In ways no one could have understood at the time, June 16, 2015, turned out to be a momentous day for Canada and Canadian politics, the reverberations of which are only being fully felt now, nearly a decade later.
In the moment, the day’s most significant event might have seemed to be an announcement by the leader of the Liberal Party in downtown Ottawa. Still four months away from becoming prime minister, Justin Trudeau stood before television cameras at the Château Laurier and presented a plan for sweeping political reform, including a categorical commitment to change Canada’s existing electoral system.
If things had turned out differently that might have been the launching point for a historic shift in Canada’s political system — perhaps toward proportional representation and the coalition governments that are common in Europe.
In reality, the day’s more seismic event occurred eight hours south of Parliament Hill, on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
After riding a golden escalator down to the lobby of the skyscraper he named after himself, a former reality TV star announced that he was running to be president of the United States. He said “drugs” and “rapists” were streaming across the American border with Mexico. He promised to build a wall. He said the United States was being “ripped off” by the rest of the world and that it didn’t have “victories” anymore. He vowed to “make America great again.”
In the years that followed, the United States had multiple opportunities to decisively reject Donald Trump. But last fall, they chose him — for a second time — to be their president.
For Canada, the first four years of a Trump presidency were a time-consuming challenge. The scramble to maintain an open economic relationship with Canada’s largest trading partner necessarily became the Trudeau government’s top priority. But it was still possible then to believe those four years were a strange anomaly — that America would, after four years of Trump, snap back to normal.
Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 seemed to confirm that. But the four years of Biden’s presidency now seem like the last gasp of a world that no longer exists. And two months into the second four years of Trump, the threat to Canada now seems existential. The first time around, Trump talked about tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now, he threatens to erase the border — an “artificially drawn line,” in his words — between our two countries.
“Trump is posing the gravest challenge our country has faced since the Second World War,” Chrystia Freeland, the former foreign affairs minister who was at the centre of Canada’s initial response to Trump, said at a Liberal leadership debate last month.
At the same debate, Mark Carney said, “Canada faces one of the most serious crises in our history.”
Skeptical observers might accuse these Liberals of wanting to capitalize on the threat. But it is hard to deny that a profound threat exists.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in February that “we can’t rely on the Americans anymore.” Of the current and coming conflict, former prime minister Stephen Harper wrote that “the preservation of Canada’s existence must be our highest objective,” something that wouldn’t need to be said unless Canada’s existence was not entirely assured.
Timothy Snyder, the American historian and author who has become a leading voice on the threats endangering American democracy, wrote recently that “Trump’s rhetoric about Canada uncannily echoes that of Russian propagandists towards Ukraine.”
Decades of Canadian economic and international policy have been — quite rationally — geared toward greater integration with and reliance upon the United States. As John F. Kennedy said in 1961, economics made us partners and necessity made us allies. But the United States is no longer a reliable ally or partner. And that casts into doubt not just continental relations and Canadian security, but the entire world order.
Whoever is prime minister after April 28 will have to contend with this unsettled and unsettling new reality. They will have to fight a continental trade war. They will have to negotiate with an American president who openly pines for annexation. They may soon face a national or global recession brought on by a global trade war. They will have to make urgent decisions about domestic economic policy, resource development, national defence and international engagement.
Asked why Canadians should believe he represents change as Liberals seek their fourth consecutive mandate, Liberal Leader Mark Carney says it’s about action, not words, and that he recognizes ‘the need to act dramatically and act rapidly’ to build a strong economy.
There may currently be widespread agreement on some of what should be done — on the need to impose retaliatory tariffs, reduce interprovincial trade barriers and increase defence spending. But those are just the first and easiest calls.
And even where there is currently general agreement, the details will be crucial. Even if, for instance, there is some agreement on a need to build new pipelines for oil and gas, under what environmental rules will those projects function? Even if Canada needs to spend more on defence, how will we pay for it?
Only a handful of elections in Canadian history could be said to be about a single, defining question — conscription in 1917, reciprocity in 1891 and 1911, free trade in 1988. But the 45th general election might be defined by a clear and present crisis. One way or another, these 37 days will be about beginning to answer the myriad questions currently and to be posed by a changed and changing world — not least the question of who should lead the country at this unnerving moment.
For the foreseeable future, the United States will be a source of instability — of hostility, unpredictability, misinformation and anti-democratic ideas. That will challenge Canadians to newly define who they are and what they want their country to be. An attack on one’s sovereignty forces one to both respond and look inside.
The affordability and climate crises haven’t gone away
There are also the crises that were apparent before Trump regained the presidency.
As recently as last fall, it seemed obvious that this election would be about the affordability crisis — about the hardship and frustration brought on by the post-pandemic rise in inflation and Canada’s acute housing shortage. It is the rise in the cost of living that may explain why so many incumbent governments across the democratic world suffered losses or outright defeats in 2024. And it was those concerns that Poilievre has put front and centre over the last two years in arguing that it was time for Canada to be rid of Trudeau.
Trudeau’s exit and Trump’s return have scrambled the political situation, not least for Poilievre. But that does not mean the leading problems of three months ago have been resolved — 45 per cent of respondents to a recent survey by Abacus Data still identified the cost of living as one of their two biggest concerns, while 33 per cent said the same for dealing with the ramifications of Trump.
(Different pollsters, asking different questions, are getting different results. Both Nanos and Leger find Trump is the top concern for a plurality of Canadians.)
Recent action to reduce the flow of immigration to Canada — including a drastic reduction in the number of international students — may have relieved some of the pressure on the housing market. But truly solving the challenge of housing availability and affordability in Canada would require a “war-time-like effort” to build approximately 330,000 housing units per year — more than we have built in any of the last 60 years.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, asked at his campaign launch if he respects U.S. President Donald Trump, said he respects the office of the president — and would deal with Trump in a respectful and firm manner if elected prime minister, while working to strengthen Canada.
Poilievre argues that the “promise of Canada” — which he defines as the idea that “hard work gets you a great life in a beautiful house on a safe street” — has been broken. And he places the blame for that squarely and entirely on the policies and spending of the Trudeau government. The Conservative leader, whose ideological view of politics can be traced to reading free-market economist Milton Friedman as a teenager, says he would reduce regulation and eliminate the federal deficit by cutting “bureaucracy,” spending on consultants, “corporate welfare” and foreign aid.
Reducing spending on at least some of those things might be wise. But it’s not obvious that reducing or even eliminating such expenses would be enough to balance the federal government’s annual budget — and those are hardly the only areas that Trudeau’s government directed federal spending toward over the last nine years. As the Liberals will likely be at pains to remind Canadians over the next five weeks, they have introduced new federal funding for child care, dental care, pharmacare and school nutrition programs — and Poilievre has not explicitly committed to maintaining those initiatives.
Concerns about the overall growth of the Canadian economy may have lately taken precedence in recent months, but the question of how to build a more equitable economy has not suddenly become irrelevant.
Overarching all of this — even Trump — is the climate crisis.
Four years ago, wildfires consumed the entire town of Lytton, B.C. The wildfire season in 2023 smashed records — and the smell of smoke reached the floor of the House of Commons. Last summer, fire destroyed a third of Jasper, Alta. The Insurance Bureau of Canada reported that 2024 was insurers’ costliest year on record, totalling more than $8.5 billion in damages due to fires, floods and hailstorms.
Some amount of future damage — a painful amount, no doubt — is now unavoidable. But the Canadian Climate Institute has estimated that in a world where greenhouse gas emissions are significantly reduced and Canadian governments take steps to adapt to the impacts of extreme weather, the costs of climate change could be reduced by 75 per cent.
But that would obviously require action and investment. Over the past decade a flurry of climate policies have been implemented and advanced at the national level. But many of those measures are now in dispute and may not survive a change in government.
Carney and Poilievre, a study in contrasts
The two leading contenders to lead the federal government are a study in contrasts — perhaps more different than any pair of leaders since Progressive Conservative Leader John Diefenbaker, a populist prairie lawyer, battled Liberal Leader Lester B. Pearson, a decorated former diplomat, in the 1960s.
Poilievre, who was first elected to the House of Commons in 2004 at the age of 25, is a modern populist. He uses the word “woke” as an all-purpose pejorative. He thrives on conflict. He has expressed enthusiasm for bitcoin, accused his Liberal opponents of wanting people to eat bugs and said he would ban his ministers from attending the World Economic Forum. He has said he would fire the governor of the Bank of Canada, defund the CBC and use the notwithstanding clause to override judicial challenges to some of his justice legislation.
After winning the Conservative Party’s leadership on the first ballot in 2022, he seemed to capture the frustration of many Canadians — Canada was “broken,” Poilievre said. But now two of his favourite targets — Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax — are off the board and suddenly Trump looms as Canada’s biggest problem.
Carney has been an active politician for nine weeks. A former governor of the central banks of Canada and England, senior civil servant in the Department of Finance, chairman of a major investment firm and a UN special envoy for climate change, he is someone to whom the word “technocrat” is often applied.
In a short period of time, he has tried to differentiate himself from his predecessor — cancelling the carbon tax, nixing changes to the capital gains tax, promising a greater degree of fiscal discipline — but his larger platform remains to be detailed. His corporate career is being combed over for unflattering details — Brookfield Asset Management moved its headquarters from Toronto to New York last year, when Carney was chair of the company’s corporate board.
In winning the Liberal leadership on the first ballot two weeks ago and in pulling the Liberals back into the national race, Carney seems to be riding a new moment. On the strength of his resumé and his early showings, many Canadians apparently see someone who they would want to put up against Trump. But a lot can change in five weeks.
As ever, the NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens will hope to capitalize on any weaknesses in the Conservative and Liberal arguments.
Standing outside the doors of Rideau Hall on Sunday — where the Governor General had just dissolved the 44th parliament — Carney said Canadians “are facing the most significant crisis of our lifetimes because of President Trump’s unjustified trade actions and his threats to our sovereignty.”
Ready to vote? Canada’s 45th federal election will take place on April 28, 2025. You can email your election questions to ask@cbc.ca.
At his own campaign launch, overlooking Parliament Hill, Poilievre said he understood Canadians were “worried, angry and anxious — and with good reason, as a result of the president’s unacceptable threats against our country.
“You worry about your job and the sovereignty of our nation,” he said.
Though perhaps the day’s most bracing language came from Green Party Co-Leader Jonathan Pedneault, who said Canadians should “vote like our country depends on it.”
Both Carney and Poilievre talked about the need for “change” — though exactly what they’d change, and for what reasons, is likely to differ markedly.
The ultimate lesson of Trump — for Americans and Canadians — is how little can be taken for granted — not least democracy itself. Elections are choices and elections have consequences. Every election is a chance to decide what a country will do and how it will be — with real, lasting and potentially significant effects.
Whatever else he has wrought, Trump has made that clear. And in doing so he has freighted Canada’s 45th general election with an incredible weight.
