The election happened and the results are not yet finalized, but it looks likely that we’ll have a Liberal minority government. We had a Liberal minority government going into the election so, at a surface level, not much has changed.
Look beyond the surface, and it’s clear that things are quite different.
The Conservatives have won more than 41% of the popular vote. The NDP and the Greens have been decimated. The Dippers have lost party status and Jagmeet Singh came third in Burnaby South. He also resigned as leader of the party.
Screenshot from CBC's election results page just before noon:
Poilievre lost his seat! In his concession speech, he said that he would stay on, but it’s not clear whether he’ll be able to do that without a seat since someone would have to volunteer to give up their seat for their dear leader.
It’s strange to see the Conservatives both do so well and so poorly in the same election. Although there was talk until election day of a Liberal majority government, the results were far tighter. But, five months ago, the Conservatives were on track to win a majority. One can’t, as a Canadian voter, help feeling a bit of whiplash.
If the current seat count holds up, then the Liberals (168 seats) can be propped up by the NDP (7 seats) to form a relatively stable government. This is same arrangement that we had before the election. The wrinkle is that a couple of the NDP seats and four of the Liberal seats are still too close to call.
There are two extremely tight races: the Bloc Quebecois are holding onto Terrebonne by 28 votes and the Liberals are leading Terra Nova-The Peninsulas by 46 votes. Once all the votes are counted and, in some cases, recounted, what will the seat distribution look like?
And what of the future? We know little about Carney's abilities as a politician. Is he going to channel Starmer or Macron? The expectation is that he will do his best to prop up the status quo since he’s a 60-year-old rich, establishment white man. But the young – who are more likely to support the Conservatives – don’t want the status quo. For all the talk of “strategic voting” not working again, it’s clear that – in places like London-Fanshawe – a lot of people heeded Poilievre’s call to vote blue for the first time ever.
The generational divide is extreme. Boomers and early Gen-Xers who bought housing in the right places have been able to make up for falling standards of living through asset inflation. For them, the system appears to work. Young people who do not have rich parents have no such assets. They rely on wages, which have been stagnant for 40 years.
What are the Liberals and the rump NDP going to do to address the discontent generated by growing inequality? What will the new government do about climate change, which will leave people poorer and more likely to become unhoused? Do the Liberals and the NDP have any solutions that go beyond telling Canadians to bring their "elbows up"?
Next time, Trump may not be around to scare people into voting for the Liberals and people are likely to be even more desperate. If the Liberals and NDP want to avoid further radicalizing people, they need a plan to improve material conditions for people who don’t have rich relations. I'm not convinced that they have one or can come up with one.
I have wanted to write but how do you write in the midst of chaos and collapse? Fascism, which I used to think about in terms of something that was coming, is here. We are watching a form of fascism install itself in the United States and it is terrifying.
It is immensely destabilizing to reach middle age and find yourself wondering whether you can type freely if you’ve always typed freely. I’ve always just said what I thought in private, but now I can foresee a future where that might be undesirable or even dangerous.
Since Trump came into office less than three months ago, he has:
These are just the events and decisions that I can remember off the top of my head.
I grew up being told endlessly about how I lived next to the world’s longest undefended border. Recently, I have started wondering about that border. Are the Americans going to invade? Can the border be defended?
This is the context in which Canada’s federal election is being held. In January, when Justin Trudeau announced that he was going to resign, the Conservatives were riding high in the polls. Now the Liberals appear likely to win a majority on April 28. The change in voter sentiment has been incredible.
Since he became Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre has promised to bring Trumpism-lite to Canada. The Conservative Party of Canada has deep links to other right-wing parties in the Anglosphere and is closely associated with the “freedom” convoy that laid siege to downtown Ottawa in 2022.
Poilievre has spent his entire time as Conservative leader calling for an election and for Trudeau to resign. In January, it seemed as if the stars were finally aligning. But as soon as Trudeau signalled that he was going to leave, the tide started to shift. That tide turned into a wave when Trump started talking about making Canada the 51st state.
Among non-Conservative voters, there is a lot of fear and the Liberals are the main beneficiaries of this fear. People who would not have voted Liberal six months ago are talking about how they are going to hold their noses and vote Liberal because they don’t want the Tories anywhere near power. People who do not generally support either of the two main parties and who live in ridings that the Conservatives do not have a chance of winning are talking about voting Liberal just in case or to push up the popular vote for the Liberal Party.
The Tory collapse in the polls has caused in-fighting, which had long been rumoured, to spill out into the open with weeks left in the campaign. Poilievre’s campaign attempted to suggest that the polls were not credible, but backed down after criticism from all sides. In an attempt to further tie the Tories to Trump, the Liberals idiotically planted stop the steal buttons at Conservative events despite the Liberal lead in the polls.
In addition to the effects of the tariff war and the threat of invasion, I worry about the effect of a close election. While the polls show that the Liberals are in the lead, it is clear that a sizable minority of Conservative voters may not accept another electoral defeat. What will happen if this election is close? What will happen if it isn’t?