Liberal Party of Canada just did what American Democrats couldn't: Beat Trump | Opinion
Conservatives in Canada had a clear path to victory. Then Trump's pugnacity punched the Conservative Party right in the ballot box.
Canada, you may have heard, is a completely different country just to the north of America and overwhelmingly has no interest in becoming our 51st state, despite President Donald Trump's odd fixation on annexing our ally.
Canadians don't vote directly for a prime minister. But they did, in the April 28 national election, vote very specifically against Trump. The election's results guaranteed that a Canadian prime minister who calls Trump a threat to his country will remain in office to stand up to him.
Canada just showed America – and maybe the Democratic Party can learn a lesson here – that Trump's chaos can be kept in check if enough people recognize him as a very real threat to democracy.
Trump inadvertently sparked a remarkable back-from-the-dead revival of Canada's Liberal Party, which prevailed in the election. His fluctuating flirtations with trade tariffs and unhinged demands that Canada just cease being a country and become part of America are just as unpopular, maybe more so, north of the border as they are here at home.
The Conservative Party of Canada, by contrast, started 2025 looking like a sure-fire winner set to seize control from a previously deeply unpopular Liberal Party, using political tactics cribbed from Trump. The Conservatives complained about "woke" culture. They campaigned on "Canada first." They bragged about the size of their rallies.
Sounds familiar, right? But Trump's pugnacity punched the Conservative Party right in the ballot box. How toxic was Trump for the party? Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader who mimicked Trump's political tactics, didn't just see his aspiration to be prime minister evaporate. He also just lost his seat in Parliament to a Liberal Party challenger.
Trump's MAGA takeover of US gave Canadians something to vote against
Mark Carney, the Liberal Party leader who took over as Canada's prime minister in March after the deeply unpopular Justin Trudeau stepped down, kept Trump at the center of the election while declaring victory.
“As I have been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country," Carney said in an election night speech. "But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.”
Carney had an unwitting accomplice in that messaging – Trump, who instinctively tried to make Canada's election all about himself just as that country's voters started casting ballots.
In a social media post that sounded disconnected from reality, Trump urged Canadians to vote for an unnamed candidate, citing a series of stances not supported by any candidate on the ballot, while again demanding that the country become America's 51st state.
Poilievre tried to push back on social media, telling Trump to "stay out of our election" while vowing to be the candidate who could "stand up to America from a position of strength." Pretty meek stuff from a guy who played the MAGA game and then got burned by it.
America has become a cautionary tale
The Liberal Party's victory was quite narrow, with a healthy showing at the polls for the Conservative Party. This was no blowout, but it could be mistaken for one since the Liberal Party looked so doomed at the start of 2025.
"The reality is the Liberals were on their deathbed at the end of December," Nik Nanos, a Canadian pollster who runs Nanos Research, told me after the election, noting that the Liberals had national support of just 20% then while the Conservatives were at 47%.
The Liberal Party, Nanos said, benefited from voters with a "single-minded mission" to find someone who could stand up to Trump. They saw Carney in that role, not Poilievre.
The lesson going forward, Nanos said, was that other Western democracies now see America as unreliable as an international partner for issues like security and trade.
"The kiss of death right now politically is for people to associate a populist, right-wing leader with Donald Trump," Nanos said. "Because Donald Trump is now seen by a number of people as the enemy. He's someone who is threatening and causing harm to people's economic well-being."
Canadians could teach Democrats something about rejecting Trump
It wasn't just Trump's rhetoric about Canada that juiced turnout for the Liberal Party.
Tari Ajadi, an assistant professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, told me that Trump's "pushes towards authoritarianism" in America, especially on immigration and fights with the judiciary, resonated in a worrisome way in Canada.
"We Canadians, I would contend, know America far better than Americans know us," Ajadi said. "And to some extent, we follow American news more than many Americans. So we're looking at all this stuff."
He pointed to news reports of Canadians cancelling vacations and selling vacation properties here as Trump makes them less likely to spend any time in the United States.
I wondered: Is there some lesson America's Democratic Party could learn from all this? The Democrats, for now, appear stuck somewhere between a hope for a revival and self-defeating infighting.
Ajadi told me Democrats in America must "be univocal and unequivocal" in opposing Trump.
"Democrats appear to be unwilling and unable to use the tools at their disposal to hold Trump to account," Ajadi said. "They allow him to pass legislation with some bipartisan support. They approved many of his appointees."
Democrats in America need to be more like the Liberal Party of Canada, he concluded, and reject "business as usual" while Trump threatens democracy.
Follow Paste BN columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.