Carney's Canadian Comeback
Oh, Canada. While it's neither my home nor native land, you can feel some true patriot love coming from America's neighbor to the north. The past year and a half have been a rollercoaster.
Justin Trudeau's Liberal party was down twenty points and looking at a generational wipeout at the next election. The current Prime Minister, Mark Carney, did not even have a seat in Parliament heading into Canada's 2025 election. The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, looked like a man already measuring the drapes at Rideau Cottage, which is Canada's equivalent of the White House. Conservative victory was not just expected. It was being treated as a foregone conclusion by most of the people paid to have opinions about Canadian politics after ten years of Liberal government and, by the end, a pretty unpopular Prime Minister who was starting to rack up the scandals.
Then, in about three months, everything changed.
Justin Trudeau had been prime minister since 2015. By late 2024, he was losing what little mandate he had to govern. The centre-left New Democratic Party, or NDP, had pulled out of their supply-and-confidence agreement — where a smaller party agrees to support a minority government on key votes without formally joining the cabinet. When the NDP walked away from that deal, Trudeau's minority government lost the floor it had been standing on (and I'm not talking about Centre Bloc's renovation). His approval numbers had fallen to levels that made governing, let alone winning, look like wishful thinking. Multiple Liberal Members of Parliament were publicly calling for him to go. In January 2025, he announced his resignation.
That resignation triggered two things simultaneously: a Liberal leadership race (the selection of a new leader of the party in charge, who would instantly become the Prime Minister) and a period of prorogation. Unless you're a politics nerd like me, that term is probably not in your vocabulary. Prorogation is a formal suspension of Parliament that pauses all legislative business and gives an incoming government time to organize before returning to face Canada's House of Commons.
Naturally, the Conservatives immediately called for an election rather than waiting out the process. But the Liberal Party controlled that schedule, and started looking for someone who didn't carry Trudeau's baggage — which in early 2025, after a decade of Trudeau's control over the party, was considerable and well-documented.
The party then did something unusual. They picked someone who had never been elected to anything. Ever.
Mark Carney is a former governor of two central banks: the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, covering the global financial crisis, and then the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, covering both the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the opening phase of the pandemic. He managed financial crises at an institutional level most politicians only read about in briefing documents. His native language is economic theory, not sound bites, and under normal circumstances that would be a significant liability on the campaign trail. Voters today typically want personality over credentials. It just plays better on social media. Just look to the US for evidence of that.
But 2025 was not normal.
The newly re-elected American president, Donald Trump, had imposed twenty-five percent tariffs on Canadian exports, targeting steel, aluminum, and a range of manufactured goods that flow across the border as part of deeply integrated North American supply chains built up over decades. He was openly musing about making Canada the fifty-first American state, not as a negotiating metaphor, but as something he appeared to mean. That threat was made more credible because at the same time he was talking about adding another star to the flag, he was talking about invading another Canadian neighbor: Greenland. Both Canada and Denmark, Greenland's owner, took those remarks seriously. So did currency markets and Canadian exporters.
That rhetoric landed very differently in Canada than Trump wanted. Instead of energizing the Conservatives on the right of Canadian politics, it shook the Liberals out of the post-Trudeau fog just in time for an election. Canadian nationalism, which tends to be like most other Canadian exports — quiet and polite, and dare I say hilarious like SCTV — suddenly had something to push against. Polling shifted faster than almost any political movement in Canadian history.
The question voters were asking stopped being "which party do I normally vote for" and became: who can actually handle this? Who has done this before? Who can sit across a table from Trump in Washington and hold the line to protect Canada's interests?
Carney's election as leader, and therefore Prime Minister, in March 2025 immediately reset the terms of the election. This was not Liberals versus Conservatives, which was unfortunate for the Conservatives, since they had built their entire campaign around Trudeau and his perceived failings. This was about who had the credibility to manage an unprecedented economic confrontation with Canada's largest trading partner. A central banker who had managed the Bank of England through Brexit — the last major trade disruption of comparable scale in the English-speaking world — made that argument in a way a career politician simply could not. He had actually done the job. Stabilizing an economy through an external shock while maintaining trade relationships is not a theoretical exercise when you have done it twice.
The Conservative response leaned on traditional free-market arguments and closer Canada-US alignment — your typical right-wing, low-regulation pitch. But against a president openly threatening annexation and imposing tariffs on Canadian goods, that pitch didn't appeal to enough voters, regardless of its economic coherence. Poilievre was not necessarily wrong on the underlying economics. But, read the room, Pierre. When a guy with nuclear weapons is threatening to Make Canada Great Again, you don't want to cozy up to him.
And it worked. For the Liberals.
On April 28, 2025, the Liberals won forty-four percent of the vote, their highest share since 1980. The Conservatives got forty-one point three percent, which under any other set of circumstances would have been a historic result and probably enough to win a majority government. It wasn't enough.
Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat in Carleton, a riding (the Canadian term for electoral district) he had held since 2004. He was the first Conservative leader to lose their personal seat since Kim Campbell in 1993, which was an extinction-level election for that version of the Conservative Party, when they dropped from 150 seats to just two. Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, also lost his seat, coming third in his own riding. The NDP dropped from twenty-five to only seven seats. They stopped being a real player in Ottawa.
The Liberals landed at 169 seats, three short of a majority in the 343-seat House of Commons.
So how did a minority become a majority?
It started with floor-crossing — a controversial but legal practice where sitting members of one party cross the floor of the legislature to join another. Before Carney secured his majority, five Conservatives flipped to the Liberal Party. Many observers have viewed these defections as simple self-preservation. They can read the polls, and the Conservative Party under Poilievre is not gaining traction, thanks in large part to a perceived closeness to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to Canada.
It is also deliciously ironic. While Conservatives in general and Poilievre specifically have, suddenly, started calling for electoral reform to prohibit floor-crossing, Poilievre voted against such a law in 2012, when floor-crossing was benefiting his own party. That vote is on the public record.
Along with the floor-crossers, three by-elections went Liberal last month, in April 2025. By-elections are elections held to fill individual vacant seats outside of a general election cycle (called special elections in the US). Combined, these moves pushed the Liberals from 169 seats to a working majority. Carney now governs without needing other parties to pass legislation, which is a considerably more stable position than a minority government, since you normally have to water down proposals to bring other parties on board.
A few things are worth understanding about the mechanics of how this turnaround happened.
In the 2025 election, NDP voters — that centre-left party whose powerbase is in Western Canada — broke for the Liberals in extraordinary numbers. More than half of people who had voted NDP in 2021 voted Liberal four years later. That is a highly unusual pattern. Partisan loyalty, even soft partisan loyalty, normally sticks together better than that under almost any circumstances. It reflects how thoroughly this election became a referendum on competence under external threat, rather than a conventional left-versus-right choice about domestic priorities.
The Bloc Quebecois — a federal party dedicated to representing French-speaking Quebec and periodically advocating for Quebec independence — largely held its voters, but signaled early willingness to cooperate on Canada-US negotiations. Quebec gave the Liberals ten more seats than in 2021.
The Conservative vote was strong in raw numbers. Forty-one percent is genuinely impressive for a losing campaign. But it was concentrated in the wrong places geographically, like around Toronto, to translate into seats under Canada's first-past-the-post electoral system.
Carney now governs with a fifty-two percent approval rating and a net personal favorability of plus twenty. Those are remarkable numbers for any leader in office right now, in any Western democracy, at a moment when sitting leaders across Europe and North America are generally polling in the mid-thirties on a good day.
The lesson can be repeated across western democracies. When voters face a credible external threat, partisan loyalty can be put aside. The question shifts from who shares my values to who can handle this specific situation. Carney won because enough Canadians decided that question had a clear answer, and because his biography made that answer credible in a way that is difficult to fake with prepared talking points or carefully produced TV ads.
Whether he can sustain those numbers moving forward depends heavily on what happens across the border. Eighty percent of Canadian exports go to the United States. The two economies are deeply integrated through supply chains and financial systems built up over decades that cannot be quickly disentangled. If tariffs remain in place or escalate even further, the economic pressure on his government will mount regardless of how competent his management of the situation looks. Canada can control its response to the threat. It cannot control the threat itself.
That's the part that will define whether this Liberal comeback holds, or sticks with the usual pattern — governments that win in a crisis and then struggle through the long aftermath. Look at Bush, who won the 2004 election on a post-9/11 patriotic upswing and bungled everything in his second term. Johnson, winning 2019's Brexit-caused political crisis, but ineffective at governing. Or Biden, winning in the middle of Covid, and unable to make his case to the American people four years later.
There is also a broader story here about how Canada's political system handled an extraordinary set of circumstances. The Liberal Party lost its leader, ran a leadership race, chose a candidate with no electoral experience, prorogued Parliament, fought a general election, lost a majority by three seats (while both opposition leaders lost their own seats), and then assembled that majority through by-elections and floor-crossings, all within roughly fourteen months.
That is an enormous amount of institutional activity compressed into a very short period. The system absorbed it without a constitutional crisis, without legal challenges to the outcome, and without any serious question about the legitimacy of the result — outside of some people on social media calling floor-crossing "treason," but those people call everything treason.
That is worth noting in an era when democratic institutions in several comparable countries are under more visible strain.
Carney himself has handled the transition from technocrat to elected politician better than pretty much everyone predicted. He has stayed disciplined in his public messaging about tariffs, consistently framing Canada's position as firm but not gratuitously antagonistic.
In other words, Canada is standing on guard for thee.
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