OTTAWA—Don’t let anyone tell you the re-election of Donald Trump is not a jolt to Canada’s political landscape. Or that we’ve been there, done that.
The fallout is about to overwhelm the Canadian government’s agenda for the next four years.
Just how it all plays out in a Canadian election expected at any time in the next year with a deeply unpopular Liberal prime minister and a right-leaning Conservative opposition leader way ahead in the polls is a central question.
There are certainly tactical lessons to be learned by Canadian political practitioners.
What’s less clear is whether Donald Trump’s victory represents a lasting political realignment south of the border and whether it signals a shift in Canadian political coalitions to come.
First, the early takeaways.
Liberals and Conservatives, along with other political parties, can draw three lessons from the United States election results.
Addressing cost of living anxiety is the political play that matters right now.
A moralizing campaign — whether it’s signalling how virtuous you are or how detestable your opponent is — doesn’t cut it.
And finally, “change” is a powerful vote driver. Incumbents are dropping around the world.
Those are the tactical takeaways that many politicos identified in the halls of Canada’s Parliament, on television panels and analysis pieces, and in hot takes on social media.
Yet a surprising number of MPs and advisers trying to chart the path for leaders aspiring to the prime minister’s seat warn against drawing too many comparisons between the Canadian and American political landscape.
In conversation after conversation with the Star most, including those who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss political strategy, said the two countries, the campaigns, and the personalities of the main party leaders are too different to read too much into Trump’s win and the Democrat’s defeat.
But Fred DeLorey, the Conservative party’s 2021 campaign director and a longtime party strategist, said that’s “complete and utter nonsense.”
DeLorey said the biggest lessons are for the Liberals, who he said are “heading down the exact same path the Democrats went down. They’re trying to run the same playbook, the same messaging, the same everything. And it didn’t work there. It’s not going to work here.”
The Biden-Harris Democrats “lacked a strong, powerful narrative on why they should be elected. Instead, it was like, things are bad, but our opponent’s really bad.”
DeLorey said negative comparisons between Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Trump won’t work, as they are patently not the same. The Democrats, he said, had “real material to work with. The problem is, though, the positive message — why vote for us — for the Liberals and the Democrats is almost the same, in that there isn’t one. There is no narrative (other) than we’ve got your back.”
For voters, including the Black men, Latinos and women who shifted votes to Trump, who were worried mostly about the economy, Trump didn’t offer a detailed plan, Delorey acknowledged, but at least he “talked about issues that they felt he would champion.”
In fact, a senior Liberal cabinet minister who assessed the results early on the morning the Trump victory was called agreed with the broader point: that the Liberal party must focus its re-election bid on cost of living and affordability, and forget the rest.
“Inflation’s a killer,” he said. Voters will be driven by their household economic concerns and no campaign that relies on “moral superiority” — anything that looks like tone-policing, virtue-signalling, or culture wars — will succeed, the insider said.
Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville coined the slogan “it’s the economy, stupid.” The phrase has found a whole new generation’s ears in the past week.
Two other senior Liberal sources agreed that is the party’s biggest takeaway from the U.S. election: that, as one put it, the economy is “number one, number one, number one.”
“And it’s not just in the United States where you’ve seen an election result like that, it’s hard for incumbents everywhere right now,” he said.
However, those insiders don’t accept there is no value in attacking your opponent.
The second insider said it is “it is not good enough, although you have to do it, to only try to demonize your opponent. You also have to have a positive offering of your own which meets the moment, and you can’t only have one of those things these days. You have to have both.”
The bigger question about whether voting coalitions have irreversibly shifted is more complicated. Analysts with AP’s VoteCast who combed through a deep dive on voter data said “big shifts within small groups and small shifts within big groups helped propel” Trump back to the White House and eroded the Democrats’ voter base.
Some Conservatives here believe that is a sign of what’s to come.
A Conservative MP said Poilievre has already expanded the Conservative coalition in the two years since becoming leader, drawing in more voters from Canada’s working class, from unionized labour, and from ethnic or visible minority groups by focusing on inflation, the cost of living, jobs and affordability almost to the exclusion of all else.
Howard Anglin, a top staffer to then-Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper and to then-Alberta premier Jason Kenney, said Latino and East and South Asian voters, especially the men, “voted like issue voters rather than as ‘ethnic’ block voters,” adding it bolsters the theory that there is a “multi-ethnic groundswell against out-of-touch progressive social policy.” But Anglin said that was secondary to the overwhelming drive for change.
First and foremost, Anglin said, “it was a change election and Trump was the candidate of change and Kamala was the candidate of continuity.”
“In 2020, Biden won independents in key swing states; in 2024, Trump won them. Trump also won the votes of “double haters” — people who said they didn’t like either candidate — by 20 points.
“People voted for change … because of policies that they can feel making their lives worse: illegal immigration, cost of living, crime, and general quality of life. Those are progressive Democratic policies and Kamala said she wouldn’t change them.”
André Turcotte, a pollster with Pollara Insights and an associate professor at Carleton University, agrees the anti-incumbent wave is strong, but takes a slightly different view, saying it’s “too simplistic to simply say it’s all about the economy.”
“Identity was probably also a factor in the shifts that saw young men turn up and vote in greater numbers for Trump, Black men and Latinos supporting Trump,” he said in an interview. As for whether that is a trend likely to be seen here, Turcotte said “I don’t think we play identity politics the same way they do it.”
He said Canada doesn’t have “big racial — for lack of a better word — groups” that can be mobilized in the same way the U.S. taps into racial voting blocs, while identity in Canadian politics tends to fall along gender or social identity lines — for example, LGBTQ identity.
Turcotte believes the U.S. result makes it easier for Trudeau to resist calls for him to leave, because he can argue it didn’t help Democrats to ditch Biden. It also complicates Poilievre’s bid to replace Trudeau.
Pollara’s research shows that half of Conservative supporters don’t like Trump, but the other half does. So he’s got to be careful, when for example he’s chewing on an apple as he chews out a reporter. “He has to be conscious that he has many people in this coalition that really don’t like that.”
And yet, Turcotte observes, Democrat strategists bet big — but wrongly, it turns out — on the old axiom that “hope is better than anger.” Instead, Trump’s win shows that anger works. For the past few years, Pollara’s polling has tracked a Rage Index in Canada. It shows Canadians are angry — about governments, institutions, media, wars, the housing market, you name it. So he suggests the Canadian political market is ripe for political parties to try to use that to political advantage.
“The anger is there,” he said. “We say we’re civil, until we’re not.”
In the end, what voter coalition can a Liberal government seeking its fourth mandate under Trudeau mobilize to resist the anti-incumbent forces, and not face Kamala Harris’ fate?
Even the Liberals are wondering. Their base is still in urban and suburban Ontario, Quebec and B.C., with some semi-rural and rural support in Atlantic Canada, less so in Quebec. The Liberals have to recover support among the under 35-year-old youth vote to win the next election. Polls show it’s going to be a tough hill to climb.
Conservative Fred DeLorey said voter coalitions are shifting, but he cautions all shifts are transactional at the outset, and can be elusive.
“For sure, there is a political realignment happening across the world, it seems, coming out of post-pandemic,” said DeLorey. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to be results based. It’s going to be- will Trump and the Republicans deliver what these voter groups want. And that’s what will determine whether this solidifies.
“Voters lend you their vote. They can take it back next election and people can move around. So it’s all about whether they can deliver or not. And that’s the same thing Poilievre is going to have when he wins. He’s going to have to deliver. If they (voters) don’t get the change they want or are happy with, they’ll move back somewhere else.”
