Rather than courting the right, Carney gained votes by uniting the left, aided in part by Donald Trump’s unwelcome interference. Labour, by contrast, risks alienating its progressive support by chasing the right-wing vote. In doing so, it offers little that inspires, let alone galvanises.
Wouldn’t it be something if Donald Trump, the figurehead of the global rise in right-wing populism, ended up being the one to derail it? The movement that brought him to power ultimately undone by his own chaos and excess. It might almost make his absurd and chaotic second term feel worth it. Almost.
While that may sound like wishful thinking, the headlines coming from Canada this week could suggest otherwise.
In a rare piece of good news for progressives, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party pulled off a remarkable political turnaround in Canada, winning a fourth successive mandate.
At the start of the year, the Conservatives held a 25-point lead, and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, looked certain to become the next prime minister. That’s when Carney, the former Bank of England governor, entered the race, replacing the then unpopular Justin Trudeau as party leader.
But a remarkable campaign dominated by Trump’s punishing tariffs on Canada and ludicrous rants about “one of the nastiest countries”, Carney swiftly turned the Liberal’s fortunes around.
In a particularly bitter blow for the Tories, Poilievre even lost his own seat in Carleton, Ontario to his Liberal opponent Bruce Fanjoy. This made him the first major party leader to be unseated in a general election since 1993 when then-prime minister Kim Campbell of the Progressive Conservatives lost her seat.
Uniting progressives
Carney’s victory wasn’t built on peeling away Conservative voters. The Tories, in fact, held up reasonably well. Instead, his success came from consolidating the progressive vote, siphoning support from the New Democrats and Greens, and even taking seats from the Bloc Québécois, the centre-left party devoted to Québécois nationalism.
His pitch was centrist rather than leftist, which carefully distanced him from Trudeau’s unpopular policies like carbon tax and capital gains. This was despite the Conservatives seeking to tie him to Trudeau, citing his previous advice on the economy and climate. But Carney ran on his experience and establishment credentials while, as he had never sat in parliament before, avoiding any taint of incumbency.
Carney’s secret weapon
He presented himself as the prime ministerial candidate who would most effectively stand up to the boorish and bullying tactics of Donald Trump.
And there seems little doubt that he owes his victory to Trump. The President’s repeated threats to impose punitive tariffs on Canada and his bizarre fixation on making the country America’s ‘51st state’, provoked a surge of patriotic, anti-US sentiment. Today, two-thirds of Canadians consider the US to be unfriendly or an enemy, and 61% say they have started boycotting American companies. The Liberals harnessed this sentiment to their political advantage.
Even on election day, Trump couldn’t resist one last meddling outburst. In an especially erratic social media post, he urged Canadians to write his name on their ballots — a bizarre intervention, even by his standards — in pursuit of his fantasy of annexing Canada.
“Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the world.
“It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!”
The Liberals meanwhile portrayed Poilievre, who was once regarded as Canada’s Trumpian figure having embraced some Trump-style policies, such as cutting foreign aid and defunding state media, as aligned with the US president.
There is little doubt that his demise and Carney’s rise could be seen as directly attributable to Trump.
Lessons beyond Canada
Carney’s path to power offers lessons beyond Canada.
He didn’t chase the right or adopt its populist rhetoric. The Conservatives’ reliance on worn-out ‘common sense politics’ slogans failed to connect. Carney, by contrast, came across as the more stable and competent option, boosted, ironically, by Trump’s clownish interference.
This is why Keir Starmer, and those directing Labour’s strategy, namely campaign chief Morgan McSweeney, should tread carefully. Emulating Reform’s playbook to chase right-wing votes, or remaining silent on Trump, may come back to haunt Labour.
Take the party’s recent announcement that it plans to publish the nationalities of foreign criminals in the UK for the first time, a move civil servants have long resisted over concerns about data quality and moral implications.
The shift appears politically driven with short-term gain the goal. A Labour source quoted in the Telegraph, boasted: “Not only are we deporting foreign criminals at a rate never seen when Chris Philp and Robert Jenrick were in charge at the Home Office, but we will also be publishing far more information about that cohort of offenders than the Tories ever did.”
The announcement caused outrage. Migrant charities and MPs accused the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper of pandering to racism and stoking the possibility of riots. Fizza Qureshi, the chief executive of the Migrants’ Rights Network, said publicising foreign national offenders’ nationalities was a “blatant exercise in scapegoating”.
One Labour veteran said: “This is pandering to Farage, plain and simple. We need to fight prejudice not reinforce it.”
“Unbelievable! This plays straight into Farage’s hands. Labour is playing a very dangerous game,” wrote Leeds for Europe.
It followed similar outrage in February, when, after footage showing people being removed from the UK was released for the first time, left-leaning Labour politicians accused the Home Office of “enabling the mainstreaming of racism”.
Around the same time, the party published adverts on social media boasting about their record of deporting ‘illegal’ migrants, alongside a ‘Breaking Point’ style picture of a queue of silhouetted migrants, a tactic that was widely condemned during the Brexit campaign.
Commentators have pointed out that Labour’s approach appears aimed at countering the rise of Reform by adopting a similarly hard-line rhetoric on immigration.
As journalist Adam Bienkov warned:
“The direction of travel is clear. Faced with opinion polls showing Reform level, or ahead of Labour, Keir Starmer is engaging in an obvious attempt to outdo Farage’s party at its own game.
But for Bienkov, this strategy is doomed for failure, as it was for the Tories when, while in government, they too tried to upstage Reform on immigration.
“All this achieves,” Bienkov argues, “is to raise the salience of immigration as an issue on which Farage and his party can, and will always, go further.
“It also creates a situation in which all three parties are engaged in a perilous contest to make Britain as hostile an environment as possible for anyone not born in the UK.”
And if this week’s difficult local elections for Labour and the Conservatives – marked by sweeping gains for Reform – teach us anything, it’s that voters who want Reform policies will vote for Reform.
Then there’s the question of how Starmer should deal with Donald Trump himself.
Mark Carney made standing up to Trump’s bullying and defending Canada’s independence the centrepiece of his campaign, something voters handsomely rewarded him for.
Such a bold anti-Trump position contrasts to that of Keir Starmer, who is much more cautious when it comes to dealing with the US president, trying to strike a balance between distancing himself on Trump’s attacks on Zelensky and his aggressive trade tariffs, and avoiding overt criticism.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey meanwhile, doesn’t share such caution. Ahead of this week’s local elections, he said:
“Voters in Canada have elected a Liberal government on a clear mandate to combat Trump’s dangerous populism. Across the globe, it is liberals who are taking the lead in standing up for prosperity, security and democracy in the face of Trump, Putin and the rest.”
Others however, have urged caution in drawing parallels between the Canadian election and UK politics, particularly when it comes to how Keir Starmer might position himself in relation to Donald Trump.
Luke Tryl, UK director of the More in Common think tank, warned against assuming outcomes in one country will mirror those in another.
“I am always nervous about reading across from elections elsewhere and here. There are various potential lessons – the fact that Carney managed to consolidate the left around him.
“For the moment, people tend to think Starmer is getting the balance right [on Trump].
“… I think the impact on our politics will be much more marginal than in Canada, because obviously they are right next door, and Trump isn’t yet asking us to become the 52nd state.”
As Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney took a clear and unapologetic position on Brexit, warning that leaving the EU risked plunging the UK into recession. His anti-Brexit approach made him a target for the pro-Brexit right-wing press, but it also showed a level of conviction rarely seen in today’s political leadership.
Rather than courting the right, Carney gained votes by uniting the left, aided in part by Donald Trump’s unwelcome interference.
Labour, by contrast, risks alienating its progressive support by chasing the right-wing vote. In doing so, it offers little that inspires, let alone galvanises.
What Trump provided for the Liberal Party was unambiguous evidence that populist politics is a game played by rich men for their own gain at the expense of the majority. Trump unwittingly provided an enemy for Canadians to coalesce against which wasn’t immigration, or woke, or the deep state and all the other fictions created by right wing politics. And of course, Carney played his cards well with clarity and seriousness mixed with wry humour, and just the right gravitas.
In so doing he showed that charisma doesn’t have to be the shallow showmanship of the likes of Trump.
The Labour government and those advising them should take due note.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch.
Canada’s Snap Election: Trump’s Bluster Boosts Elite Technocrat
George Binette explores the extraordinary electoral recovery of the Liberals under its new leader.
As 2024 ended, Canada’s ruling Liberal Party appeared to be facing almost certain defeat at an election due to take place no late than this October. After nearly a decade as the nation’s prime minister Justin Trudeau looked the lamest of ducks and had little alternative but to tender his resignation as PM and party leader. By the time he stood down in early January, Trudeau’s Liberals were consistently trailing by more than 20 points in national opinion polls to Canada’s Tories under the right-wing culture warrior Pierre Poilievre.
In the subsequent election to replace Trudeau, the one-time Governor of the Bank of England and before that holder of the same title at the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, emerged victorious with more than 85% of Liberal members’ first preferences.
The 60-year-old Carney, Oxford PhD, a Harvard graduate, who was the second-string goalkeeper for the university’s ice hockey team, was a political neophyte. He had never held elected office prior to this spring, which may have proved a perverse advantage in the circumstances. Within days of his overwhelming win in the leadership contest, Carney called an early federal election for 28th April. The decision to go to the polls came as no surprise and was a highly calculated gamble since by March a remarkable reversal had occurred: the Liberals had inched ahead in opinion polls.
So, what had transpired, aside from a change of face atop the Liberal Party? The answer, of course, was Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20th January as the 47th US president and his repeated references over the weeks both before and after to Canada’s future as the ‘51st state’ of the USA. There had been patronising references to ‘Governor Trudeau’ and then came the very real threat of tariffs on Canadian exports to the US, some of which have taken effect.
Whatever Trump’s intention, his brazen arrogance touched the national equivalent of a raw nerve. Canadians cancelled planned visits to the US in their tens of thousands, a “Buy Beaver” app took off encouraging the population to purchase Canadian-manufactured products and an ice hockey tournament involving the two nations’ teams took on added significance with US players wilfully provoking fights on the rink in Montreal and Canadian fans booing the “Star Spangled Banner” en masse. (The Canadian side emerged the tournament’s eventual winner at Boston’s TD Garden).
Against this backdrop, the Carney/Liberal gamble largely paid off, even if the Liberals fell just short of an absolute majority in the slightly expanded, 343-seat Ottawa Parliament. While the final figures for the Liberals’ share of the popular vote fell slightly below the most optimistic opinion poll findings, the 43.7% recorded in last month’s election was up by more than 11 percentage points from the 2021 contest.
More than two-thirds (68.7%) of eligible voters turned out, a sharp uptick in electoral participation from the last federal poll in 2021. While far from record-breaking, the turnout suggested the degree to which Trump’s threats had shocked voters into action. Though Carney is less than an inspiring public speaker, his reputation for competent economic management in times of crisis won over a substantial swathe of a previously sceptical electorate.
Silver Linings for Disappointed Tories
Meanwhile, Tory leader Poilievre, having projected some Trump-adjacent positions, had to distance himself from the looming shadow of the US president. This proved a task too far, and Poilievre paid a personal price, losing his own seat to the Liberals’ Bruce Fanjoy in April’s election. (A Tory MP from Alberta province has offered to resign from his safe seat to pave a path for Poilievre’s early return to Parliament).
Certainly, the result was extremely disappointing for the Tories, given the considerable and sustained lead they had held only weeks before, but on the other hand their share of the popular vote (over 41%) as well as their presence in the House of Commons (up by 24 seats) improved significantly compared to four years before. Some Conservative pundits have seized on the results in Ontario’s ‘905 belt’, which offered solace to the Tories as evidence of an electoral realignment among sections of the province’s working class in metro Toronto’s suburbs.
NDP Meltdown
The results were, however, truly disastrous for the New Democratic Party (NDP), North America’s closest equivalent to a European-style social democratic party. At the start of the year, the NDP was a solid, if somewhat distant, third nationally, approaching and occasionally surpassing a 20% share in opinion polls. On 28th April, the NDP gained just 6.3% of the popular vote nationally, retained just seven seats – down from 24 prior to the last Parliament’s dissolution – and saw its leader, Jagmeet Singh, lose his own seat in British Columbia, where the NDP controls the provincial government. Unlike Poilievre, Singh has resigned from his party’s leadership after finishing third in his own riding (constituency).
In the context of the two-horse race that had developed in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, the NDP haemorrhaged votes across the country, almost exclusively to the Liberals. While the party’s time in a supply and confidence agreement with the Trudeau administration probably did its standing few favours, the deal, which yielded some modest reforms around dental care and prescription drug costs, was not the root cause of its humiliating performance on 28th April.
The election was also a bad one for the fledgling Green Party of Canada, which lost one of the two seats it had held previously and saw its national vote share fall below 1.5%. Otherwise, the contest may well have sounded a death knell for Maxime Bernier’s populist right People’s Party of Canada. More importantly, the soft nationalists of the Bloc Quebecois (BQ), which contests seats only in “la Belle Province” suffered losses, but still held 23 seats. From time to time, the Carney administration will almost certainly have to rely on tacit support from the BQ. There is, though, no prospect of overtures to the NDP at present.
Where next for PM Carney?
In the wake of his modest, but undeniable victory, Prime Minister Carney held his first press conference since the election on 2nd May. He is now due to meet Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday 6th May, while he committed to unveil his new Cabinet on 12th May with the 45th Ottawa Parliament holding its first full meeting on the 26th. In the meantime, he’s pledged tax cuts for the ‘middle class’ from 1st July as well as promising to retain and build on dental care and ‘pharmacare’ reforms alongside more investment in childcare provision. A housebuilding programme, with the Government pump-priming the private sector, will also feature in his agenda. At the same time, Carney pitched to his right with promises to toughen the criminal code and bail restrictions, as well as putting a cap on temporary immigration to Canada from 2027.
Carney’s most immediate challenge remains the negotiation of an altered relationship with the US under Trump. In other respects, though, he faces all too familiar problems which confront virtually all of the advanced capitalist economies in terms of the lasting impact of the post-Covid cost-of-living crisis, an acute shortage of affordable housing and in Canada’s case comparatively high and recently rising unemployment with the nation’s jobless rate at 6.7% in March.
George Binette, a Massachusetts native, is a retired union activist, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.
Image: https://www.heute.at/i/liberale-gewinnen-parlamentswahl-in-kanada-120105388/doc-1iq02bag94. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed
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