In a couple of recent posts, I described how Canada’s Liberals won that nation’s federal election last month. Here, we turn to some of the leading theories as to why they won. Five explanations are each briefly discussed, from least plausible to most.
5. Tory leader Pierre Poilievre should have secured an endorsement from President Trump. This theory is championed only by those with no feeling for the politics of the Great White North. Donald Trump is viewed unfavorably by almost 80 percent of Canadians. These numbers long predate his 2024 re-election campaign. Tory voters are divided on this question of how they feel about Trump. Other Canadians are largely united; they don’t like him. For Poilievre to have flown down to Mar-a-Lago, kissed the ring, and be shown smiling and shaking hands with Trump in the middle of a Canadian election campaign would have been politically suicidal. The Conservatives would have done even worse than they did in the end.
4. Poilievre should have campaigned more forcefully from the start against Trump’s threats of US annexation. This theory is the opposite of the previous one, and a bit more credible. Tory Premier Doug Ford of Ontario, for example, secured a thumping re-election win at the provincial level on February 27th hammering away at the big bad Americans. The problem for the federal Conservatives is that Canada is not Ontario, Poilievre is not Ford, and being Prime Minister is not the same as being a provincial premier. Given Poilievre’s broader responsibilities, he did not have the luxury of simply slamming Donald Trump while running for the highest office in the land. Nor is the base of Poilievre’s party located in Ontario. The Tory 21st century base lies in Western Canada, among rural and small-town conservative populists friendly toward the United States. And while these voters have no interest in being annexed by America, their lead target of antipathy is an eastern, urban, left-wing elite—not the United States. This put Poilievre in an impossible situation. Under the circumstances, there was no way for him to accommodate the Tory base, swing voters, and Donald Trump all at the same time.
3. National conservative populists are permanently doomed to lose in Canada. If this is taken to mean that MAGA is doomed to lose in Canada, that’s true. After all, the purpose of conservative populists north of the border isn’t to make America great again—it’s to make Canada great again. And to be sure, national conservatives face more of an uphill struggle in the True North than in many other Western countries. (More on this in my next post.)
Having said that, any blanket statement that patriotic conservative populists cannot win a Canadian federal election is clearly false. For the most recent evidence, look at the national polls as recently as January 5th of this year. Tory leader Poilievre is a conservative populist who held a commanding and growing lead over the Liberals for more than two years. He was on track to win in a landslide. Then fate intervened. The following two maps reveal the difference between early January and the final election result:
In this case, fate came in the form of Donald Trump. That brings us to the second-most important factor in the recent Canadian election.
2. President Trump’s tariff campaign together with his talk of Canada as the 51st state. It was hardly inevitable, say a year ago, that any sitting US president would repeatedly state he was serious about annexing Canada, and was ready to use economic coercion to do it. But by late January, after his second inauguration, Trump had Canadians’ attention, and not in a good way. This is now well understood within the United States, including by Republicans: The president’s language toward Canada eventually catalyzed an astonishing popular reaction in that country.
Still, in the fickle sport that is politics, while every surfer needs a good wave to ride, you might also say that every wave needs a good surfer. Donald Trump provided the wave. That takes us to the single most important factor in the recent Canadian election result: a surprisingly skilled rider with a reliable board. I’ll say more about this in the final entry of the series.
The post Why the Liberals Won: Five Theories appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
