Let's set the record straight about the Canadian election
because I've seen a lot of terrible takes and it's starting to bug me.
Myth 1: This was a huge defeat for the Conservatives
The way this is presented is that while Justin Trudeau was Prime Minister, the Conservatives had a 25-point lead over the Liberals. But then Trudeau resigned, Trump started making threats, and the Liberals made a miraculous recovery to win their fourth consecutive term in government.
This is true. But the Conservatives did not do badly by any stretch of the imagination.
In 2015, when Justin Trudeau's Liberals won a majority government, he won 39.5% of the popular vote. When Stephen Harper's Conservatives won a majority in 2011, they had 39.6% of the popular vote.
In this election, the Liberals won 43.7% of the popular vote. Normally that would mean that they won a crushing majority of seats. But they won a minority. The Conservatives got 41.3% of the popular vote, which also would be enough to win a majority in normal times. And they did pick up 24 seats in the election.
The big story isn't that the Conservatives did badly, because they didn't. The big story is that the NDP (the labour/social democrat-ish party) absolutely collapsed in this election, losing seats to both the Liberals and Conservatives. They went from 24 seats to just 7 seats. They lost official party status.
The Liberals rebounded, not because they won Conservative supporters, but because they siphoned support from the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois (the Quebec nationalist party) (who went from 34 to 23 seats).
That's because there were two issues in this election: Donald Trump and the cost of living.
During the last Parliament, the NDP entered into an agreement with Trudeau's minority government to prop them up in return for some very very limited reforms that the Liberals probably would have done anyways. The NDP kept the Liberals in power through the cost of living crisis, through the genocide in Gaza, through the Liberals repeatedly shutting down important strikes (dock workers, rail workers, postal workers). They took on responsibility for a government that was widely unpopular.
Then Trudeau resigned, Mark Carney reversed his most unpopular policies (Carbon tax, Capital gains tax), and Trump instituted tariffs against Canada. The Liberals were able to revamp their image and appeal to people who were scared of Trump, while the NDP bore responsibility for the previous government. And those who were voting based on worries about the cost of living voted Conservative.
The NDP actually lost more seats to the Conservatives than to the Liberals, including the manufacturing regions that have been hit the worst by the trade war. The NDP usually gets a majority of the support from union members and youth, but this time they lost both of those demographics to the Conservatives. Because the Conservatives were the only ones talking about the working class (opportunistically), and the only ones who seemed to be at all anti-establishment (rhetorically).
And this is not going to be a stable government for the Liberals. They're a minority government, those usually last 18-36 months. And come next election, the Conservatives will be well-placed to win.
As a side note, there's a lot of people talking about how Pierre Poilievre (Conservative leader) lost his seat. And yes, it's funny and satisfying. But also it's been way overblown. He's just going to run in a by-election for a safe Conservative seat, it doesn't change anything.
Myth 2: Pierre Poilievre/The Conservatives are fascists
I honestly feel like I'm in the twilight zone with the way some people talk about Poilievre.
He's just a normal conservative. He's been a parliamentarian his entire adult life. He was a member of Stephen Harper's cabinet. He's an establishment politician who jumped on the right-populist bandwagon at the time of the trucker convoy, and then got a makeover and added a few catchy slogans ("boots not suits" "the have-nots vs. the have-yachts").
Are there extremists who vote Conservative? Yes. But the strategy of the Conservative party when it comes to extreme social conservatives (going back to Harper's day, and Poilievre is a Harper-ite) is to use them for their votes and then tell them to shut up. You see this with Poilievre, that he was winning based on talking about the cost-of-living crisis, so he didn't need to get into culture war stuff, and he avoided it.
And you need to look at who voted Conservative: youth, workers, and immigrants. Poilievre is popular because he (demagogically) talks about the fact that people's lives are getting worse, and everyone is sick of the Liberals.
Myth 3: The Liberals are any better
First of all, let's be really clear about what the Liberals are. They've been in power for most of Canada's history. They're nicknamed "the natural governing pary". They are the preferred party of Canadian capitalism.
They're what in political science is called a "brokerage party". That means that they don't stand for anything ideologically, but operate solely on the basis of what will get them elected. They are not a left party, and have never been a left party.
And the Liberals, being the main party of Canadian capitalism, have presided over some of the worst stuff that Canadian capitalism is responsible for. They were huge supporters of the creation of Israel. They presided over the 60s scoop. Federally, they implemented the worst cuts in Canadian history in the 1990s. Recently, they've shut down every major strike in the past few years. And that's just off the top of my head.
Even under Carney, and he's only been around a couple of months, the Liberals are making massive cuts to Indigenous support programs, and sending weapons to Israel and lying about it.
In this election specifically, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre's platforms were *extremely* similar. Before the election even got underway, Carney implemented three of the promises that Poilievre was running on (ending the carbon tax, stopping the capital gains tax, ending federal oversight of development projects). Poilievre accused the Liberals of stealing his platform, even.
Both the Liberals and Conservatives are talking about limiting immigration and sending migrants out of the country, they're both talking about "encouraging investment" (payouts to business), and they're both talking about balancing the budget.
The reason why they're so similar is that in times of economic crisis, the ruling class has less room to manoeuver. Canada is facing a productivity crisis, runaway deficits, and now the trade war. From the point of view of the ruling class, the main task is to balance the budget. That will necessarily mean making cuts to social spending, whether it’s the Liberals or Conservatives in government.
That's the ultimate point of this post: The Liberals and the Conservatives are both our enemies, and both need to be treated as such.