic lessons about what a parliament is for. He persuaded himself that those thousands of good people working within 10 blocks of his desk in the Commons were extras in his little Instagram dramas. Perhaps, in his search for easier markers elsewhere, he will pause in a carefully isolated corner somewhere to think about that.”

Time magazine was just as harsh, saying Poilievre’s tumble from front-runner heights made him the “Ron DeSantis of Canada.” Why summon the spectre of the culture-warring Florida governor’s failed drive to become the Republican presidential nominee? “The two men are an object lesson in the pitfalls of trying to do Trumpism without Trump.”

Views from Alberta

In Alberta, where during the election Ottawa-bashing Premier Danielle Smith chose to murmur about secession while making personal entreaties to Trump, Edmonton-based political writer Dave Cournoyer saw a chance for a shift in the wind.

“As the two MPs from the governing party in Alberta, it can be expected that Corey Hogan and Eleanor Olszewski will find themselves with cabinet roles or parliamentary responsibilities. This gives the governing Liberals an opportunity to reset their relationship with Albertans — a role that might be particularly well-suited to Hogan, a whip-smart political strategist, communicator and podcaster who worked as the head of the Alberta government’s communications branch under premiers Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney.”

On her Substack, political scientist Lisa Young offered a similar view. “This is a reminder that local campaigns matter. Hogan’s clever messaging ‘Confederation is worth fighting for’ captured the zeitgeist of the election and his positioning of himself in contrast to [Premier Smith] was effective in an electoral district with lots of public sector employees (as it’s home to the University of Calgary and the Foothills Medical Center).

“The Liberals haven’t had great luck with MPs from Alberta lasting in cabinet,” writes Young, “so the newly elected Hogan and Olszewski offer another chance for them to get it right. And this will be important in the face of [Preston] Manning/Smith’s separatist musings.”

Pondering polarization

As Tyee senior editor Paul Willcocks concluded, the election paints a picture of a nation polarized and tilting towards becoming a two-party state. “That would be bad, as we’ve seen in the U.S. People are forced to hold their noses and vote for a party they don’t really support to block an alternative they consider even worse.”

For the people at Fair Vote Canada, the remedy is to shift to proportional representation.

“The results of this election demonstrate, once again, that Canada’s archaic voting system is failing voters.

“Canadians on the left and right flocked to the two big parties, with many motivated to block the other side from winning a majority.

“The outcome may be more proportional than usual (similar to the United States, where the vote share and seat share closely match) but it leaves Canadians as divided as ever. First-past-the-post also makes regional polarization worse.

“In Alberta, the Conservatives won 34 seats, the Liberals two and the NDP one. With a proportional system, Conservatives would have won 24, Liberals 11 and the NDP two.

“In Saskatchewan the Conservatives won 13 seats, the Liberals one and the NDP none. With proportional representation, the Conservatives would have won nine, the Liberals four and the NDP one.

“First-past-the-post also denied NDP and Green voters any seats in Ontario, whereas a proportional result would have seen the NDP pick up six seats and the Greens one.

“Moving closer to a two-party system is not the answer for our democratic deficit.”

Time will tell if Canadians lit a beacon for liberal democratic revival around the world that observers like Garton Ash want to see.

Making that happen will depend on how our political climate evolves — and that rests on how we share information and make decisions as citizens.

You won’t read much that’s real about this election on U.S. tycoon Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook because his trillion-dollar Meta has blocked Canadian news on his platforms. At the Washington, D.C.-based Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, deputy managing editor Layla Mashkoor writes:

“During Canada’s short-lived 35-day election cycle, candidates took their campaigns to cities, towns, and online platforms to win over voters. One distinguishing feature of Canada’s information ecosystem is the absence of news content on Facebook and Instagram, following Meta’s decision to block it in response to the Canadian Online News Act. This is particularly noteworthy as Facebook was reported to be the platform most used by Canadians.

“Exacerbating the issue was Meta’s January 2025 decision to end its fact-checking programs, which played an important role in maintaining protective safeguards against information manipulation — safeguards that are even more necessary in the face of proliferating AI-enabled deceptions.

“Canadian Meta users were left to navigate an uncertain landscape, one without adequate protections but rife with potential risks and deliberate harms. This creates a concerning precedent, suggesting that platform resistance may create information vulnerabilities that can be exploited during critical democratic processes.

“As the tactics of information manipulation evolve, democratic societies must foster adaptable, evidence-based responses that protect electoral integrity and preserve the principles of open, free discourse. This requires ongoing innovation in both policy and technology to stay ahead of emerging threats while upholding the values of democracy.”