Mark Carney speaks during his Liberal Party election campaign tour in Brantford, Ont., in April.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Justin Ling is a Montreal-based journalist and author of The 51st State Votes: Canada Versus Donald Trump, from which the following has been adapted.
The 45th Canadian election was nothing short of an existential exercise.
Saying that sentence out loud would have sounded melodramatic – somewhere between alarmism and a Liberal Party fantasy – just last year. Despite the usual high rhetoric of our political parties, most Canadian voters think of our democracy as relatively stable. We may get into histrionics about the prospect of our least favourite party winning, and we may half-jokingly promise to move to the United States if the other guy wins. But given that about a third of the country doesn’t vote, and that many of us make up our minds at the last possible moment, it’s clear that most Canadians don’t consider the casting of a ballot to be a life-or-death choice.
A few days before this election was called, I joined a roundtable hosted by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression in Toronto titled “Canadian Politics in the Eye of the Storm.” The grandiose branding is fairly regular for these kinds of events, but the audience seemed to think it an understatement. During the question-and-answer period, a woman stood up to say: “I have a stepdaughter who is completely panicking about this idea that this might be the next Ukraine.” The audience, a diverse mix of students and seniors, nodded along. How, she wanted to know, do journalists “keep Canadians informed without engendering panic”?
Reflexively, I wanted to tell her she was wrong. Journalists are often inclined to tamp down anxieties precisely because we don’t want to engender panic. But I pondered the question for a second and realized that I couldn’t reasonably do that. While the prospect of an invasion is still remote, we have to concede that it has become a lot more likely over the last year.
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It is still wildly unlikely that tanks are about to roll across the border, but Donald Trump had, by that time, spent weeks reiterating his honest desire to expand his territory and make Canada the 51st state. “We wouldn’t have a northern border problem; we wouldn’t have a tariff problem,” he told reporters in early March. “They spend very little, as you know, the least of almost anybody, on military. We have a great military.”
Mr. Trump, who had long billed himself as a pacifist and who was often described (incorrectly) as an isolationist, had certainly changed his rhetoric over his four years out of office. Returning to power, he was quick to rattle off the territorial seizures he believed America required. “We need Greenland for national security purposes,” Mr. Trump said at a press conference in early 2025. He began making similar pronouncements about the Panama Canal, telling a joint session of Congress weeks later that “to further enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.” Not long after, he instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans to increase U.S. military presence around that critical shipping route.
Mr. Trump’s stated concerns about Greenland and the canal largely turned on their utility to global trade, America’s ability to project power abroad, and the perceived threat of China. Canada, too, ticks all those boxes. Canadians bolstered their sense of security by telling themselves that Mr. Trump wasn’t serious. Or that he was too inept to do any real damage. Or that the checks and balances of American democracy would constrain him. But day by day, that secure constituency shrank. More and more signed up to the idea that Mr. Trump represented a real, existential threat to Canada. To the whole world. When Mark Carney called the election, just two months into the second Trump administration, America’s checks and balances were already being stressed. The President was making it clear that he would defy court orders, ignore the text of the Constitution, violate basic human rights, run roughshod over Congress, squeeze the independent press, and stack the deck for future elections – perhaps even set the stage for an unprecedented and unconstitutional third term. American democracy was at risk of breaking, and that was a threat to Canada.
The question became who could best manage our anxiety. Mr. Carney would theme his campaign around this existential threat, whereas Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre tried to minimize it. But, fundamentally, both men were blunt about the actual threat posed by Mr. Trump. They were united on that point. And they were on the same page, too, about solutions: build a more diversified economy, find new export markets, finance a stronger military, and take a tough stance in Canada-U.S. trade negotiations. They had different styles and different ways to get there, one leader being considerably more serious than the other, but the two men who stood to become prime minister were both willing to and capable of grappling with this crisis.
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So there was no existential threat in the elections themselves. Rather, the election was a response to the existential threat. That was exactly the case Mr. Carney made when he walked to the podium outside Rideau Hall on March 23 to announce that Canadians would be going to the polls.
“What’s important,” Mr. Carney said, “is that the government has a mandate from the Canadian people to finish the job of building that Canadian economy, to finish the job of diversifying our trading partners, and to have a strong mandate to stand up to Donald Trump and the Americans and negotiate the best deal for Canadians.” Mr. Carney, unsurprisingly, wanted a “strong, positive mandate,” and, in a general sense, he was right that getting one would be beneficial to Canada’s next government.
Every facet of Canadian life is tied to the United States. Our culture, language, shared defence systems, national security, economic viability, and supply chains – all these are interwoven with or at least heavily influenced by the United States. That relationship has made us rich and relevant, but it has always been a strategic risk. America has suddenly and irrationally erected trade barriers in the past, and it has even floated the idea of annexation before. But the possibility that America may fully exit the liberal order and opt for something much, much worse is acute under Donald Trump. In that context, all our linkages became vulnerabilities. Canadians did not need to be told any of this. Polling data, both the public kind and the internal surveys that informed the respective campaigns – along with the vibes hanging over the country at the outset of this campaign – made clear that this was an election about more than the usual tax breaks, national strategies, and piddly gaffes. This campaign was going to be existential: a word that got worn out on the first day of the campaign.
The election wasn’t just a referendum on our sovereignty – although it was certainly that. It was also a test of our ability to take the moment seriously. For a very long time, and particularly in the roaring 2010s, we were told that we could have everything. We were told that the value of a home would go up, but that mortgages would stay cheap. We were told that government debt could mount, but that spending could continue. We were told that we could say no to a new apartment block or rail line in our backyard, and that the city would simply find somewhere else to put it. We were told that the enemies of democracy were cowed, contained, and no longer a threat to our comfy way of life. We were told a lot of things that turned out to be wildly untrue, and we should have known better.
So going into this campaign, it was an open question: Could these leaders resist the urge to lie to us? Could they rise to the occasion, look us in the eye, and say, “You’re going to have to make sacrifices if we want to keep our way of life”? Could they take the extraordinary unity – not in political affiliation, but in the desire to get things fixed – and use it to make some big changes?
An election campaign is usually no place to deliver hard truths, but if any election was going to serve as the exception, it was this one.