One of the most inexplicable things that Trump has done (and he has done so many that it is hard to keep score) is him going out of his way to insult and demean Canada, America’s long-time friend, ally, and neighbor. One can understand Trump doing that to another long-time friend and neighbor Mexico because that country is full of, well, Mexicans, and thus in MAGA eyes an inferior people. But Canada is largely affluent, white, English-speaking, and (at least nominally) Christian, just the kind of people Trump likes. So why go after Canada, claiming that they will become the 51st state and referring to their then prime minister Justin Trudeau as ‘governor’? Does he think that speaking of them as potentially the 51st state is some kind of compliment to them, of their desirability?
If so, he has badly miscalculated. Canada goes to the polls on April 28 and at the beginning of the year it looked like like the Conservatives would cruise to an easy victory, crushing the incumbent Liberals. But since Trump took office, things have changed dramatically, and now it looks like the new leader of the Liberals Mark Carney, by taking a defiant line in response to Trump’s threats, might well lead his party to victory over the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre.
Liberal pollster Frank Graves noticed this shift before others did and in an interview he explained what he thinks is going on. He says that Poilievre had the support of about 45% of the voters that consisted of about 25% MAGA-type people sympathetic to Trump but the other 20% were what he calls lapsed Liberals who were simply sick of Trudeau and were looking elsewhere. It is the support of this latter group that the Conservatives are losing, who are heading back to the Liberals because of Carney’s nationalist rhetoric compared to Poilievre’s wimpy response.
Another major force which interacts with that is disinformation. The average Conservative supporter is not a little more likely to approve of Trump. They’re 25 times more likely. They’re 25 times more likely to have a favorable outlook on the Freedom Convoy than Liberals, and they are almost on that scale more likely to believe all kinds of disinformation — for example, governments are intentionally concealing the real numbers of deaths from vaccines, or the rise in forest fires is due to activist arsonists setting them, or more favorable attitudes to Russia, beliefs that climate change is false.
About 25 percent of voters would fall into that category, all with the exception of those who voted for the People’s Party, which has largely been swallowed up by the Conservatives under Mr. Poilievre. They look a lot like Trump voters.
But for Mr. Poilievre to get to the 45 points — he attracted 20 percent of voters who didn’t share those characteristics. They weren’t institutionally mistrustful. They were status quo conservatives. They were lapsed liberals who are sick of Trudeau, and they don’t believe that climate change is a hoax, and they like the country. That’s where a lot of the growth for the Liberals happened. Some of those started coming back.
…Mr. Poilievre had been nurturing a lot of these populist forces quite effectively. He had run a very disciplined campaign, “Trudeau bad, Canada’s broken, axe the tax,” which he repeated like a mantra with discipline and effectiveness. It worked well, but all of a sudden, as Canadians are recoiling from this existential threat to our sovereignty, that stuff started ringing hollow for a lot of Canadians, and he had trouble pivoting. First of all, it’s hard to abandon a framework which has been really effective when you’re that close to winning the government.
But the second problem was that he was compromised, because within his core constituency, this 25 percent, they weren’t alarmed by these things. They liked Trump. They didn’t think it would be a bad idea if we were to become the 51st state. And so it became difficult for him to restyle himself as Captain Canada. I think it made it much more difficult for him to pivot.
…What I saw was that the overall outlook on this election — and I know that before this, it was not hopeful — shifted to hope. Even though Canadians were very, very anxious and worried about tariffs and annexation and what the New World Order might look like and how they would fit into it, they actually had a really huge resurgence of hope.
It says yeah we’ll do what it takes to maintain our sovereignty and to reforge relationships in a world that’s going to be a lot different, and we know it’s going to be painful and risky, but we feel optimistic and hopeful that we can rise to this challenge.
Poilievre’s plight is similar to that of the Republican party. It has sold its soul to Trump and now, even if public opinion starts to shift strongly away from them (and there are signs that that is happening already as I will detail in a future post), they cannot distance themselves from him without alienating the hard core MAGA crowd.
It will be interesting to see what happens in Canada on the 28th.
This analysis seems somewhat biased and very incomplete. It’s correct that there is a return of the Liberals who were tired of Trudeau but the Trump effect is mostly on third parties. The NDP and the Bloc Quebecois have lost a lot of support and all that loss is a gain for the Liberals. People hate Poilievre (who is seen as a Trump light) more than they like their party and the solution for blocking Poilievre and having a strong opposition to Trump is seen as the Liberals lead by Carney.
In the polls, the Conservatives are basically back to where the have historically been with most of their support in the prairies while the Liberals are much higher and are likely to make major gains in Ontario and Quebec where not only they may take over some seats from the NDP and the Bloc but also from the Conservatives where the progressive vote won’t be split between 2 or 3 parties (or more).
So the Trump effect is coupled with the Carney effect (who is not Trudeau and seems like a very competent person to go against Trump and all he brings) to produce something that is very polarized and may bring something very close to a two-party system in the parliament after the elections.
There’s a lot more that could be said about the campaign on both sides with Poilievre unable to change quickly from his Trudeau bashing mode and adapt to the new reality of Trump and Carney and Carney’s lack of political experience and somewhat weak French speaking skills. But that, and more, can be found from better sources than myself from real political analysts who cover Canadian politics.
It is weird to find myself in the midst of these things, though my father the (official) historian says it’s always like this -- we always live in historical times, the non-events are later called out as important in the history books and we’d be saying, “wait, no, that didn’t matter, what mattered was (some other thing)” -- the truth is, it all matters and none of it does.
Marcus Ranum @ 3
Those goddamn butterflies are at it again.
Marcus Ranum @ 3
BTW what period will future historians be most fascinated by? The Dubya years or the Trump/system collapse years?
@Jean:
Agreed, I suspect we’re going to see a lot of that. Canada has had ‘ABC’ elections before (Anything But Conservative) and this is going to be a pretty extreme one of those; the only minor party that’s really likely to benefit from that is the People’s Party, which is for those who think the Conservatives are too centrist. And when you get right down to it, Poilievre was made leader of the party after their loss in the previous election mostly in an attempt to staunch the loss of the extremists exiting rightward to Bernier’s vanity project.
Poilievre has tried painting Carney as being the same as Trudeau, but I don’t think that’s landing with anybody who has paid even the slightest attention. Carney’s a banker for crying out loud; forty years ago he’d probably have been an old school ‘Red Tory’ in what was then the Progressive Conservative Party. Which honestly gives him good ‘stable hand on the till’ vibes to counter the chaos going on, and that’s something that people go for.
@birgerjohansson:
Any historians who take a longer view are probably going to go further back that; starting with Nixon courting the disaffected racist vote with his Southern Strategy (and the fact that Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News and the force behind a lot of the early Conservative Talk Radio strategy, was a Nixon staffer), through Reagan who actively partnered with the growing Religious Right (when they started using the cover story of wanting to overturn Roe v Wade as a figleaf over what they actually wanted to overturn, US v Bob Jones University and Brown v Board of Education), through Bush II whose ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ cronies opened the door to a plausibly deniable fascist takeover, to Trump who has never really cared about plausible deniability or subtlety. With a through-line of Democrats like Clinton, Obama, and Biden, who were fine with hanging on to the extra executive power the Republicans had claimed and didn’t care enough to fix the structural problems being exploited, casually assuming that the ‘politics as normal’ pendulum was inevitably going to swing back to them.
This Canadian isn’t particularly hopeful. I think the Liberals likely form a majority government with the Conservatives as the official opposition and all other parties without official party status. When you don’t have official party status you typically can’t ask questions in parliament. What that means is 4 years of neoliberal bullshit which will result in worsening conditions for working Canadians that will cause a rise in sentiment towards the Conservative party for the next election. I despise the Conservatives, and yes, a Liberal majority is better than a Conservative one, but let’s remember that the “stable hand on the till” is the hand of a banker, you know, the people who fucked the economy in 2008. My entire life the Liberals and Conservatives have taken turns screwing over the working class and Canadians still can’t bring themselves to vote for anything else. I’m really sick of this back slappin’ ain’t Canadians great bullshit. We vote against our own self interest as often as Americans do.
Sorry for the depressing rant, but this has been a very frustrating election cycle, Conservative tears aside.
At the federal level Canada has a single “conservative” party, the CPC, and 3 “liberal” parties, LPC, NDP and Green.
This has resulted in the liberal vote being split (not evenly) between the 3 parties.
So while the majority of the population votes liberal, the CPC can field more votes than the top ranked liberal party (the LPC, Liberal Party of Canada).
This has not happened in the last 10 years as the CPC has been taken over by the alt right MAGA crowd and this has scared away normal, sane voters.
In this election most of the uptick for the LPC has come from the other 2 liberal parties, NDP and Green.
Add to this our antiquated first past the post electoral system which allows a party that gets as little as 35% of the vote to form a majority.
A good poll aggregation site is 338Canada.com, currently showing the LPC to get 190 seats (172 needed for a majority) and the CPC to get 120 seats, if the election were held today.
We have our share of fringe parties as well, the most notable being the PPC, Peoples Party of Canada, which attracts those MAGA voters who consider the CPC to be too woke.
We also have the regional Bloc Québécois which is devoted to Quebecois nationalism and is on track to get 20 seats.
I was planning on voting NDP or Green but when Mr. Carney threw his hat into the ring I joined the Liberal party to vote for him as the new leader and I plan to cast my vote for him, technically in our parliamentary system we vote for our local candidate and the leader of the party that wins the most seats becomes the PM.
This is why Mr. Carney is now PM Carney despite not being elected as a member of parliament.
steve oberski @8:
Dunno about ‘most’. A lot, definitely. But I think there were also squishy centrist Liberals who were sick of Trudeau and saw Poilievre as the best alternative, then pivoted when Trudeau quit. Strengthening my belief that most voters (in any country) don’t pay much attention to actual policies and their consequences.
@steve oberski:
Technically, the leader of the party that wins the most seats gets the first chance to become the PM. If there’s no clear majority, the Governor General will ask the largest party first. Assuming they say ‘yes’, we wait to see how long the government actually lasts. If the government falls over quickly, the Governor General can just ask the next-largest party about forming a coalition.
In practice this has never actually happened, and the closest it came to happening was back during Harper’s run as PM where he literally shut down the government in the face of the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc agreeing to form a voting coalition against him, rather than risk a non-confidence vote loss and the coalition taking over. This was the time when a great many Canadians first learned the meaning of the word ‘prorogue’, because it was basically the first time the PM had decided to just ask the Governor-General to send Parliament on vacation as a strategic move to prevent his government from falling.
(For the Americans out there, the Governor-General is technically the local representative of the King and also technically head of the what would be considered the equivalent of the Executive Branch, such as the armed forces; but they mostly only have ceremonial power aside from a few specific situations, such as handling transitions between governments. As a result of this, the Governor-General is appointed and not elected at the same time as members of Parliament. So yes, the Governor-General has to formally sign any legislation before it becomes law, and only the Governor-General could send Parliament on a vacation, but also the Governor-General will almost always accede to any reasonable request from the Prime Minister. The last time there was a serious fight between the Prime Minister and the Governor-General was the King-Byng affair… and that affair is also why the GG is nowadays always appointed from within Canada rather than being appointed from Britain as had happened previously.)
Your assumption that there will be future historians, and furthermore that they will be able to choose their research areas and findings, strikes me as extremely optimistic!
Even when it looked like the Conservatives would win several polls indicated this was because people wanted Trudeau gone, and not because they liked Poilievre. His public approval ratings weren’t much better than Justin Trudeau’s were.
The People’s Party of Canada is a vanity party led by Maxime Bernier. Bernier was a cabinet minister under Stephen Harper, and was a front runner in the 2017 Conservative Party leadership campaign until Andrew Scheer won. When he lost he didn’t do the smart thing and hang around to influence the party. Instead he stormed off and formed the PPC, which has failed to come anywhere close to winning a riding, even the ones Bernier has run in.
Bernier was Harper’s short lived Minister of Foreign Affairs, who resigned in 2008 after he left classified NATO documents at the apartment of his girlfriend Julie Couillard. It didn’t help that Couillard had been the girlfriend of a member of the Quebec branch of the Hell’s Angels.
A lot of Canadians don’t understand the role of the Governor General. During the 2022 Ottawa occupation one group of occupation supporters wanted the Governor General and the Senate to force Trudeau from office. If they had tried to do so it would have effectively been a coup, since they don’t have the power to force a Prime Minister from office. Which they knew, and had no interest in the idea of the kooks.
if you have access to CBC Radio One, or the CBC listen app,
you can hear the leaders debate in English starting at 19:00 today.
probably also available all over the internet.
as in yesterday’s debate in French, you can expect
the other three leaders to focus on Mark Carney.
POTUS4547 imho is sufficiently incompetent in
economics to understand the implications of
his chaotic tariffs.