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Notes -
A brief primer on the forthcoming Canadian federal election
I say brief in an attempt by myself to keep this short. The newly sworn-in Mark Carney has asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and call an election for April 28. This was as an anticipated reaction to the recent swings in polling so it's not exactly a surprise, but it's still short notice and parties are rushing to fill out their candidates and get their campaign in action.
The big story in all of this is the massive collapse in Conservative polling support, which is what prompted the election call as the Liberals hope to capitalize. The Liberals have been in power for ten years now, and were up until Justin Trudeau's resignation in December seemingly cooked. The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide. Now, as the election kicks off, polls suggest something between a comfortable Liberal minority to a majority government. What happened?
For general context: Canada has four major political parties, three national (progressive NDP, centrist Liberals, centre-right Conservatives) and one regional (Bloc Québecois). There are also two minor parties, the environmental Greens and libertarian/populist People's Party. Canadians are in general not partisan: it's very natural for support to shift between parties, and your average Canadian will have voted for 3 different federal parties by the time they hit middle age. What's unprecedented is the degree of the swing in support towards the Liberals, not that it never happens; in 2015 Justin Trudeau entered the 5 week election campaign thoroughly in third place but ended up winning a majority.
I think there's three major factors, and they are all individuals rather than larger undercurrents. The first is obviously Donald Trump. Never has one man done more for Canadian pride and unity. Canada of course is heavily intertwined economically and culturally with the United States, and the actions of the Man Down South has put everything in a bit of a frenzy. For once we are actually seeing meaningful progress towards dismantling inter-Canadian trade barriers, to building new nationwide infrastructure, and indulging in a bit of national pride which has been treated as rather disdainful the past decade. It also goes without saying that Trump's antics are repulsive to most Canadians, and you could not do worse as an advertisement for conservatism to Canadians. It does not help that there's a very fringe and annoying portion of MAGA Canadians, or that the federal Conservatives have done an agonizingly slow job of voicing meaningful denunciations to Trump's tariffs and annexation threats. (By comparison: Doug Ford whipped about quick and used the bully pulpit very effectively, and won his Progressive Conservatives another majority in Ontario).
Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, is the second factor. To put it simply: he is not an inspiring candidate to most Canadians. He has spent the past two decades in Parliament (he has never worked outside of politics; he became an MP more or less immediately after graduating university) as the attack dog, and he has kept up that spirit as party leader. He has incessantly and somewhat annoyingly been fixated on Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax for the past few years, ever eager to get in a dig. The problem: Justin Trudeau is gone, and so is the consumer carbon tax (Carney axed it on his first day as PM). Poilievre was never a popular individual, but up against an even less popular leader in Trudeau and his generally maleffective ministry Canadians would have grumblingly voted for him. Now suddenly he is very much the dog who caught the car. The things he has been harping about for years are gone, and he has not shifted his message an iota since the start of Trump's upheavals. The old tricks are simply not working anymore. I think if the previous Conservative leader Erin O'Toole were still leading things they would still have a comfortable lead. He was much more palatable to the average Canadian and far less vulnerable to the changing of the winds. Poilievre's combative nature has put them in a real bind because even if they win the most seats it's hard to imagine them forming government: the things I hear from insiders suggest people just hate working with him, and he's done his best to piss off all the other parties.
And that is particularly damaging because of the third factor, Mark Carney. He might be the most qualified individual to have ever become Canadian Prime Minister; he was appointed to lead the Bank of Canada during the Great Recession under the previous Conservative government, and was subsequently the first non-Briton to head the Bank of England. In a time where there are suddenly great questions about the economic future of the country, he is exactly the type of person voters look to. (Whether he will lead the country effectively remains to be seen.) I've often said that in times of turmoil even the most dysfunctional of democracies will pick boring bankers as leaders, but I was imagining this to be the case in 2029: I really did not see this polling turnaround coming. I think everyone misjudged Trump's capacity for havoc. Poilievre's partisan nature and lack of experience are very stark in comparison to Carney who at least so far is setting a more centrist sort of tone in his messaging and is soliciting notable from both the Conservatives and NDP to run for the Liberals in this election.
The only other thing to add is the real loser in all this might be the NDP. They had helped prop up the Liberals for the past few years and for the last two were generally polling ahead of them. But now the tent is collapsing and all their support is shifting to the Liberals instead. I very much dislike their leader Jagmeet Singh and will not be sad to see him go, but it looks likely that the NDP will lose official party status. It's a long long fall from where they were ten years ago, when they entered the 2015 campaign looking likely to form their first government.
My personal opinions are as follows: part of me wants to see the Liberals win a majority because it would be very funny, and I quite strongly dislike Poilievre and would find it simply embarrassing if a man like that were the leader of my country. We've been through ten years of Trudeau making a mockery of us and do not need any more nonsense. The other half of me finds it a bit galling that the Liberals might escape ten years of misrule and divisive politics without punishment. They are for better or for worse the natural ruling party of Canada (and the one I am most closely aligned with, ideologically) and that means they are the experts at shifting with the public, but it means they also can get arrogant and complacent and that begets all kinds of nonsense and corruption. So I guess I'm hoping for a small Liberal minority that chides the Liberals and forces them to do a better job.
I think you nailed the tale of three personalities on this change in the winds in Canada. The intra-west vibe shift toward the right has clearly happened in Canada, perhaps more than other places, but it is being parsed through our electoral system with unusual results. The Liberal Party is a non-ideological chimera which is optimized fully for power. This is why, for example, they have the slack to enable constant corruption. Trudeau capitalized on a woke vibe shift back in 2015 and lurched the party to the left and now its lurching back to the right. Canada's other parties are ideological and this puts them at a huge relative disadvantage. The NDP are controlled by unions and woke college students and so can't pivot from leftism in any way. The Conservatives contain multitudes but their leadership keeps them solidly center-right out of fear of the electorate. This gives the Liberals room to maneuver and their natural governing status allows them to attract high-quality candidates who just want competently run centrist globalism. Add their extremely efficient distribution of voters and constant pandering to Quebec and you have a recipe for success.
And kudos to Mark Carney who saw all of this months ago. Everyone thought whoever took over for the Liberals was just taking Trudeau's bullet for him, but Carney saw that the hatred for Trudeau masked ambivalence about Poilievre. And now we're probably headed for a Liberal majority.
The specifics of my view of all of this is similar to yours, except I'm a conservative so it blackpills me (even more) about the country. My top issues are immigration, DEI, crime, and housing prices and the Liberal failure on those files is so complete that a rational people would electorally annihilate whosoever did it to them forever. Carney's ideas on these files are either non-existent or the same the previous government. As ever in Canada, the boomer cohorts will sail merrily on with a little anti-Americanism and economic and social mediocrity until the end of time.
The one bit of solace I take from this is the Liberals have moved sharply right virtually ensuring a more conservative country going forward. The NDP have been obliterated and I think its an open question whether the party continues to live on. What I'm really opening for is that we may get an Overton expansion to the right, a CPC re-absorption of the PPC, and open calls for very low levels of immigration and the end of DEI/affirmative action. Anything that puts those ideas into the mainstream is a win.
In terms of first-world government competence (from a right-wing perspective), I rate Trudeau's Liberals as delivering 3/10. Nothing cataclysmic happened but on virtually every file things got worse, often much worse. I am confident that Carney's Liberals will be more like 6/10. They'll steer the ship capably toward a destination that is okay, not great. I am already lamenting that we wont get a confident and high-agency conservative government with a large majority to reverse the damage liberalism has wrought.
If there's anything that's going to happen in that regard, it's going to be provincially.
What distinguishes Big City Easternism from standard progressivism in your view?
All of the nastiness of American progressivism, none of the checks and balances that keep it mostly talk.
I guess you could add regional looting which is enabled by our system and which the U.S. doesn't have.
The US doesn't maintain a public list of have and have-not states, but I'd venture that most members of Congress see it as their sacred duty to get as much money as possible redirected from the rest of the country to their state, and preferably to their district. The US is just better at hiding the fact that the regional looting has any costs to anyone.
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