Trump helped Carney to victory but now he could make or break Canada’s new government

The Liberal prime minister owes his against-the-odds win to threats about making Canada the 51st state, but now comes the hard part: working with the White House, says Mary Dejevsky

After a snap vote that will go down in the annals of election history the world over, Mark Carney has led Canada’s Liberal Party to a fourth consecutive term in office, overturning the opposition Conservative Party’s double-digit lead at the start of the campaign.

In truth, though, his victory owed almost as much to the loud noises coming from south of the border as it did to the novice politician’s campaigning skills.

President Donald Trump’s boasts of wanting to make Canada the 51st state, compounded by the trade tariffs he announced for imports from Canada, as from much of the world, gave the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England his central theme: Canada’s independence and sovereignty, as well as its difference from its southern neighbour.

Both Canadians’ visceral reaction to the Trump claims and the Conservative leader’s initial affinity with Trump cut the rug from underneath Pierre Poilievre’s feet, depriving him and his party of a victory that had seemed assured at the start of the year.

The former leader of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau, could reasonably be another disappointed party. Resigning at the start of the year, with his party in the doldrums and his government in disarray after the resignation of his deputy and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau left office anticipating his party’s swingeing defeat in this year’s scheduled election. If only, he might think, he had somehow hung on and campaigned on the “sovereign Canada” platform that gave Carney so much of his advantage.

That said, there are, as ever, nuances. The scale of the Liberal Party’s victory is not yet clear – clear enough for Poilievre to concede defeat, but not as great as some forecasts had suggested. The composition of the new parliament will determine how much real power Carney and the Liberal Party can exercise.

It would also be doing an injustice to Mark Carney to say that he had his victory handed to him, essentially gift-wrapped by Trump. Carney seized the “survival of independent Canada” argument – which could equally have been Poilievre’s – at the outset, leaving Poilievre on the defensive and scrambling to distinguish himself and his party from Donald Trump. What could once have been seen as an asset – the victory for the Republican right in the United States as evidence of a global rightward trend – became a huge burden, as Trump raced to implement a programme that was about as “un-Canadian” as it could be. Carney was able to present himself as a safe, or at least the safer, pair of hands.

Carney also benefited, first in the Liberal Party leadership contest, then in the election, from his profile as a banker and known international player, which convinced at least some wavering voters that he would have the heft and experience to take on Donald Trump. As such, he was able to transform a government that was perceived as shambolic and a party considered tired and ineffectual after three terms in office into a plausible electoral proposition. That perception only grew as tariffs became the central issue.

The quite remarkable turnaround signified by the election result, however, does not mean that governing will be plain sailing for Carney and Canada’s Liberal Party, even if it does emerge with an overall majority or something close. This is not just to do with the bitterness and resentments that will surely be a legacy of Trudeau’s last months and will not necessarily be expunged by this victory.

It is also to do with the domestic issues that contributed to Trudeau’s departure and largely took second place to the Trump threats during the campaign, but have not gone away. The new government will have to address the cost of living and housing crises that headed the domestic agenda before Trump returned to the US presidency and set his sights north of the border. A looser fiscal policy, which was one of the differences between the two main parties during Canada’s election campaign, may hold as much risk as promise.

The next government will also have to face what would appear to be the very real threat to Canada’s wellbeing posed by the Trump administration. Not only does this require a complete change of mindset – Canada may not have regarded the US as quite a benign neighbour as the US saw Canada, but bilateral relations were relatively trouble-free, given a few relatively small diplomatic hitches here and there – but the economic implications of this change are huge.

The US economy is 10 times the size of Canada’s, and some 80 per cent of Canada’s exports are to the United States; the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) allowed car parts and other manufactured goods and components to move to and fro. That may no longer be possible.

It also remains to be seen how, or whether, Carney might be able to improve matters by establishing a working relationship with Trump.

A campaign, of course, is a campaign, and government requires a different approach – as both Carney and Trump would probably grant. But Carney’s campaign rhetoric gave no quarter. Claiming victory, he insisted that the US “will never break us”, while at the same time striking a note of humility, as an essentially untried politician, towards the domestic audience.

But big questions are left hanging. How serious is Trump about exerting pressure on Canada? Improbable though it might seem, could a determined and ruthless US president force Canada into the US fold by economic duress? Or – equally unlikely – the opposite: could it dawn on Trump that he has single-handedly brought about an election result he surely did not want?

And what of the “kinder, gentler” country that Canada prides itself on being compared with the giant south of its border? Can its more European-style welfare system survive the need to reorientate its economy and defences away from the United States? What concessions might Canada be prepared to make to remain independent of the US? Can it afford to wait out the remaining years of the Trump presidency in the hope of a change after 2028? The pace of Trump’s presidential decision-making might seem to make such a gamble unwise.

Against this, the election result shows that Carney takes over a country that is more united and determined to preserve its independence and distinct identity than it has been for a long time, perhaps ever – even if the margin of the Liberals’ victory was not quite as wide as some might have hoped.

The coming weeks will show how much slack Canadians will give their new government in the domestic arena, and whether the harsh language of the campaign – coming from both sides of the border – might be replaced with less vitriol and a desire, on one or both sides, to explore prospects for deals.

Two predictions can be made with a reasonable degree of certainty, however. The Canada-US relationship will never be the same again, at least not for a very long time, and Mark Carney must surely have ditched any thoughts he might once have entertained of a post-election honeymoon, either at home or – especially – abroad.