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Robert Delaney

The Liberal Party of Canada, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, will hold onto power after the country’s federal election – a contest that was defined by voter hostility to US President Donald Trump’s trade war and his repeated suggestions that Canada should become America’s 51st state.
In a victory speech in Ottawa late on Monday, Carney stressed the importance of Canadian unity in the face of the threats coming from Washington.
“We will win this trade war,” Carney told cheering supporters, while warning of “challenging” days ahead.
He also reiterated a belief he shared while campaigning: that the mutually beneficial system Canada and the US had shared since World War II had ended.

“We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” he said.
“As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” Carney said. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us, so America can own us. That will never – that will never, ever happen. But we also must recognise the reality that our world has fundamentally changed.”
The Liberals were leading or elected in 168 electoral districts, known as seats, followed by the Conservatives with 144, with votes still being counted from Monday’s vote.
The Liberals need to win 172 of the House of Commons’ seats for a majority that would allow them to govern without support from a smaller party.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre conceded defeat to Carney’s Liberals and said his party would hold the minority government to account.
Poilievre also faced defeat in his own riding to Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy. As a result, he is no longer a Member of Parliament and will not be able to return to the House of Commons when it resumes. This situation complicates Poilievre’s role as the opposition leader, and he must now find a way to regain a seat.
Tensions with the US have caused supporters of two smaller parties, the left-leaning New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Quebecois, to shift to the Liberals. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh conceded defeat in his own district and said he planned to quit as party leader. The Bloc Quebecois is projected to lose about a third of their seats. The Green Party of Canada lost one of only two seats.
The results of the election carry substantial weight geopolitically as Canada is the first among the group of industrialised democracies to hold a nationwide vote since Trump put his so-called “reciprocal” tariff regime into effect, in a bid to force trading partners to make concessions and simultaneously pressure companies to manufacture more in America.

Carney, 60, secured a term as prime minister despite having never served in parliament, which is unprecedented in Canadian history. He has been serving as prime minister since early March, after former prime minister Justin Trudeau stepped down amid a chorus of opposition to his policies, including from within the Liberal Party.
The prime minister distinguished himself as the first non-British person to lead Britain’s central bank, a nearly seven-year stint that ended in 2020, and had previously steered his own country through the 2008 financial crash as the governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013.
He emerged suddenly on the political stage as a forceful critic of Trump’s frequent denigration of Canada’s sovereignty and accusations that the country has unfairly benefited from its trade relations with the US.
Poilievre, meanwhile, has been a politician for most of his career, well known to voters as a culture warrior, whose positions against environmental regulation and diversity initiatives were often similar to those of Trump and the US leader’s base.
Poilievre rose to his party’s leadership as a champion of a convoy of truckers that occupied Ottawa in January 2022 to protest Covid-19 mandates and a proposal to defund Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC. He regularly put the blame on Trudeau for escalating housing costs and consumer prices.

When Trump began belittling Trudeau last year, Poilievre had a substantial polling lead against the prime minister, which appeared to ensure that the Conservatives would bring a decade of Liberal rule in Ottawa to an end.
However, after Trump doubled down on his insults against Trudeau, referring to him as Canada’s “governor”, and then suggesting that the country should become part of the US, the Conservative Party’s lead vanished.
The abrupt drop in support for Poilievre’s party was exacerbated by the tariffs that Trump slapped on Canadian imports, a violation of the USMCA trade pact that the US leader’s team negotiated with Ottawa and Mexico City during his first term in the White House.
Carney and Poilievre have both said that, if elected, they would accelerate renegotiations of the free trade deal in an effort to end the uncertainty hanging over the economies on both sides of the border. The US accounts for about 80 per cent of Canadian exports.
However, Poilievre had offered a more muted response to Trump’s rhetoric and economic manoeuvring, focusing more on his message to Canadians that they must deny Carney’s party a fourth-straight term after what he described as “a lost Liberal decade”.
Trump continued to push his annexation vision just hours before voting in Canada came to a close.
“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,” Trump said on social media.
“No more artificially drawn line from many years ago,” he added.
While Carney’s hardline stance on Trump helped him gain altitude going into the election, his ties with China during his years as an investment banker, in particular during his 13 years at Goldman Sachs, before being named deputy governor of the Bank of Canada in 2003, have been a liability.
Before he was elected as Liberal Party leader, Carney was chair of Bloomberg’s board of directors and served on the board of Brookfield Asset Management, which has invested billions in real estate and infrastructure in China. Also, he was part of a US business delegation that met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last year.
Additional reporting by Associated Press and Reuters


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Supporters of Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney in Ottawa. Photo: Reuters

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Mark Carney’s Liberal Party won Canada’s federal election, influenced by Trump’s threats, while his Conservative rival, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat in Parliament


Mark Carney’s Liberal Party won Canada’s federal election, influenced by Trump’s threats, while his Conservative rival, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat in Parliament.


Donald Trump

US-ally trade wars

Mark Carney