Liberal Leader candidate Mark Carney speaks with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre before a ceremony at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, on Jan 27.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
I am not ordinarily in the business of making predictions. I find it difficult enough to make sense of the recent past. So I will not even venture a guess as to who will win the coming election. I will say this, however: It will be an election unlike any in our history.
Safe enough, you might say: Every election is unlike any in our history. But the degree to which this election is likely to depart from all precedent will itself be unprecedented.
To say the least, we have never held an election in the shadow of a foreign power’s attempt to divide, destroy and devour the country. We were at war in the election of 1940, but it was a war primarily fought “over there.” The threat Nazi Germany posed to Canada was real, but remote: If Hitler were not stopped, and if he were allowed to take over all of Europe, and if his alliance with Japan held, then some day the combined Axis powers might invade, or certainly attempt to dominate us – though if they did they would have to do the same to America.
Whereas today the threat we face is from the Americans. The madman demanding our submission is not in the Reich Chancellery but the White House. It is not yet a military threat, but it is an explicit attempt to subvert our sovereignty and drive us to ruin, with the avowed purpose of forcing our absorption into the United States, or at the least reducing us to a vassal state. If we were merely in the middle of the most pointless and destructive trade war we have ever endured – a sneak attack by our nearest neighbour, largest trading partner and closest ally – that would make this election historic enough. But it is clearly much more than that.
This is not, of course, the first time Canada’s survival has seemed to be in doubt. The entire period from the election of the first Parti Québécois government in 1976 to the passage of the Clarity Act in 2000 was one in which the country’s very existence was said to be on a knife-edge. It wasn’t – there never was any practical prospect of the separatists being able to pull off secession – but it certainly felt that way. The debt crisis, culminating in the mid-1990s, likewise felt existential, at least to some of us. But none of these came down to a single federal election.
The closest parallel is the great free trade election of 1988. Certainly those on the no side – for that election closely resembled a referendum – were of the view that the country’s survival was at stake. But the electorate decided otherwise.
(Have free trade’s opponents been vindicated by recent events? Hardly. The argument then was not “decades from now the United States might elect a lunatic, who, along with attempting to tear his own country to pieces, might suddenly take it into his head to try to annex us.” It was that the mechanics of free trade itself would lead, gradually but inexorably, to our absorption.)
Whether free trade threatened the country’s survival, or whether it would secure it, was very much the issue in the 1988 federal election. By contrast, in 2025 there is broad consensus on the nature of the threat, its seriousness and scope. No one doubts that Donald Trump is trying, at the least, to cause us great harm: to wreck our economy, and to bend us to his will. The question is what to do about it. And, even more, who should do it.
That’s a question, at any rate. Predictions of what will be the “ballot-box question” in any given election are always dangerous and usually self-serving. Partisans like to predict a particular issue will decide an election because they want to frame the choice to their advantage. Pundits do it because they want to be thought-sages.
In most elections, however, voters have all sorts of different ballot-box questions, some predictable, some entirely unexpected. Even in 1988, exit polls showed lots of people who voted Liberal were in fact in favour of free trade: Their vote was cast against Brian Mulroney, or against the Meech Lake Accord, and so on.
In this election, however, the evidence really does suggest that the tariff fight, and the broader U.S.-Canada relationship, is uppermost in the electorate’s mind. It would be hard otherwise to explain the remarkable – again, unprecedented – realignment in public opinion over the past few weeks, from a 25-point Conservative lead to, as the most recent polls show, a dead heat.
Yes, Justin Trudeau’s resignation liberated some centrist voters to return to the Liberal fold, but it was pretty clearly the sudden escalation of the Trump threat, from serious to existential, that drove so many others, of all stripes, to reassess their choice.
But why should that have been to the benefit of the Liberals, and not the Conservatives? While voters tend to rally around the incumbent in a crisis, it is easy to imagine a situation in which voters despaired of the current government’s ability to handle the crisis – or even blamed the crisis on it – and sought a new one. Why have so many seemed to prefer the Liberals to the Conservatives – especially since the Liberals have of late been jettisoning so much of their policy handbook in favour of policies advanced by the Conservatives?
It is hard to escape the impression that it comes down to leadership. Even when the polls were showing the Conservatives far ahead of the Liberals, they were also registering considerable unease with the Conservatives’ Leader, Pierre Poilievre. That was obscured by Mr. Trudeau’s unpopularity, but the arrival on the political scene of former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney has clearly piqued voters’ interest, and highlighted Mr. Poilievre’s comparative shortcomings.
Whether that trend will continue is very much the question to be decided in this election. Mr. Poilievre is a skilled politician, but Mr. Carney is showing flashes of native political talent. Mr. Carney has the deeper knowledge of policy, but Mr. Poilievre is no slouch, and has a rare ability to explain an issue in ways that are understandable to the general public. They can each make a case for being the better leader, but what is undeniable is that that is what the election will come down to.
Leadership is an important issue in most elections. In this election it will overhang everything. That’s largely due to the nature of the Trump threat, which is almost entirely driven by Mr. Trump’s aberrant psychology. There’s no obvious strategy for dealing with such a threat, at least in the short term, and to the extent there is one, the two parties seem largely in agreement.
Rather, it boils down to the experience, character and abilities of the leader. To face down such an overbearing and unpredictable ignoramus will require a mix of diplomatic tact and Churchillian defiance, and the judgment to know when each is most appropriate; the negotiating skills of a champion poker player, an intuitive sense – part risk analysis, part psychological insight – of when to bluff and when to call the other guy on his bluff; the ability to stay cool in a crisis, neither panicking at apparent defeats nor celebrating at apparent victories, but remaining calm and focused on the task at hand; and a talent for communicating all this to the public, in such a way that people feel confidence in their leaders and a willingness to follow where they lead.
It will also require deep understanding of policy – a firm grasp of the levers of state available to a prime minister, and how these can be used to improve his bargaining position. But policy chops – knowing not only what to do, but how to get it done – will be even more important over the longer term, after the immediate crisis has passed. Assuming it does.
As many have observed, the challenges facing Canada are not only to survive the present threat, but to reduce our exposure to similar threats in future, on the understanding that, while Mr. Trump is the emergency at the moment, the broader issue is the political culture and the system that produced him – and could produce another like him in time. That brings up a range of critical policy choices – on trade, on tax policy, on environmental regulation, on defence, on the very process of making democratic choices – implying major changes in the way this country is governed, and some resulting hardships.
So in a way it is true that this election will not only be about the Trump threat, but about broader questions of policy and competence of a kind that come up in every election: how the country has been governed in recent years, and how it will be governed in the years to come. While that might sound reassuringly normal, there’s no escaping the context. It is always open to us to make one choice or another, but the necessity of making choices can no longer be avoided.
We cannot simply kick the can further down the road on these questions, as we have so often in the past. We have reached one of those decision points, as we did in the free-trade election of 1988, as we did in the debt crisis of the mid-1990s, as we did in the unity crisis of the late 1990s, when we must make big bets and trust in our leaders. This election may well decide what those bets are, but it will certainly decide which leader has earned our trust.