A Very American Election

In an un-American election, the United States has never been more influential.

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This upcoming Monday, Canadians will go to the polls to cast their ballot on the issue of the President of the United States. Yes, the matter of who will become prime minister will also be decided, but this campaign season has been dominated by one name more than any other, not Carney or Poilievre, but Trump. Which candidate will better face the newly returned president has become the most prominent issue of the campaign and will likely be the lasting legacy of this election in the public consciousness. Six months ago, the elephant in the room of Canadian politics was still Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Stalwartly declaring his intention to stand for a fourth term in office; the 45th Canadian general election was set to be a referendum on his near decade in office. It seemed clear that Canadians had already decided firmly against granting Trudeau another five years in office. However, following Donald Trump’s victory in November of 2024, his repeated remarks stating his desire to annex Canada, and his launching of an aggressive trade war, the Liberals saw a slim but growing hope of reversing their fortunes. If the narrative of the election could be shifted, so too might their electoral chances. On January 6th of this year (a somewhat odd date for Trudeau to decide to permanently associate himself with), Justin Trudeau resigned from his office and gave the Liberal Party their chance to change the narrative.

Following a leadership race which often revolved primarily around finding the candidate least associated with Trudeau, Mark Carney was appointed prime minister by roughly .33% of the Canadian population and launched the current election two weeks later. While Mark Carney is technically an incumbent prime minister, his nine days in office did not establish many clear trends for his governance, despite the best efforts of his campaign staff to bolster the scale of his sub-Scaramucci prime ministership. Carney himself has seemed to distance himself from the idea of running as an incumbent in order to further separate himself from Justin Trudeau in the mind of the Canadian electorate. This has not proved difficult for Carney, who was recognizable to only 7% of Canadians less than a year before becoming their prime minister. In this race, carefully crafted Conservative attacks on Trudeau and his administration have proved out of date, as the Conservatives have pivoted to attempts to link Carney and Trudeau similarly to Donald Trump’s campaign efforts to tie Kamala Harris to Joe Biden. The single most relevant asset for both party leaders has seemed to be boosting their Canadian patriotic bonafides. To do this, they have dipped into that most Canadian asset of all, anti-Americanism.

Both Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre have been leapfrogging over one another to see who can distance themselves further from Canada’s southern neighbor. Poilievre has long faced accusations of being too pro-American, yet Carney has more American credentials than any modern prime minister, having spent more time in the United States than possibly any previous Canadian leader. Both leaders have sought to aggressively downplay these narratives. Anti-Americanism is a consistent factor in Canadian culture and therefore its elections. In 2004, the issue of the Iraq War and Canada’s potential role in it certainly helped bolster Liberal support for newly incumbent prime minister Paul Martin and helped him narrowly hold onto power in that year’s election, yet it was by no means the dominant matter of the campaign. Two decades later, America has taken center stage in a way not seen in modern Canadian history.

Despite their increasingly hostile tone to America and indeed Americans as a whole—not merely their government—the Liberal Party has been benefiting from that oft-derided hallmark of American politics: a two-party system. This is poised to be the most “American” election in modern Canadian history, not merely due to the fact that one of the central issues of the campaign has become relations with Canada's southern neighbor, but also because this may be the most two-party election in Canada in decades.

It appears that the biggest losers of this election will not be the Conservatives or the Liberals, but instead Canada’s smaller parties. This is a trend predominantly observed on the left; the only significant minor right-wing party in Canada, the People's Party, has proved unable to win a single seat in Canada’s parliament since its founding in 2018. On the left, however, there is a far wider swatch of third parties, although this may no longer be the case come Tuesday morning. Long a perennial third wheel of federal politics, the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP) was once on the cusp of overtaking the Liberals, rising to become the official opposition in the 2011 election under the leadership of the charismatic Jack Layton. Yet following Layton’s untimely death, the party has stagnated under the leadership of Tom Mulcair and now Jagmeet Singh, today holding fewer than a quarter of the seats it did only a decade ago. Now, Mark Carney is on the cusp of dealing the NDP a blow from which it may never recover. Currently the party is polling poorly enough to potentially win no seats, and even if a rump caucus is able to return to Ottawa in the summer, the party’s own former leader has dubbed the organization an “afterthought.” The sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, too, has seen its support stagnate despite also once seeming poised to capitalize enormously upon a Liberal electoral collapse in Quebec. The Green Party, for its part, was not even permitted to attend the Leaders’ Debates due to its slate of candidates falling beneath the Commission's standards. While third parties have shown far more ability to rise to prominence in Canada than in her southern neighbor, this election may well push several of them into political irrelevance for the remainder of the decade, if not permanently. Fear of Donald Trump’s America has pushed left-wing Canadians who might once have voted their conscience into becoming concerned strategic voters, desperately hoping to deny Pierre Poilievre a victory they feel will jeopardize their idea of what makes Canada great.

This election will likely prove to be one of the more important in modern Canadian history for its potential to remove previously important players in Canadian politics from relevance. Only a few months ago, it had seemed likely that the 45th Canadian federal election would be a significant one, but for vastly different reasons. For the past four decades, Canada has seen major electoral changes roughly every ten years. This seems logical; a decade seems a reasonable amount of time for a government to grow fully stale in the eyes of voters. Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives’ near decade in power came to a close in 1993, with the razing of that party electorally, ushering in over a decade of Liberal leadership under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. It took a little over a decade for voters to tentatively oust the Liberals in favor of Stephen Harper’s newly formed Conservative Party and another decade for Harper to find himself replaced by resurgent Liberals. Now, as the Liberals’ time in office draws close to the ten year mark, it had seemed likely that the trend would continue, and the Tories would return to power. However, it appears that Donald Trump—as per his modus operandi—has thrown a hand grenade into the status quo. His initial calls for Canada to become the 51st state were met with shocked laughter, which soon dissipated as President Trump doubled down upon this rhetoric. He soon followed this with tariffs that could reduce Canada’s economy by over 2.5%. The President has also repeatedly declared a lack of interest in the outcome of the election, seeming to see no difference between either leader and asserting that he would likely be able to negotiate better with Mark Carney rather than Pierre Poilievre, a narrative the Conservatives have used to the best of their ability as they have rapidly pivoted towards their own softly anti-American campaign. To the Liberals, Donald Trump has given Mark Carney a platform that this campaign's staffers wouldn’t even dare fantasize about, allowing him to paint himself as the defender of Canada against evil right-wing, corporate American aggression. The paranoid fears of a certain type of middle-class, middle-aged Canadian have all but been confirmed and provided the Liberals the chance to not just avoid their previously likely decimation but entirely reverse it.

Should the Liberals win an outright majority—as seems no longer merely possible but increasingly likely—the trend will have fully been bucked. Mark Carney will have a mandate to rule for a full five-year term, without fear of being forced into a snap election like Paul Martin, 20 years previously. Running a surprisingly slim domestic campaign, it seems likely that this ultimately will mean a continuation of the majority of Justin Trudeau's policies and initiatives. Barring the abandonment of electoral albatrosses such as the carbon tax, this will translate to a further shift towards a more left-leaning, government-funded and subsidized Canada. For many Canadian voters, strong Canadian opposition to America matters far more than change on the home front. The chance for major left-wing parties to benefit from hatred for the 47th President has also not only been noticed in Ottawa. In Canberra, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called for an election to be held a month after Canada’s. A sharp rise in the polls for the ruling Labor Party and a decline for Australia's right leaning Liberals can be observed to have occurred following Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the UK, Norway, and other Western democracies, there was a clear bump for left-leaning parties following Donald Trump’s inauguration. While these may not all be able to be directly attributed to the president, his impact on the global political stage is hard to overstate.

In an election in which likely over a third of the votes have already been cast, Trump’s shadow will remain the dominant narrative of the race regardless of any last-minute surprises that might take the spotlight away from him. Come Tuesday morning, Canada might find itself looking at a far more two-party parliament than it has seen in modern history. Determining how strong a mandate the victor will have to negotiate with the United States will be the issue endlessly debated by pundits, politicians, and indeed by the victor himself. For an election seemingly built around who loves the Maple Leaf more, the Stars and Stripes have hardly ever loomed larger.