By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

On Monday, April 28^th, Canadians gave the Liberal Party its fourth successive mandate, albeit as another Minority Government but much stronger than in the last two elections, and, more importantly, with a different Prime Minister. Justin Trudeau who had been Prime Minister from 2015 was forced to resign in January 2025 on account of his perceived electoral unpopularity. Trudeau was succeeded by Mark Carney, 60 year old former Governor of the Bank of Canada and later the Bank of England, who dramatically revived the falling fortunes of the Liberal Party and secured its fourth mandate in ten years.

Mark Carney

The Liberal Party and Prime Minister Mark Carney owe their good fortunes to the presidential madness that is going on south of the border, in the United States of America. With his mercurial obsession over tariff’s and recurrent musings about making Canada America’s 51^st State, President Trump painted the backdrop to the Canadian election. Trump’s antics did not go down well with the Canadian public and in a rare burst of patriotism the people of Canada overarched their diversities of geography, language, culture, religion and ethnicity, and rallied round the Maple Leaf national flag with utmost determination to stick it to Trump and other ugly Americans of his ilk.

People and businesses in Canada shunned American products, stopped travelling to US holiday destinations and even took to booing the US national anthem at sporting events involving US and Canadian teams. The threat of economic pain due to a tariff war is real, but Canadians are daring to suffer pain rather than become a part of the US. And Justin Trudeau showed his best leadership in his last days as Prime Minister. Combining diplomatic skill and splendid teamwork with eloquent defiance, Trudeau succeeded in forcing Trump into what has since become Trump’s modus operandi in implementing his idiosyncratic tariff policy: tariff, one day; pause, the next day; and uncertainty, extended indefinitely.

100 Days of Disaster

What he began with Canada and Mexico, Trump has since writ large upon the whole world. His second term is already a term of chaos not only for America but also for the whole world economy. The US economy is officially in first quarter contraction. Another four months, it could be a manmade recession of what was in January an economy that was humming sound and was easily the best performing one in the world. It’s only 100 days of the second term, and what is left of it is looming as eternity. “Only 1,361 Days to Go,” is the cover page heading of the latest issue of the Economist. That sums up America’s current state of affairs and their global spillover effects.    

Americans are beginning to sour on Trump but there is no way for them to channel their frustrations and anger to force an immediate executive retreat. Trump has reduced the Republican Party to be its personal poodle and with Republics holding slender majorities in both the Congress and the Senate, the Legislative Branch of the US is now wholly beholden its Executive. The traditional wait is for the midterm Congress elections in two years. But Trump has no respect for traditions and conventions, and it would be two years too much before a Democratic majority in the two houses could bestir the Congress to check and balance the runway president.

The Judicial Branch is now playing catch up after the Supreme Court had given Trump near absolute immunity and enabled his second coming. The lower courts are applying the law as they should and stymieing Trump’s palpably illegal orders on everything from deporting immigrants, to downsizing government, and gutting the country’s university system. The tariff cases are slowly making their way to courts and they will add more confusion to the running of the economy before some kind of sanity is restored. Overall, by upending a system of government that has been constitutionally evolving over 200 years, Trump is providing a negatively sobering demonstration that no system is foolproof if a capable fool is elected to take over the reins of government.

Off-shore Populism

Fortunately for the world, other governments and polities have been quick in drawing the right lessons from the demonstration effects of Trump on their American cousins. Trump’s excesses have had a dampening effect on right wing populism in other countries. The Canadian elections are one such demonstration. Australia has just joined Canada in re-electing the incumbent Labour Party to another term in office, and rejecting the right wing Liberal opposition that made the mistake of drawing too much inspiration from Trump.

On the political spectrum, Canada’s Conservative Party and Australia’s Liberal Party are two tory peas in the same right wing pod, while the Liberal Party in Canada and Australia’s Labour Party are the two mainstream left-of-centre parties. In two remarkable electoral reckonings, both the Conservative Party leader in Canada, Pierre Poilievre, and the Australia’s Liberal Party leader, Peter Dutton, both lost their seats in parliament.   

In Europe, right wing populist parties are scaling down their rhetoric to avoid facing local backlashes to Trump’s American excesses. No populist leader anywhere wants to go where Trump is blindly heading, and no one is mad enough like him to think that imposing tariffs is the way to grow a national economy. In Hungary, its strongman Viktor Orbán after securing supermajorities in four elections since 2010, is facing the real possibility of defeat in the national elections next year. Orban is regressively anti-Eu while 86% of Hungarians want to strengthen their EU ties, and they are naturally getting tired of Orban’s smearing of the EU just like all Europeans are getting tired of Trump’s and his VP Vance’s anti-European rhetoric.

But Trumpists in America are not giving up on their right wing design for Europe. Both VP Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have embarked on a twitter-spat with Germany over the latter’s classification of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as right-wing extremist. America’s new Kissinger-lite has called the designation, “tyranny in disguise.”  Responded Germany: “We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.”

On the other hand, the local government and byelection results in the UK, where Neigel Farage’s new Reform Party scored impressive wins at the expense of both the disarrayed Tories and the governing Labour Party, clearly demonstrate both the fickleness of the electorate and the precarity of power. Countering Reform’s success is the growth in support shown for Liberal Democrats and Greens. Yet the electoral success of Reform UK underscores the death throes status of the Conservative Party and its new leader Kemi Badenoch of Nigerian Yoruba ancestry and the first black person to lead a national party. The immediate political challenge, however, is to the governing Labour Party and Prime Minister Keir Minister’s self-created dilemma of appeasing the right (and Trump) while appearing to be progressive.            

Canada Holds its Own

Canada, despite its proximity to the US, has never been a haven for Trump’s right wing populism. Yet there have always been and continue to be pockets of support for Trumpism in Canada, and they have found their sanctuary within the Conservative Party of Canada and behind its leader Pierre Poilievre, a 45 year old career politician who entered parliament in 2005 at the age of 25 and became Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition 18 years later, in 2023.

Clever and articulate with an ability to spin rhyming simplistic slogans, Poilievre cultivated his political base by feeding it on a diet of vitriolic and vulgar personal attacks and advertisements denigrating then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Poilievre identified himself with the January 2022 truck convoy protest that stormed Ottawa, cheered on by MAGA America, and he came to be seen as Canada’s Trump-lite, just like Peter Duttonnin Australia. Nonetheless, Poilievre’s attacks on Trudeau worked in the post-Covid climate of economic hardships and Trudeau’s popularity sank to the point that his own MP’s started calling for his resignation.

Alas for Poilievre, Trudeau’s resignation in January took away the one political foil or bogeyman on whom he had built his whole campaign. In addition, while his attacks on Trudeau diminished Trudeau’s popularity, it did not help enhance Mr. Poilievre’s image among Canadians in general. In fact, he was quite unpopular outside his base of devotees. More people viewed him unfavourably than those who viewed him favourably. Outside his base, he became a drag on his party. He would even go down to defeat in his own electorate and lose his seat in parliament that he had held for 20 years. Again, just like Australia’s Dutton.

Mr. Poilievre’s troubles began with the emergence of Mark Carney as the new Liberal Leader and Prime Minister – looking calm, competent and carrying the ideal resume of experience in dealing with the 2008 financial crisis as Governor of the Bank of Canada, and calming market nerves after the 2016 Brexit referendum as Governor of the Bank of England. Carnie, who had never been in formal politics before, seemed the perfect man to be Prime Minister to weather the economic uncertainties that President Trump was spewing from Washington. Almost overnight Liberal fortunes shot up and after resigning themselves to face a crushing defeat with Trudeau at the helm, Liberals were suddenly facing real prospects of forming a majority after two terms of minority government.

In the end, thanks to the quirky genius of the electorate, Liberals ended with 169 seats with 43.7% of the vote, and three seats short of a majority in the 343 seat national parliament, while the Conservative Party garnered 143 seats with 41.3% vote share. Both parties gained seats from their last election tallies, 15 new seats for Liberals and 16 for Tories, and, unusual in recent elections, the two parties garnered 85% of the total vote. The increases came at the expense of the two smaller but significant parties, the left leaning New Democratic Party (reduced from 24 seats to seven seats); and the Bloc Québécois (reduced from 45 seats to 23 seats) that contests only in the French majority Province of Quebec. The Green Party that had two MPs lost one of them in the election.

In the last parliament, New Democrats gave parliamentary support to the minority Trudeau government in return for launching three significant social welfare initiatives – a national childcare program, an income-based universal dental care program, and a pharmacare program to subsidize the cost of prescription drugs. These are in addition to the system of universal public health insurance for hospitals and physician services that has been in place from 1966, thanks again to the programmatic insistence of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

But the NDP could not reap any electoral reward for its progressive conscience and even its leader Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh Canadian, lost his seat in the election. The misfortune of the NDP and the Bloc Québécois came about because even their supporters like many other Canadians wanted to entrust Mark Carney, and not Pierre Poilievre, with the responsibility to protect the Canadian economy from the reckless onslaughts of Donald Trump.

Yet, despite initial indications of a majority government, the Liberals fell agonizingly short of the target by a mere four seats. The Tories, while totally deprived of what seemed in January to be the chance of a landslide victory, managed to stave off a Liberal sweep under Mark Carney. The answers to these paradoxes are manifold and illustrative of the reasonably positive functioning of parliamentary democracy within the framework of Canadian federalism. The system enables political energies and conflicts to be dispersed at multiple levels of government and spatial jurisdictions, and to be addressed with minimal antagonism between contending forces. Proximity to the US helps inasmuch as it provides a demonstration of the American pitfalls that others should avoid.