Canada’s 2025 federal election will be remembered as a game-changer. Liberal Leader Mark Carney pulled off a dramatic reversal of political fortunes after convincing voters he was the best candidate to fight annexation threats from United States President Donald Trump.
“We are over the shock of the American betrayal; we have to take care of each other,” he told cheering supporters in his victory speech in Ottawa. “Together we will build a Canada worthy of our values. Canada strong, Canada free, Canada forever, vive le Canada!”
Canadians gave the Liberals their fourth mandate since 2015, although the race against the Conservatives was much closer than polls predicted.
Nonetheless, only four months ago, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had a 25-point lead in public opinion polls and a fairly secure path to victory.
Yet Poilievre’s lead soon vanished due to shifting voter sentiments defined less by the official campaign period and more by the months that preceded it. Justin Trudeau’s early January resignation announcement and Carney’s confirmation that he was officially in the Liberal leadership race dramatically changed the political landscape.
Within a matter of weeks, Liberal support surged when Carney became party leader and Trump continued to make threats about Canada becoming a 51st American state — and to levy punishing on-again, off-again tariffs against the country.
The party went from being 20 percentage points behind the Conservatives to overtaking them, putting the party on track to secure its fourth consecutive victory. A shift described by longtime pollster Frank Graves as “unprecedented.”
The emerging “Canada Strong” and “Elbows Up” narratives, linked to the widespread anti-Trump sentiment, proved a major advantage for the Liberals, who made the most out of this political gift.
This shift, alongside Carney’s elimination of the carbon tax, left Poilievre on the back foot as his longstanding messaging on Trudeau and his “axe the tax” slogan became largely irrelevant.
The impact of these shifts in electoral fortunes extended beyond the two main parties. As the election became increasingly a two-party race between the Liberals and Conservatives, the smaller parties struggled for relevance.
Election campaign polling and early results indicated steep losses for the NDP, with Jagmeet Singh losing his own seat in Burnaby, B.C. and then resigning as party leader. This could be due to voters on the left responding to calls to vote strategically to prevent Conservative victories in various ridings.
The Bloc Québecois also lost ground, as did the Green Party of Canada and the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). Neither the Greens nor the PPC fielded full slates of candidates or participated in the leaders’ debates and therefore played comparatively limited roles in this election.
About the authors: Fiona MacDonald is Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Northern British Columbia and Jeanette Ashe is Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s College London
This article is reproduced from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence.
