New Delhi: Mark Carney, the leader of the Liberal Party, has done the unthinkable—in a little over a month, the career civil servant has led the moribund party to victory in Canada’s federal elections.
On Monday, the Liberals were just short of the majority mark of 172, set to win over 43 percent of the votes, while the main opposition Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) won 41 percent of the votes.
The Liberal Party’s victory is a remarkable turnaround from a few short months ago when opinion polls guaranteed a total wipeout in favour of the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre.
Since then, however, two important events have taken place. The first was the resignation of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who had led the party since 2013 and the country since 2015, but had seen his popularity tank over the last few years. In March, Carney, a successful central banker, won the party’s leadership race.
On 5 January, the day before Trudeau announced his resignation, the Conservatives were polling at roughly 45 percent—25 percentage points ahead of the incumbent government. However, Poilievre, who became the leader of the CPC in September 2022, took a hit from Donald Trump being elected as the 47th US president.
Trump, who won in November last year and was sworn in this January, set his sights on Canadian sovereignty, repeatedly calling for it to become the 51st Canadian state, and unleashed a punishing set of tariffs on Ottawa. This changed the narrative around the Canadian elections, from one led by domestic dissatisfaction over the cost of the living crisis to the need for a strong counter force to Trump’s overtly threatening rhetoric.
As a result, after over two decades in politics, Poilievre not only lost the elections, but also his own electoral constituency of Carleton.
Trump’s impact was also evident in Carney’s victory speech, where the prime minister talked about “unity” as well as “Canadian values” such as humility and ambition. “These are values that I will do my best to uphold every day as your Prime Minister,” he said.
“As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. Never. But these are not, these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never ever happen. But we, but we also must recognise the reality that our world has fundamentally changed,” Carney further said.
He added: “We are once again at one of those hinge moments of history. Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade, anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.”
The focus on Trump and the deteriorating global order, was a message Carney honed in throughout the roughly 37-day campaign for the federal elections, against Poilievre, who remained focused on the domestic cost of living crisis.
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The Trump factor
While in 2015, when Liberal Party unseated the Conservatives after a decade in power, Trudeau ushered in what the former PM called the “sunny ways” of politics, his successor has been focused on promoting a politics of stability.
Around 77 percent of Canada’s total exports are to the US, while over 60 percent of its imports come from south of its border. Trump’s tariff threats, directed at Canada’s core automobiles and lumber industries, and the near-constant allegations that the US was bailing out Canada unleashed chaos.
Even Monday, as Canadians headed to the polls, Trump once again called for the country to become a part of the US. “Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st State of the United States of America,” he said on his social media platform Truth Social.
He added: “No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE! America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past.”
The Trump factor moved the needle in favour of Carney, who was a part of Canada’s recovery efforts during the 2007 global financial crisis, before becoming the governor of the Bank of England in 2013.
Born in 1965 in Edmonton, Alberta—a province that has been a bastion for the CPC for decades—Carney went on to study at Harvard University in the US, before completing his PhD in economics at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
In 2003, he moved into the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor, eventually steering Ottawa’s economy through the global recession. In 2016, as the first non-British head of the Bank of England, Carney also had to mitigate the economic damages when Britain exited the European Union (EU).
By positioning his economic career as a strength, Carney set out to make the elections a vote against Trump.
Poilievre too ‘Trump-y’
As a result, overnight, Poilievre’s pugilistic approach to politics, which worked when Trudeau was in power, became a hindrance because of its similarity to the rhetoric employed by Trump. His famous one-liners, such as “Axe the tax”, also resonated less.
Conservative leaders, such as Kory Teneycke, warned Poilievre against “acting too Trump-y”, urging him to pivot his message to counter the US tariffs or risk losing the elections. Teneycke was one of the strategists behind the Conservative majority victory in provincial elections earlier this year.
Nevertheless, under Poilievre’s leadership, the elections saw Conservatives hit the highest share of the popular vote in their history. The party, founded in 2003, never crossed the 40 percent threshold in any of the past federal elections. Its previous highest vote share was 39.6 per cent in the 2011 federal elections, which saw the Liberals wiped out to around 11 per cent of the total vote share.
The last time a leading Canadian party won 40 percent of the vote share was in the 2000 elections, when the Liberal Party led by Jean Chrétien stormed to power for a third term. The Liberals under Carney, beat Chrétien’s vote share, with at least 43.5 per cent of Canadians voting for the party in 2025, according to Elections Canada.
The last time the Conservatives or its predecessor the Progressive Conservatives won over 40 percent of the popular vote was almost four decades ago in 1988. Poilievre has indicated that he would continue to lead the CPC going forward, however, the party members do have measures that could be taken to force him out.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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