George Binette explores the extraordinary electoral recovery of the Liberals under its new leader.
As 2024 ended, Canada’s ruling Liberal Party appeared to be facing almost certain defeat at an election due to take place no late than this October. After nearly a decade as the nation’s prime minister Justin Trudeau looked the lamest of ducks and had little alternative but to tender his resignation as PM and party leader. By the time he stood down in early January, Trudeau’s Liberals were consistently trailing by more than 20 points in national opinion polls to Canada’s Tories under the right-wing culture warrior Pierre Poilievre.
In the subsequent election to replace Trudeau, the one-time Governor of the Bank of England and before that holder of the same title at the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, emerged victorious with more than 85% of Liberal members’ first preferences.
The 60-year-old Carney, Oxford PhD, a Harvard graduate, who was the second-string goalkeeper for the university’s ice hockey team, was a political neophyte. He had never held elected office prior to this spring, which may have proved a perverse advantage in the circumstances. Within days of his overwhelming win in the leadership contest, Carney called an early federal election for 28th April. The decision to go to the polls came as no surprise and was a highly calculated gamble since by March a remarkable reversal had occurred: the Liberals had inched ahead in opinion polls.
So, what had transpired, aside from a change of face atop the Liberal Party? The answer, of course, was Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20th January as the 47th US president and his repeated references over the weeks both before and after to Canada’s future as the ‘51st state’ of the USA. There had been patronising references to ‘Governor Trudeau’ and then came the very real threat of tariffs on Canadian exports to the US, some of which have taken effect.
Whatever Trump’s intention, his brazen arrogance touched the national equivalent of a raw nerve. Canadians cancelled planned visits to the US in their tens of thousands, a “Buy Beaver” app took off encouraging the population to purchase Canadian-manufactured products and an ice hockey tournament involving the two nations’ teams took on added significance with US players wilfully provoking fights on the rink in Montreal and Canadian fans booing the “Star Spangled Banner” en masse. (The Canadian side emerged the tournament’s eventual winner at Boston’s TD Garden).
Against this backdrop, the Carney/Liberal gamble largely paid off, even if the Liberals fell just short of an absolute majority in the slightly expanded, 343-seat Ottawa Parliament. While the final figures for the Liberals’ share of the popular vote fell slightly below the most optimistic opinion poll findings, the 43.7% recorded in last month’s election was up by more than 11 percentage points from the 2021 contest.
More than two-thirds (68.7%) of eligible voters turned out, a sharp uptick in electoral participation from the last federal poll in 2021. While far from record-breaking, the turnout suggested the degree to which Trump’s threats had shocked voters into action. Though Carney is less than an inspiring public speaker, his reputation for competent economic management in times of crisis won over a substantial swathe of a previously sceptical electorate.
Silver Linings for Disappointed Tories
Meanwhile, Tory leader Poilievre, having projected some Trump-adjacent positions, had to distance himself from the looming shadow of the US president. This proved a task too far, and Poilievre paid a personal price, losing his own seat to the Liberals’ Bruce Fanjoy in April’s election. (A Tory MP from Alberta province has offered to resign from his safe seat to pave a path for Poilievre’s early return to Parliament).
Certainly, the result was extremely disappointing for the Tories, given the considerable and sustained lead they had held only weeks before, but on the other hand their share of the popular vote (over 41%) as well as their presence in the House of Commons (up by 24 seats) improved significantly compared to four years before. Some Conservative pundits have seized on the results in Ontario’s ‘905 belt’, which offered solace to the Tories as evidence of an electoral realignment among sections of the province’s working class in metro Toronto’s suburbs.
NDP Meltdown
The results were, however, truly disastrous for the New Democratic Party (NDP), North America’s closest equivalent to a European-style social democratic party. At the start of the year, the NDP was a solid, if somewhat distant, third nationally, approaching and occasionally surpassing a 20% share in opinion polls. On 28th April, the NDP gained just 6.3% of the popular vote nationally, retained just seven seats – down from 24 prior to the last Parliament’s dissolution – and saw its leader, Jagmeet Singh, lose his own seat in British Columbia, where the NDP controls the provincial government. Unlike Poilievre, Singh has resigned from his party’s leadership after finishing third in his own riding (constituency).
In the context of the two-horse race that had developed in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, the NDP haemorrhaged votes across the country, almost exclusively to the Liberals. While the party’s time in a supply and confidence agreement with the Trudeau administration probably did its standing few favours, the deal, which yielded some modest reforms around dental care and prescription drug costs, was not the root cause of its humiliating performance on 28th April.
The election was also a bad one for the fledgling Green Party of Canada, which lost one of the two seats it had held previously and saw its national vote share fall below 1.5%. Otherwise, the contest may well have sounded a death knell for Maxime Bernier’s populist right People’s Party of Canada. More importantly, the soft nationalists of the Bloc Quebecois (BQ), which contests seats only in “la Belle Province” suffered losses, but still held 23 seats. From time to time, the Carney administration will almost certainly have to rely on tacit support from the BQ. There is, though, no prospect of overtures to the NDP at present.
Where next for PM Carney?
In the wake of his modest, but undeniable victory, Prime Minister Carney held his first press conference since the election on 2nd May. He is now due to meet Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday 6th May, while he committed to unveil his new Cabinet on 12th May with the 45th Ottawa Parliament holding its first full meeting on the 26th. In the meantime, he’s pledged tax cuts for the ‘middle class’ from 1st July as well as promising to retain and build on dental care and ‘pharmacare’ reforms alongside more investment in childcare provision. A housebuilding programme, with the Government pump-priming the private sector, will also feature in his agenda. At the same time, Carney pitched to his right with promises to toughen the criminal code and bail restrictions, as well as putting a cap on temporary immigration to Canada from 2027.
Carney’s most immediate challenge remains the negotiation of an altered relationship with the US under Trump. In other respects, though, he faces all too familiar problems which confront virtually all of the advanced capitalist economies in terms of the lasting impact of the post-Covid cost-of-living crisis, an acute shortage of affordable housing and in Canada’s case comparatively high and recently rising unemployment with the nation’s jobless rate at 6.7% in March.
George Binette, a Massachusetts native, is a retired union activist, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.
Image: https://www.heute.at/i/liberale-gewinnen-parlamentswahl-in-kanada-120105388/doc-1iq02bag94. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed
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