Political analysts, academics and media pundits are busy trying to make sense of the Mark Carney Liberal government elected in April 2025. The cognoscenti have not yet formed a consensus about the Carney version of Liberal government. Nor it seems has the public: according to recent polls, people are willing to grant Carney as prime minister strong positive approval ratings, far ahead of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, yet bring in a hung jury on support for the Liberals, who are basically tied with the Conservatives across the country.
The first thing to say about the Carney government is just how improbable it is. The April 2025 election was what social scientists have dubbed a “Black Swan” event: a result that is far outside the realm of expectations but has a substantial impact on the existing system. The Conservative Party under Poilievre had pulled ahead of the Justin Trudeau Liberals, eventually reaching an extraordinary 25- to 28-point polling lead in early 2025. The Liberals began losing what had been the safest Liberal seats in the country in humiliating byelections. Yet within a couple of months, under a new leader who had never held elected public office and had no previous political experience, the Liberals had returned to power with a near-majority of seats. A canvass of democratic countries in North America, Europe and Asia yields no comparable example of this kind of huge turnaround in voting support in so short a time.
The most obvious post facto explanation is a specific variant of “shit happens.” In this case – “Trump happens.” For Canadians there was sudden, shocked recognition that those whom we had long believed to be our close friends and allies now constitute our most immediately threatening enemy. Canada found itself at war – economic war in the first instance but, with the Trump-induced spectre of the “51st state,” the potential for even worse.
The first casualty of war was Poilievre and his brand of hyperpartisan divisive attack-dog leadership that now appeared out of kilter with the menace Trump poses to Canada as a whole. The second casualty was the NDP, coming off a supply and confidence agreement with the Trudeau Liberals that had garnered some traditional social democratic aspirations like child care, dental care and pharmacare, none of which benefited the party politically. Instead, the NDP now appeared irrelevant to the bigger picture of trade wars and threats to sovereignty and democracy. The third casualty was the Bloc Québécois, whose role as federal secessionist sidekicks to the Parti Québécois was blindsided by Quebecers’ recognition that Trump’s America constitutes a more immediate challenge than English Canada to Quebec’s national distinctiveness. Picking up both NDP and BQ voters, the Liberals scored 44 per cent in the April election, higher than the party had achieved in any election since the Pierre Trudeau sweep in 1968, 57 years ago.
For some time it has been apparent from polling data that on most – although not all – policy and political values questions, there is in Canada a broad grouping of voters who might be called moderately centre to centre-left. This grouping is at odds on most issues with a somewhat smaller grouping described as centre-right to right. In partisan terms, the first group has been split four ways among Liberals, BQ, NDP and Greens, while the second grouping has been relatively united behind the Conservative Party. Consequently, the smaller grouping exercised political influence disproportionate to its actual numbers, while the larger group’s influence was diminished by partisan splitting. The Carney Liberals thus appear to have reunited a broad centre-left coalition. I say “appear” because the nature and fragility of this evanescent coalition are in question. I will return to this later.
Throughout the democratic world, the old political centre, the core of relatively stable party systems once contested by would-be big tent parties, has been under stress and tending toward disintegration. Along with building support around specific rather than general interests, parties have also grasped that the new media of communication promote division as a tool of partisan mobilization. Resentment and distrust of others, inflamed into the dehumanization and demonization of opponents in the fragmented social media world where groups gather in tribal echo chambers, are powerful inducements to line up in hostile political formations.
Parties are quick to exploit these divisions. One result is the sharp decline of democratic trust – trust in institutions, trust in processes and trust in fellow citizens. Trust is a crucial currency of democracy. Lose it and you lose the unwritten constitution, the infrastructure, of an actually functioning democracy.
The disintegration of the centre has often been depicted as symmetrical polarization, in which both right and left have become equivalently centripetal forces. This is misleading. In most democratic countries the process has been distinctly asymmetrical. The real dynamic has been on the right, where xenophobic far-right populists have either displaced traditional centre-right parties to take power (Giorgia Meloni’s far-right coalition in Italy) or remade old centre-right parties in their own extremist image (Trump’s MAGA Republican America). The effect has been to drive the entire democratic political spectrum rightward, once again lodging old ideological tropes that had become not just unfashionable but even unmentionable, like racism and sexism, in the conventional wisdom.
There has been no equivalent dynamic on the left. There were attempts to radicalize the old centre-left – Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in the U.K., Syriza in Greece – but all have failed. The extraparliamentary left that has flared from time to time (Occupy Wall Street or the antiglobalization protests) has signally failed to impact the existing political system. The left has generated few new ideas, while the right has resuscitated once-discredited old ideas and dressed them in new clothes.
The United States represents the most advanced stage of this disintegration of the political centre, with the once-mainstream Republican Party reduced to disciplined cheerleaders for Trump’s autocratic extremism. Meanwhile, both France and the U.K. are currently experiencing severe political crises rooted in the disintegration of the centre. In both countries, the old mainstream is being pulled apart by centripetal forces of the left and the right. While the picture in France is complicated by the rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise, the underlying dynamic is driving the emergent far right to the verge of office – Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the U.K.
At first glance, the 2025 Canadian election would seem to signal a return toward the centre. We would have to go all the way back to the 1930 election to find an equivalent proportion of the total vote shared by the two old mainline parties. Since 1935 we have effectively had a multiparty system, with more programmatic third and fourth parties added to the two more brokerage main parties. Might we now be returning to the status quo ante?
While the Conservatives were falling almost 30 seats short of the Liberals, they were also attaining a share of the popular vote higher than that gained by the victors in the past five majority governments, including Stephen Harper’s 2011 win. But this actually argues against a return to centrism.
The Conservative Party had already begun mimicking the rightward radicalization of once mainstream conservative parties in other democracies. The Tory caucus turfed the moderate centrist leader Erin O’Toole in the midst of the 2022 Freedom Convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa, the Canadian reflection of the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol that attempted to overthrow the result of the 2020 presidential election. Like Donald Trump, who has pardoned the insurrectionists of January 6 and begun in his second term to prosecute/persecute any officials who acted against the insurrectionists, O’Toole’s successor, Poilievre, has to this day maintained unwavering support for the Freedom Convoy.
Just as the U.S. President has been recast as the ogre threatening Canada, Mark Carney has also been recast. Instead of the wealthy elitist banker responsible for the woes of ordinary Canadians that Poilievre had pictured, he is now the “adult in the room,” the calm, measured, reassuring guy with the record and experience that qualifies him to deal with Trump (“Prime Minister Dad,” as one analyst put it). In the one-on-one top-dog contest of 2025, Carney won in a knockout – literally, as Poilievre was humiliatingly kicked out by his own Ottawa constituency.
But Carney’s victory was personal. This is a Carney government more than a Carney-led Liberal government. Carney has pulled the Liberals behind him, while Poilievre has been a drag on the Conservative brand. Moreover, this model persists past the election through the November budget.
How can we account for the persistence of the Conservative brand? Before Trump’s return to the White House, Poilievre’s “Canada is Broken” narrative was winning the day. Runaway inflation, the housing and health care crises, postpandemic populist angst over government interference, backlash against “woke” identity politics, anti-incumbent rage – all fuelled Poilievre’s grievance/victim narrative. He had correctly identified many of the sources of discontent and was rising on the swelling tide of anger. Closer inspection would have indicated a lack of credible alternative policy answers after the rhyming slogans and emotive denunciations, but those looking for blood are not policy wonks.
Above all, Poilievre’s personalized message, his relentless insistence that the breaking of Canada was the fault, the deliberate fault, of Justin Trudeau alone, served as his all-purpose replacement for a coherent plan for how he would restructure the country and the economy to solve the endemic problems he had identified. Inflation is a global problem, but for Poilievre it was “Justinflation.” Trudeau’s carbon tax was a statistically insignificant contributor to inflation, but Poilievre had dishonestly convinced the public that it was a prime cause. If you could con enough people into thinking that just getting rid of Trudeau and his policies would magically solve the problems afflicting all democracies, you could evade difficult questions of what changes the Conservatives would have to bring in to fix what they had asserted was a radically broken Liberal Canada.
Then Poilievre was blindsided. First, Trump happened: “Canada is Broken” became yesterday’s slogan, replaced in a wave of visceral Canadian nationalism by “Canada Strong.” Second, Trudeau walked out, gutting Poilievre’s simplistic personalization of the problems besetting the country. Third, Carney axed the carbon tax. The targets of Poilievre’s crusade had been whisked away.
Yet the Conservative Party survived, and continues to do so. Trump may have forced national sovereignty and national unity back onto the centre of the Canadian political stage, but the pre-Trump Canada-is-Broken narrative did not go away; it simply subsided into a very large malcontented minority, one coincident with the Conservative Party voting base.
In one sense, persistence of the old paradigm is unsurprising, since the grievances that propelled Poilievre and the Tories forward pre-Trump are still there, largely unresolved. That must be a leading issue on the Carney government agenda. Easier said than done, of course, but a government of any stripe has to be deeply concerned about the corrosive effects of the escalating cost of living, the unavailability and unaffordability of housing, deteriorating health care and the alienation of parts of the citizenry from the political system.
There are also darker strains in the Canada-is-Broken narrative, posing even more difficult challenges. Preston Manning, dropping his usual counterfeit elder-statesman above-the-fray pose, intervened in the election to arrogantly demand that voters outside Alberta and Saskatchewan kick the Liberals out, or the “West” would break up the country by seceding. Any illusions that a page had been turned on “me first” trumping the national interest in the face of the existential threat emanating from the United States could be put to rest.
This was confirmed following the Liberal victory when Alberta Premier Danielle Smith nailed up a list of nonnegotiable demands on Ottawa, while kickstarting a referendum process on Alberta secession if the Carney government does not capitulate. The PQ appears poised to return to power in Quebec in the next election, promising a third referendum on Quebec independence (one it is unlikely to win, with polls showing more than 60 per cent of Quebecers opposed to sovereignty).
On the other side, the new Canada Strong narrative pulled together much of the centre-left grouping of voters, sucking substantial numbers of NDP, BQ and Green voters into – not the Liberal Party as such, but the Mark Carney party, where so far they appear for the most part to have remained. This is not, however, a resuscitated centre-left. The Liberal-NDP quasi-coalition brought in left-of-centre social policies – now yesterday’s agenda. Centre-left economic policies largely failed, and the Trudeau government’s expansive immigration policy constituted an economic and political disaster.
In any event, Trump points to the need for a different kind of governing coalition, one that is focused on the wrenching economic restructuring necessitated by the spectre of a U.S. President who threatens “51st state or I will destroy your economy.” Now, after decades of comfortable continentalism, Canada must pursue its own economic nationalism. This requires reorienting trade and investment away from the United States and breaking down protectionist provincial barriers to create an intensified economic union within Canada, all while Carney does his best to limit the damage from Trump’s zero-sum tariff war. At the same time, his government must also address the real domestic problems identified in the Canada-is-Broken narrative. And it must not ignore or underplay the existential threat of climate change.
A very ambitious agenda: fighting off the capricious, unpredictable and manifestly irrational Trump; reorienting the entire economy away from the American orbit; forging a new national unity across partisan and ideological lines; restoring democratic trust in political institutions and in our fellow citizens. “Ambitious” may be a grave understatement.
What this agenda does not involve is any recognizable old-fashioned left-right contest. That is why the Carney project is to rebuild the political centre, flying in the face of the universal centripetal trends in democracies elsewhere as well as here, which predate Trump. That the first Carney budget landed at the same time as one Conservative MP crossed the floor to join the Liberal caucus and another one abruptly announced his resignation, amid wild rumours of dissension in the opposition caucus and perhaps further defections, is a sign that the Liberals may be capable of augmenting their renewed centrist stance. Another sign is the strong support Doug Ford’s Ontario Conservatives have offered for Carney’s Team Canada negotiations with the United States. The Liberals are clearly aiming for independent voters in the middle of the spectrum (like those who provided Stephen Harper with his sole majority government in 2011 on the appeal of his economic management of the financial crash of 2008, management itself facilitated by the fiscal policies of the preceding Chrétien-Martin governments).
The centrist thrust was fully realized in Carney’s blockbuster deal with Danielle Smith enabling a second bitumen pipeline from the oil sands to BC tidewater – assuming that private capital and Indigenous partnership can be found – in exchange for an enhanced Alberta industrial carbon tax. This is politically explosive for the BC government and recently elected BC federal Liberals, for environmentalists everywhere (Trudeau’s activist environment minister Stephen Guilbeault quit the Carney cabinet in protest), and for West Coast Indigenous supporters of BC liquefied natural gas projects angered by the federal government dropping the tanker ban on the north coast. It could also be a political coup for Carney’s centrism if Alberta can be brought onside. However, Carney should remember that an earlier deal between Trudeau and Rachel Notley, then NDP premier of Alberta, to expand the Trans Mountain Pipeline in exchange for support for the consumer carbon tax resulted in zero political credit for the Trudeau Liberals in Alberta. Time will tell if Smith will drop her perpetual anti-Ottawa, anti-Liberal stance.
Of course, there will be fierce criticism from left and right of Carney centrism. If NDP and BQ supporters, so crucial in the 2025 election, begin to drain away, the governing coalition will be seriously undermined. If Poilievre succeeds in stanching the weaknesses in his caucus and continues to lead an already radicalized Conservative Party in the direction of ideological purity and regionalist resentment over compromise (i.e., chooses Alberta over Canada) the right flank of the Carney coalition may remain undeveloped.
On the other hand, there are reasons for optimism. The Conservative Party appears volatile and unstable, with not only Ford’s Ontario party but “Progressive” Conservative Tim Houston’s Nova Scotia party at odds with the Alberta-inflected national party. As for the NDP and BQ supporters, the necessity of uniting to confront the Trump threat is a powerful inducement to compromise. Trump has a long track record of so clumsily alienating other countries as to bolster his strongest foreign opponents. The Carney victory in Canada, Labor’s return to office in Australia and the consolidation of support for the leftist Lula government in Brazil can all be chalked up to Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop gunboat “diplomacy.” His epic meltdown over the Doug Ford–sponsored Reagan TV ad on tariffs presages further erratic interventions, each one certain to push Canadians together, including those of conservative as well as progressive views.
The Trudeau-era left-of-centre Liberal Party is over. The Carney-era centrist Liberal Party is under construction. It will resemble in many ways the old centrist Liberal Party under leaders from Mackenzie King to Jean Chrétien, but in other ways it will be something different, responding to novel challenges not faced by its predecessors. It will have patchwork elements: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” Infuriatingly for its critics on either side of the spectrum, its success may well be a precondition for the survival of Canadian sovereignty and democracy.
