The Liberal Party made an unlikely comeback when Canadians elected Mark Carney in April, a decisive victory propelled by national panic over U.S. tariffs.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Fall has always felt like much more of a time to take stock and start over to me than January. Structure returns to life, new routines settle in and everything green turns more gilded and rustling with each passing day, a constant reminder that time ticks by and things change, whether you like it or not.
All of which is to say: Holy smokes, have we ever been on an emotional journey as a country over the past year.
This time last year, the Justin Trudeau political deathwatch was just starting, and it seemed possible that Kamala Harris’s politics of joy would sweep Donald Trump back into history’s big beautiful diaper pail.
But only six months ago, a newly re-elected Mr. Trump was braying that Canada as a nation was a cute idea that existed only in our own little hoser brains. Every time he made another tariff pronouncement, it was an all-day emergency; the effects on Canada’s economy were unknown, but presumed to be catastrophic.
That national panic would propel Mark Carney into the Prime Minister’s Office and the Liberals to a wildly unlikely comeback. And the cost-of-living rage rocket Pierre Poilievre had been riding to a 20-point polling lead – everything that election was supposed to be about – sputtered and fell out of the sky.
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Mr. Carney was, to an almost comical degree, a man who found his moment. And Mr. Trump was the villain who created the hero.
But now, as Parliament nears its first day of school on Sept. 15 – and the Conservative leader, newly by-elected, finally gets to go toe-to-toe with Mr. Carney in Question Period – it’s become clear that, as often happens on summer holidays, a lot has changed.
The Prime Minister gathered with his cabinet in Toronto this week for what he’d rebranded a “planning forum,” presumably because the usual term “cabinet retreat” conjures images of group shoulder massages and friendship bracelets, and are you kidding me, Mr. Carney would never.
But perhaps the most revealing thing to emerge from that meeting didn’t come from the politicians, but from a pair of pollsters invited to explain to the cabinet where Canadians’ heads are at. Their answer, basically, was that the calendar has jumped back a year or so.
Jean-Marc Léger, president and CEO of Leger Marketing, told reporters that U.S. tariffs have fallen out of the No. 1 worry position they’d been occupying in recent months; that issue has slipped to fourth, behind inflation, the cost of living and access to affordable housing on Canadians’ rankings of their most urgent concerns.
“If government fights against tariffs, citizens fight against inflation,” he said. Mr. Léger explained later, in French, that it was “a surprise” to the cabinet to hear that Mr. Trump’s tariffs were less top-of-mind now.
His colleague, Sébastien Dallaire, executive vice-president of Eastern Canada for Leger, framed these reordered priorities like a logical next stage.
“We move from a context of being very afraid of what was coming from Donald Trump, the threats of tariffs, to now we’re kind of past that to ‘What does it mean for me? What does it mean for me as a Canadian to go through all of this?’” he said.
So the crisis that flipped Canadian politics upside down and caused voters to turn en masse to Mr. Carney and his otherwise reviled party in the spring now feels significantly less pressing to people.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will be back in Parliament after winning his by-election in Alberta.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
And the affordability issues Mr. Poilievre has been hammering the government with for the past three years – to the point that he was loudly criticized for missing the real election campaign – are now at the top of the list again.
Whether Mr. Poilievre’s steadfastness on this is due to prescience or stubbornness is something I invite you to place wagers on with your friends, but either way, it looks like Mr. Carney will have to write the exam his Conservative opponent has been studying for relentlessly.
On Friday, Mr. Carney’s big announcement was about plugging the holes blasted into the Canadian economy by tariffs. He unveiled a $5-billion “strategic response fund” for affected companies, a pause on the electric-vehicle mandate and a new Buy Canadian policy for government procurement, among other measures.
Of course, at a certain point, domestic affordability and the global trade war that exactly one man asked for are all pieces of the same thing. If tariffs cause you to lose your job or have your hours cut, your groceries and rent are going to feel painful no matter what else is going on. And while so far – perhaps to our collective surprise – the Canadian economy has not sustained massive tariff wounds, the cumulative damage is seeping in.
Crises have a way of shingling over each other, each hiding the one that came before, even if nothing is fixed. Remember a few years back when we all agreed that health care in Canada was a howling emergency that demanded repair? We’ve mostly stopped talking about that, even though the situation is almost certainly worse now.
In real terms, nothing is better today with the tariff situation than it was in April when we voted, but part of what makes something an emergency is novelty. Even Donald J. Trump – surely to his surprise – can become white noise after a while.
The election was fought along strange and stark terms. Without the Trump tariff threat, there would probably be no Prime Minister Mark Carney. If affordability and Liberal fatigue had been the operative questions like they were supposed to be, then Mr. Poilievre would be in that office today, sitting astride a fat majority.
But instead, Mr. Carney is there, swept in by one bizarre, loud, dire problem for which he seemed to be the perfect answer, and now with his hands full of a bunch of others.