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| Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives onstage at his campaign headquarters Tuesday. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press/AP) |
| A few months ago, it seemed a dead certainty that Pierre Poilievre would be Canada’s next prime minister. His Conservatives had a double-digit lead in the polls over the incumbent Liberals and Poilievre channeled the mounting frustrations of an electorate fatigued by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decade-long tenure. But by Tuesday morning, Poilievre’s hopes for national victory were dashed, and also, perhaps, his political future: Not only had the Conservatives failed to win Monday’s national election, but their leader looked set to lose his own parliamentary seat. There are a few reasons for the Liberals’ astonishing comeback. Trudeau bowed out early this year, triggering a leadership contest that helped change the image of his center-left party to one less burdened by its years in power. In the figure of Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, a suave former governor of both the Bank of England and Canada, ordinary Canadians saw a competent and experienced leader. Poilievre, a career politician who had been waging an anti-Trudeau campaign for months, had less of an argument.
But no factor was more important than the shadow of President Donald Trump, who reset Canada’s political map with his aggressive trade war against the U.S.'s northern neighbor and repeated insistence that Canada would better off as America’s “51st state.” Carney’s Liberals capitalized on the nationalism stoked by Trump’s bullying, while Poilievre’s right-wing, would-be-populist brand was tarnished by its proximity to Trump. Canada’s other major factions — the New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebecois — hemorrhaged votes in an election that became a referendum on Trump, not Trudeau. At an address hailing his party’s triumph Tuesday morning, Carney reiterated his belief that the old relationship with the United States, built on free trade and deepening “integration,” was over. “As I’ve been warning for months,” he said, “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us.”
The precedent set in Canada could soon be repeated in another Commonwealth country. Australia’s federal election is this weekend, and the incumbent center-left government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears to have been boosted by Trump’s belligerence. Amid the escalating trade war provoked by the White House, including tariffs on steel and aluminum, the Australian public also seems to want leadership that can directly reckon with Trump’s challenge. “The two conversations I’ve had with President Trump are ones in which I stand up for Australia’s national interest and I will always do that,” Albanese told reporters as the election campaign got underway. Polling conducted by Australian public broadcaster ABC found that more than seven in 10 Australians thought Trump’s actions will leave them worse off financially, while a majority no longer viewed the United States as a reliable security partner. Three months into Trump’s second term, 66 percent of Australians said their country could no longer count on the United States and needed to further develop its own military capacity. That figure last June was under 40 percent. The shift in attitudes has had a direct effect on the election. One-third of voters in Australia — where voting is mandatory — said they were less likely to vote for the conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton because of their views about Trump, according to a Resolve Political Monitor poll released two weeks ago. | ||||||||||||
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| Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, left, and opposition leader Peter Dutton talk April 10. (Democracy News Alliance/News Aktuell/AP) |
| Dutton, not unlike Poilievre, was ahead in the polls just before the start of Trump’s presidency. He embraced Trumpian rhetoric about “wokeness,” campaigned on a platform of immigration restrictionism, deregulation and slashing of the federal government, and positioned himself as a change candidate at a time when ordinary citizens were chafing under rising costs and housing prices. But the prospects of his conservative coalition have slipped as the ruling Labor party rebranded their rival as “DOGE-y Dutton” — a gesture to Trump’s efforts to gut federal government with the help of tech billionaire Elon Musk. “Trump has emerged as the third candidate in this election campaign,” Mark Kenny, a professor specializing in politics at the Australian National University in Canberra, told Reuters. “He’s made it quite difficult for Peter Dutton to get his message across, and made it difficult for Dutton to be seen as an entirely independent figure in this election campaign.” Albanese has tried to downplay the comparisons to the Trump effect in Canada. Australia doesn’t have the same trade deficit in goods with the United States, nor the same entangled supply chains and dense thicket of neighborly ties. “Some of that can be overestimated,” Albanese told the British-based “Rest Is Politics” podcast this month. “Canada obviously has a border with the U.S. and it’s pretty brutal and up front, that division that is going on there.” During the final debate ahead of the May 3 election, Albanese said he and Trump share “different views, different values,” but expressed confidence in the strength of the U.S.-Australian security relationship, which he said has “universal” support among U.S. lawmakers he has met. Amanda Coletta, The Washington Post’s Canada correspondent, noted that Carney had “pitched himself as a steady hand at a destabilizing time.” Albanese appears to be doing the same in his bid to win reelection. Andrew Carswell, a former press secretary to conservative former prime minister Scott Morrison — who was defeated by Albanese in 2022 — told Reuters that Trump had been “a wrecking ball” for his side’s chances. “Australian voters are looking on with concern at what is happening and saying if that is change, we don’t want it,” he said. | ||||||