Just a few months ago, Pierre Poilievre was riding high. The apple-munching leader of the Conservative Party of Canada held a commanding lead of more than 20 percent in the polls, and the approval ratings for the Canadian Liberal Party and its longtime face, Justin Trudeau, were underwater. The New York Times ran a headline on January 9: “Meet the Combative Populist on a Path to Become Canada’s Next Leader.” The polling for the Canadian liberals was so bad that they appeared to be wavering on the edge of being reduced to a third party behind the Bloc Quebecois, the regionalist party that dominates Francophone Canada.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity, saith the preacher. On Monday, Poilievre not only lost the election to the new Liberal Party leader Mark Carney; he lost his own seat in the Canadian parliament and is well on his way to losing his leadership of the Conservative Party. In one of the most dramatic political reversals in recent history, the Liberal Party in just a few weeks turned around its deep polling deficit and shot from facing a historic, potentially catastrophic defeat to a victory at the ballot box.
Poilievre, ironically, has exactly one man to blame for his demise: the United States’ President Donald Trump. Since being elected for his second term, Trump has launched a rhetorical offensive aimed at Canada and in particular at the former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he slighted by calling “Governor Trudeau.” He appears to have taken a shine to the idea of annexing Canada and incorporating it into the Union. “I think Canada would be much better off being the 51st state because we lose $200 billion a year with Canada. And I’m not going to let that happen,” the president said. “Why are we paying $200 billion a year, essentially a subsidy to Canada?”
That was never going to go over well with Canadians, who have had an anti-American self-conception since the American Loyalists emigrated there in great numbers after the Revolution. Things really started to go downhill for the Conservatives once Trump took office. The president started his second term by almost immediately threatening the Canadians with a 25 percent tariff unless they locked down their border. Many Canadians felt that the requests were vague and nonsensical, and the general impression was that Trump was just attempting to bully the country into submission. Tempers flared, and, suddenly, Canadian nationalism became popular on the left once more. Liberals who a few years ago cheered Trudeau’s pronouncement that Canada was a post-national state began boycotting American goods and promoting “Buy Canadian” campaigns.
The Liberals also profited mightily from the resignation of the unpopular Trudeau, who led the party for a decade. The eventual victor in the Liberal leadership contest, Mark Carney, is a mild-mannered technocrat. The Oxford-educated former governor of the Bank of England was an appealing choice for a country suffering from economic stagnation and strangulating costs of living. With Trudeau gone, the Liberals were able to play up their anti-Trump credentials at Polievre’s expense: The Conservative politician was seen, rightly or not, as a tarnished with the Trump brush for sharing the right side of the political spectrum with him.
The results rolling in election night might have seemed to confirm the easy narrative that the Conservative Party, burdened with being friendly to American conservatives and therefore insufficiently anti-Trump, was done in by the American president. But if you examine the actual polling numbers, a much more interesting picture emerges. The Canadian Conservatives gained massively compared to the previous election, winning 41.3 percent of the popular vote in 2025 compared to 33.7 percent in 2021. And while they didn’t reach the 45 percent peak they achieved in the polls in January, they were very close to their 42 percent average in the polls through 2024, when they were still projected to sweep the Liberals.
Rather than pulling votes from their main opponent, the Conservatives, the Liberal victory Monday was achieved by decimating the third party vote in Canada, particularly the Canadian New Democratic Party, Canada’s social democratic party, but also the Bloc Quebecois. From polling at nearly 20 percent in January, and having won 18 percent of the vote in 2021, the New Democrat voting base shrank dramatically—they received just 6.3 percent of the vote in 2025, losing 17 seats. The Bloc also suffered, losing just 1 percent of the popular vote but dropping a dozen seats, mostly to the Liberals. (The Bloc vote is highly localized compared to the New Democrats, so just a few voters opting for another party can easily swing a race.) But for all that, the Liberals will still have a minority government, having fallen three seats short of the 172 needed for a majority in parliament and leaving them slightly dependent on minor parties for lawmaking.
The Liberal Party’s victory, then, was not so much a result of Trump damaging Poilievre and the Canadian Conservatives as it was Trump scaring left-wing voters into rallying around the most convenient left-wing politician, who happened to be Carney.
It is probably little consolation for Poilievre, who is now almost certainly a has-been in Canadian politics, or to the disconsolate Conservatives, who have had a long-awaited victory snatched out from under them because of impossible-to-foresee circumstances, but this election in fact proves that the Conservatives have a sizable natural base in Canada. That base consists primarily of young people concerned with the impossible housing prices and devastating cost of living, a situation so desperate that not even the imperial menaces of Donald Trump can diminish it. A recent poll by Abacus found that young Canadians, who predominantly voted Conservative, were the most concerned with “making Canada a better place to live” and “making housing more affordable,” in contrast with older Canadians, who overwhelmingly were most concerned with “dealing with Donald Trump”.
For his part, Trump seems unbothered by his role in the demise of his northern conservative neighbors. He spoke positively about Carney after the election, calling him a “nice gentleman” and saying that he thought both of the principal candidates to become prime minister hated him but “it was the one that hated Trump the least I think that won.” Whatever can be said about Trump’s populism and his agenda to “Make America Great Again,” he certainly appears to be a genuine, pragmatic nationalist who thinks and speaks in terms of what he believes is best for the U.S.; he certainly has no interest in spreading his brand of nationalism and populism abroad, à la J.D. Vance in Munich.
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Carney, on the other hand, continues to face serious challenges to his government that could unravel the tenuous Liberal victory all too quickly. Voters will expect him to confront Trump sharply and publicly, something the genial economist Carney will not want to take to heart too much: Canada maintains a massive dependency on U.S. markets, and Trump has already shown his interest in slapping Canadian goods with harsh tariffs that would materially damage the economy.
Yet more challenging, voters expect him to end the stagnation the country has been suffering through for a decade. Just before Trudeau and the Liberals took office in 2014, Canadian GDP per capita stood at about $51,000, nearly comparable to the U.S.; today, the GDP per capita is just over $53,000, far below the U.S. GDP per capita of well over $82,000. (All figures are inflation-adjusted.) Compounded with skyrocketing housing costs, long waits for the formerly vaunted Canadian healthcare service, and increasing crime—all the results of Trudeau’s mass immigration policy, which Carney has little interest in materially changing—and Carney’s prospects look grim indeed.
Perhaps Carney can pull abundance out of his hat. But for now, a Poilievre-less Canada seems to be in for just more of the same.
