MAGA bombast has upended Canada’s political universe and given Mark Carney’s Liberals an edge
The Economist
Apr 24th 2025|Abbotsford, British Columbia
Captain Canada stands by the rink clad in a red ice-hockey jersey, a white maple leaf emblazoned on his chest. He quizzes Mike Myers, a Canadian actor and comic who lives in the United States, testing his bona fides. They run through a series of television characters of which only Canadians have ever heard. “What are the two seasons in Toronto?” Captain Canada asks. “Winter and construction,” comes the correct reply. Their chat ends with an exhortation to keep “elbows up!”, the cry that rings out across hockey rinks all over Canada when players encounter a bully. The ad has been viewed millions of times.
Repeated threats of annexation by Donald Trump, a grinding stop-start trade war and the end of an era for Canada’s Liberal Party were required for Mark Carney, a technocrat and former central banker, to find himself transformed into “Captain Canada”. Canadians are certainly afraid: annexation aside, their country exports 77% of all of its goods to the United States. This trade supports more than 2m jobs, some 10% of all employment. “I am stressed out,” says Kevin Wong, a 28-year-old engineer in Vancouver. “We are heading for a recession because of Trump. I want to keep my job.”
Mr Carney has his back. “We are over the shock of the betrayal,” he told a rally on April 16th. “We will fight. We will protect. We will rebuild.” Canadians like the rhetoric. The latest calculations from The Economist’s prediction model give the Liberal Party an 86% chance of winning the most seats in Parliament when Canadians go the polls in the federal election on April 28th.
Canada’s entire political landscape has been upended by Mr Trump’s aggression. The left has consolidated around the Liberals to an extent not seen for half a century, diminishing smaller left-wing parties and elevating Mr Carney. The socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) has seen its projected share of the vote tumble from 21% in December to 7% in April, according to the Angus Reid Institute, a pollster. Support for the separatist Bloc Québécois has dropped by a third. Mr Carney’s strength in the French-speaking province has not been blunted by his self-admitted weakness in the language. YouGov, another pollster, projects that the Liberal Party will pick up 11 seats there. It thinks the Liberals will win 182 of the 343 seats available across the country.
The swoosh of the swing
Never before in Canada has public opinion moved so quickly and deeply. The 29-point swing to the Liberals since Justin Trudeau resigned, Mr Trump took office and Mr Carney took the helm of the Liberal Party is one of the widest on record in any democracy. Some of this is thanks to the unpopularity of the departing Mr Trudeau. But much more is a response to the bombast and aggression that Mr Trump has directed at Canada. “There is only one issue that’s moved almost 30% of voters—the biggest movement of voters I’ve ever seen in a short time—and that’s Trump,” says Kory Teneycke, a Conservative strategist.
In this troubling moment, large numbers of voters are looking for what Allan Gregg, a pollster, calls “prime minister dad”. Mr Carney’s mix of blunt warnings and placid reassurance fits the bill. During a rally in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough on April 4th, a woman interrupted his boilerplate remarks with a shouted plea to “lead us, big daddy!” A startled Mr Carney quipped that he might leave the assembly hall by the back door after his speech.
The unlikely left-wing adoration for a data-driven technocrat may have flummoxed Mr Carney, but it has flattened his political rivals. This election looks set to be the first since 1958 in which the vote is split almost entirely between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the only two parties that have ever formed a government in Canada’s 158-year history.
This electoral polarisation has made life frustrating for Pierre Poilievre and his Conservative Party. It has lost the dizzying levels of support it enjoyed in 2024, but its current standing would still yield its best result in nearly four decades. Only once, in 2011, did a modern Canadian Conservative Party win 40% of the vote, good enough for a majority government under Stephen Harper as its prime minister. Every pollster in the field suggests that Mr Poilievre has a good chance of bettering that high-water mark. But he will probably still fall short of forming a government, thanks to the coalescence of the left-wing vote.
The MAGA Mash
Mr Trump is everywhere, as are the problems he creates for Mr Poilievre. Fending off Mr Trump’s threats is one of voters’ top priorities. One pollster, Léger, has produced data that explain why Mr Carney has spent as much time campaigning against Mr Trump as he has against Mr Poilievre. By a margin of 46% to 28%, Mr Carney is preferred over Mr Poilievre as the person to take on the American president.
When Léger asked people why they think that way, 45% said it was because of his experience as the governor of the central banks of Canada and England; 42% said it was because of his “calm and stable” demeanour. “I left the NDP and I’m canvassing for the Liberal Party,” says Arman Raina, outside a Liberal rally in Richmond, British Columbia. “When I listen to Poilievre I hear echoes of Trump.”
Mr Raina is not wrong about the echoes. Although the two men are very different, Mr Poilievre’s predilection for withering attacks on the media and his unprecedented success in wooing disaffected young and working-class Canadians made him the darling of MAGA conservatives in the United States. That includes Elon Musk, who has showered him with praise and compared him to Donald Trump.
That was not a problem in 2024, when Mr Poilievre was facing Mr Trudeau’s exhausted Liberal Party and the harsh reality of Mr Trump’s presidency had not yet been rammed home in the Canadian psyche. Now, standing up to Mr Trump is more vital than other left-wing principles embodied by smaller parties. In recent weeks Mr Poilievre has tried to tone down his Trumpiness, but to little avail. Hardly any of the anti-Trump vote will come his way. The right has been fighting bitterly over the extent to which he ought to be competing with Mr Carney in language that repudiates the American president. Mr Teneycke calls Mr Poilievre’s failure to do so “campaign malpractice”. As a result, constituencies (known in Canada as ridings) which have not gone to the Liberals in decades, or ever, may well do so for the first time.
The poster child for Conservative division is Abbotsford, a town of about 170,000 nestled in the Fraser valley 72km (45 miles) south-east of Vancouver, ringed by snow-dusted mountains. Five minutes from downtown is Zero Avenue, where Canada and the United States are separated by a ditch and a few widely spaced, one-metre-high concrete markers.
With 91% of its exports going to the United States, Abbotsford is among the most tariff-exposed places in Canada. Randy Bartsch, whose firm, Ecotex, employs 1,700 to supply linen and uniforms to health-care businesses on both sides of the border, worries that tariffs will hobble his business. His American associates were mystified by Canadians’ failure to embrace Mr Trump’s offer to become the 51st state. “They didn’t understand that for many of us folks this was humiliating.”
Abbotsford’s riding has reliably voted Conservative for decades. Now it is boiling over with conservative-on-conservative rhetorical violence, with Mr Poilievre’s Trumpiness seemingly to blame. Mike de Jong, a popular and successful politician in the province, says Mr Poilievre sought his endorsement when he ran for the Conservative Party leadership in 2022. Mr de Jong says Mr Poilievre then encouraged him to seek the Conservatives’ nomination for the riding of Abbotsford-South Langley. A few days before the nomination was scheduled to close, Mr de Jong was told by the leader’s office that he was no longer deemed qualified to run. No explanation was provided. He is baffled, but determined to run as an independent. If the right-wing vote splits it could allow the Liberals to carry Abbotsford-South Langley for the first time since anyone can remember.
Making room for Mark
Mr de Jong says he hears complaints about Mr Poilievre’s “Trumpy behaviour” on doorsteps. “People know the Americans have an insatiable need for our resources and there is a fear that if Trump doesn’t get them one way, he’ll get them another way,” he says. “There is a determination to stand up to this kind of disrespect.”
Graham McMahon, an Abbotsford resident who has voted Conservative in the past, says he will vote Liberal this time. He says he is put off by Mr Poilievre’s penchant for responding to complex problems with slogans. He wonders if Canadians might end up feeling grateful for Mr Trump’s bumptious threats. “By threatening our way of life, Trump pushed us back towards learning again that there is community in being Canadian and that Canada is a country of value, a country we should be proud of.”
Others think the confrontational approach wrongheaded, and that Canada should focus more meekly on fixing its own problems. “If the US is pushing us, it’s because they have legitimate beefs,” said Allan Dawes, a Poilievre supporter drinking coffee in an Abbotsford diner. “Sticking your finger in Mr Trump’s eye is so stupid, when you consider he runs the world’s biggest economy.” Mr Dawes believes the American president is compelling Canada to modernise its unproductive economy, break down interprovincial trade barriers and quickly approve pipelines and other infrastructure projects that can take decades to build. “If Canada was a business, I wouldn’t buy it,” he says.
The fact that Mr Trump says repeatedly that he wants to acquire their country has pushed millions of Canadians out of the cynical rut which defined its politics for several years, and back towards more fundamental values. In another time Mr Carney’s stilted rink-side chat with Mr Myers would have seemed kitsch and quaint. But with millions of Canadians feeling genuinely threatened by the menace and mayhem emanating from across the southern border, their tolerance for nationalism and nostalgia has expanded. That has created an electoral opening so wide, you might just fit a tetchy central banker through it. Call him Captain Canada. ■
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