The Canadian election is over, and the results would have been unthinkable six months ago.
After two years of wasting away goodwill, competence, and direction to the brink of extinction, the governing Liberal Party replaced Justin Trudeau as leader with former central banker Mark Carney.
In months, Carney’s technocratic, reassuringly patrician leadership won over enough voters to give the Liberals another shot amidst a climate of tariffs and economic uncertainty brought by Donald Trump’s second presidency.
When the election results arrived, the hearts of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party and their faithful were broken. The supermajority they had long salivated for was not delivered. Instead, they find themselves relegated to another spell on the opposition benches.
While there are no trophies for second place, the foreseen populist realignment of younger and blue-collar voters with the Conservatives was completed.
Since losing power in 2015, the Conservatives have struggled to forge a new identity, unsure of whether to moderate or tack right, all while struggling to balance the party’s many factions. This time, the Conservatives embraced the future to craft a formidable populist coalition of strivers who the Canadian economy has left behind.
Marshalling this new base has been their goal since 2022. It netted the Conservatives their largest share of the popular vote since 1988.
In the multi-party Westminster system, winning 42 percent of the ballots all but guarantees a majority government. It just so happened that Liberals somehow cobbled together more votes after the smaller parties in parliament collapsed and their rabble of backers fell in behind Mark Carney.
Canadian politics are firmly divided not so much along ideological lines but between the haves and have-nots, with the Conservatives becoming the standard bearers of the latter. They have little choice but to press onwards with what they have.
From the time he became Conservative leader in 2022, Poilievre has attacked the monied, protected classes of Canada. He termed them “Gatekeepers,” who are keeping their fellow citizens from fulfilling the “Canadian promise.”
From the cost of living to crime to over-regulation, Poilievre has made the case that a fairer country can only be achieved with a smaller government, locking up criminals, and restoring affordability via the free market.
Poilievre differs from Trump by not being an economic nationalist or protectionist. There are certainly still comparisons to be made with Donald Trump’s refashioning of the Republican Party, but a better precedent can be found thirty years ago, across the Pacific Ocean.
In 1996, Australia’s center-right Liberal-National Coalition led by John Howard won a smashing majority by capturing the votes of working-class voters who were traditionally loyal to Labor.
Termed “Howard’s Battlers,” they were blue-collar Australians who cared deeply about immigration, their job security, and the changing culture of their country. Often self-employed tradespeople with lower educational attainment, they felt alienated from the white-collar, urban shift of the Labor Party.
Howard’s pitch of a straight-forward economy of lower taxes, hard work, and cultural conservatism resonated, and it made the Coalition the most powerful party in Australia for over a decade.
It is striking how much Australia in 1996 mirrors Canada in 2025.
From the beginning of his premiership in 2015, Justin Trudeau spoke the Obama-esque language of cosmopolitan progressivism in an appeal to young people. In practice, his Liberal government oversaw the enrichment of older generations while everyone else fell behind, creating a great vacuum of disillusionment and anger.
Those who owned property and were enjoying their retirement became far richer under Trudeau. Mass immigration pushed the housing supply to its limits and real estate prices took off, inflating housing and other assets through scarcity. Trudeau’s ministers even spoke of the need to defend Canada’s “mom and pop” landlords, or property investors benefiting from the housing crisis.
The Liberals lowered the age of pension eligibility and increased the payments, further enriching their most loyal cohort. Trudeau greatly expanded the social security net, but it did not have a transformative effect on Canada’s quality of life or remedy the worsening cost of living.
Instead, the injection of so much money into the economy further eroded the buying power of middle and working class Canadians through brutal inflation, which Poilievre identified as the “invisible thief.”
A lack of innovation and attention paid to the economy resulted in stagnation and the worst growth in the G7. Canadian-born citizens now duel with hundreds of thousands of new immigrants for scarce private sector jobs.
To make up the difference, the Liberals bolstered the ranks of the public service with debt spending, adding thousands of make-work jobs to the bureaucracy that recycled wealth, rather than created it. Requiring a university education, these government jobs exclude millions of people.
Traditional Conservative planks like slashing bureaucracy and taxes struck a chord with those who found no place in Trudeau’s Canada.
If the term can be allowed, “Pierre’s Battlers” emerged in-force during the 2025 federal election. Manufacturing regions like Windsor across the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit swung heavily towards the Conservatives. Ridings on Vancouver Island on the Pacific coast where logging and other resource industries joined them.
Students in university towns like London, Ontario also went Conservative, reflecting Poilievre’s appeal to their frustrations. Added to this were the party’s traditional base on the western Prairie provinces, whose economies depend on resource exports, and whose voters resented Trudeau’s green initiatives as prime minister.
How did this mighty Conservative coalition that expanded the party’s voter base by a quarter fail to win?
The obvious answer was the destruction of the New Democratic Party (NDP) led by Jagmeet Singh. Typically the left-wing spoiler to the Liberals, the NDP supported Trudeau’s minority government in parliament beginning in 2019, on the condition he create vast new social programs.
Uninspired by Singh, who had long overstayed his welcome, huge swathes of the NDP’s traditional working class supporters migrated to the Conservatives before the federal election. Once the campaign began, many of the leftovers voted for Carney’s Liberals to stop Poilievre from becoming prime minister.
The other big factor in Carney’s victory was how he captured the loyalty of Boomers. They built good careers when the private sector economy still justly rewarded hard work, they had no use for Poilievre’s economic populism, and they flocked to Mark Carney in droves.
Donald Trump’s threat of a trade war and annexation played a major role in appealing to this demographic. Ads featuring aging Canadian movie stars like New York–resident Mike Myers spread an anti-American message, appealing to the ancient reactive suspicion held by Canadians towards the U.S.
For those aged sixty and up, relations with Trump were the top issue, not affordability and the cost of living, reflecting an enviable comfort and financial security.
Not coincidentally, those born between 1946 and 1964 have great pride in Canada, a country that gave them so much. On the other hand, their grandchildren are disproportionately ambivalent towards their homeland.
Combined with the die-hard Liberal grassroots, this strange coalition of left-wingers and patriotic retirees was able to just barely overcome the Conservatives and their battlers.
It helped that Carney is a far different sort of man than Trudeau. The former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Carney has a truly impressive resume, and his technocratic credentials played well amidst the uncertainty of Trump’s second presidency.
Carney’s fiscal pledges do not promise a real break with the Trudeau-era and are stuffed with promises of four more years of large scale deficit spending to build new infrastructure and rebuilding the ailing military. However, in the realm of national culture at least, Carney appears to be no successor to Trudeau.
In his first address as prime minister, Carney spoke of the country’s English and French founding peoples, and praised Canada’s “proud British heritage.” Carney even invited King Charles III to open the 45th parliament with a Throne Speech on May 27, an act that has not taken place in Canada since 1977.
The son of a historian, Carney appears to truly conceptualize Canada as a historically and culturally distinct country. It is a sharp rebuke of Trudeau’s attempts to turn Canada into a “post-national” state with no identity by breaking down traditional national symbols to reshape Canada into a sort of international hotel.
With his reverence for Canadian institutions and near vice-regal bearing, Carney has thus far come off as something of a High Tory on matters of identity and culture.
Despite partisan differences, this election displayed that Canadians want to be a distinct nation. Carney’s Liberals may have made superficial appeals through hockey metaphors and reviving the nostalgia of 1990s nationalism, but it still spoke of the desire of Canadians to be part of a tribe.
Carney’s first meeting with President Trump was amicable and there is a hope for a rapprochement with the American government, though this is far from guaranteed. Should a full-scale trade war be prevented and relative harmony restored to continental relations, the focus in Canada will shift back to the internal crises that nearly annihilated the Liberals.
For the Conservatives, solidifying their position as the party of the have-nots will be a long-term project, but one that positions them well for the future. The party had long drawn inspiration from the Reagan era, but the appeal of this has expired.
The future of Canadian conservatism will run through the battlers, whose counterparts in Australia kept John Howard as prime minister from 1996 to 2007. They were volatile, with large swathes switching to smaller parties or even back to Labor.
Similarly, the refashioned Conservative grassroots should not be expected to be bound by blind partisan loyalty. Permanently redefining the party will require new ideas and direction that draws upon uniquely Canadian realities and history.
Without that, Canadian conservatism will be a reactive phenomenon, and one that will always be an oppositional force. It needs to be one that can promise to reshape the country.
