A Liberal Victory Does Not Mean Populist Furies Are Dead in Canada
For that, the party will have to correct its abysmal governing failure and deliver economic results
Donald Trump’s return to the White House represented a significant victory for the sort of illiberal, far-right politics gaining strength around the world. In Canada, Trump’s election has had the opposite effect, and on Monday a party headed by a right-wing populist candidate lost our federal election. This is welcome news, but it’s too early to conclude that illiberal populism has faltered more broadly in Canada—if for no other reason than because the resentment over the failure of the governing Liberal Party to address systemic problems affecting ordinary Canadians remains widespread.
Canada held its federal election on April 28, almost six months after the U.S. presidential election in November. Global trends for over a year saw incumbent governments lose power across the board, suggesting defeat for Canada’s governing Liberal Party. Polling numbers suggested the same: just 90 days out from the election, the opposition Conservative Party held a seemingly-insurmountable 25-point lead over its Liberal rivals, with the latter sliding towards third place status.
Instead, the opposite happened.
The Liberals, under their new leader, the former central banker Mark Carney, were returned to power with a larger minority government. And not only did the Conservatives remain in opposition, but their leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat.
The biggest factor in this remarkable reversal of fortunes was Trump. Not satisfied merely to remind Canadians of the havoc that an illiberal populist regime can wreak in his own country, this time Trump launched an all-out trade war. He also overtly, and repeatedly, threatened Canadian sovereignty. In doing so, Trump upended the inertia and naïveté that initially allowed Canada’s Conservatives to mood affiliate with MAGA.
However, the populist right in Canada performed well in the election. Although Conservatives remain in opposition, they won more of the popular vote than any government, majority or minority, since 1988. They made these gains behind a leader whose demonstrated commitment to the right-wing culture war was stronger than to the classically liberal economics that once kept market liberals in a fusionist alliance with Conservatives.
The unfortunate reality is that illiberal right-wing politics are not failing and will not simply fade away. Canadian liberalism did not secure a victory, but merely a reminder that illiberalism is not inevitable. What Liberals won is time to do something to keep illiberal populist currents at bay.
Canada’s Justified Unrest
The U.S. through 2024 had its economic struggles, especially inflation. But unemployment was low and productivity and output were high. The economy was pretty good, but the vibes were bad. Canada is a different story. We have struggled with falling productivity for four decades. Canada’s GDP only grows because of its high immigration rates. On a per capita basis, GDP is falling, resulting in a “lost decade”—so far.
Despite our reliance on immigration for the economic growth we’ve managed, Canadians have not allowed policy changes to accommodate population growth. Unlike in the U.S., Canada’s housing crisis extends beyond our major cities. Building infrastructure is nearly impossible, too, and what exists is strained by population growth.
Millions of Canadians have no access to a family doctor, and promises to end “hallway medicine” in hospitals stretch back decades. Schools struggle to attract teachers. Roads are clogged because people can’t afford to live near their work and transit projects are behind schedule and over budget.
It’s a vicious cycle. Canada’s pathetic productivity means we cannot grow without more people, and more people can’t help the country thrive because of the factors that have led to Canada’s pathetic productivity. It’s Canada’s version of what Liberal Currents’ Samantha Hancox-Li has called the crisis of Democratic governance, but from all governing parties and on a national scale.
In America the puzzle is why the U.S. electorate turned to authoritarianism when things were so good. But in Canada, the puzzle is why Canadians did not throw out a party under which things had got so bad, and that so poorly positioned us to weather the economic and geopolitical instability we now face.
Around the world, the new right blames political discontent on immigrants, institutions, and liberalism. In Canada, the new right bundled these claims with complaints about the governance by the Liberal Party—in power since 2015 under former prime minister Justin Trudeau—and many Canadians were buying it.
This is the backdrop against which Poilievre’s Conservative Party was on track for a historic electoral victory. Poilievre, who served in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, had earned a reputation as “Maple MAGA” with a brash style and a disregard for the truth when stoking fear and anger reminiscent of Trump.
Then, on Jan. 6, Trudeau stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party. Two weeks later, Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. These two factors were critical in setting up the Liberal Party’s stunning electoral comeback earlier this week.
Not a MAGA Guy
In January, over 40% of voters intended to cast their ballot for the Conservatives. With high support and split opposition, Poilievre might have won as many as 70% of the seats in the House of Commons. So he didn’t feel the need to temper his rhetoric to reach centrist voters. In fact, he gained leadership of the party in part through outreach to the more fringe political right, especially Convoy protesters.
Like Trump, Poilievre focused on appearances in alternative right-wing media rather than more traditional outlets. He did two long-form interviews with Jordan Peterson. The latest one, released in early January, was revealing.
Many on Poilievre’s side were selling him as a fiscally responsible, small government conservative who understood policy and would streamline the bureaucracy and roll back regulations—a message crafted for market liberals.
The Peterson interview told a different story, however. His economics came across as muddled and sometimes conspiratorial. In contrast, he was clear when be bantered with Peterson about the preoccupations of the new right such as “wokeness” and his ability to withstand the allure of the “global utopian delusion.”
In a populist vein, he hammered the Liberals for the high immigration levels their government set, which he blamed for many of Canada’s economic woes and associated with conspiratorial worries about the nonpartisan Century Initiative. (This is despite the Liberals’ pledge to maintain a cap on immigration.) He attacked foreign aid and maintained his conspiracy-adjacent hostility to the World Economic Forum. All of this nurtured the new right’s grievances against liberal democratic institutions.
Poilievre even went so far as to praise Trump’s “massive and powerful mandate.” He claimed that Trump would be happy to make a bigger, better trade deal with him than Trudeau could secure.
Then the reality of Trump hit, and Poilievre was forced to reckon with it.
Poilievre was prepared to sit down with a Putin apologist, but he drew the line at Trump’s hostility to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump’s willingness to sacrifice Ukrainians in occupied territory, and Trump’s desire to exploit Ukraine’s vulnerability to treat it as an extractive state.
Poilievre understood—as Canadian voters do—that trade is good, and opposes Trump’s trade war. Most importantly, Poilievre rejects the notion that Canada should become the 51st state.
His sudden distancing from Trump drew the ire of Canada’s hard right, with whom he had brushed elbows. Trump declared that Poilievre was “not a MAGA guy.”
Trump is right about that. But neither is Poilievre, as the conservative commentator Ben Domenech suggested in the same interview with Trump, a “throwback Republican.” He has taken his party decisively into the culture war.
Culture War First
To understand what this election can tell us about Canada’s new right, look at where, under pressure, Poilievre relented and where he held firm.
Despite ambitious rhetoric about fiscal reform and restraint, Poilievre promised a spending reduction of only 1.3% of the federal budget, plus limits on new spending. Despite the high expectations he tried to set for market liberals, his campaign promises amounted to acknowledgement that the private sector needed to play a leading role in growth and to cuts to regulation similar to those by the Harper government. Poilievre did stick to his guns on putting an end to single-use plastic bans.
Where Poilievre held firm was on conservative economic policies that advanced the right’s anti-left cultural agenda, even when it undercut markets.
For example, he mounted an “axe the tax” campaign that killed carbon pricing, a market-based response to climate change. He promised to favor resource projects and sectors, especially Canadian oil and gas. Just like the Harper government, instead of broad, economy-wide tax reductions, Poilievre promised boutique tax cuts for groups and behavior favored by conservatives. Amazingly, he promised to implement the famously failed policy of referendums for new taxes.
Overall, Poilievre’s promised economic reforms were mild. In short, when push came to shove, Poilievre did not commit to the free-market policies his rhetoric initially implied. He committed to the culture war, placing his party squarely on the new right. Here are some of the other things he advocated:
A “warrior culture, not a woke culture” for the military.
A platform promise to fight “woke ideology” in public service and federal university funding.
A Conservative platform in which three of four mentions of women were about denying trans women access to gender-appropriate federal spaces, including prisons.
A promise to override the constitution as part of a promise to get tough on crime.
What’s most worrying is that Poilievre increasingly courts and takes his cues from the new right’s media sources, a trend accelerated by former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer in his final speech in 2020, when he praised such outlets as the “smart, independent, objective” news outlets.
Canada’s New Right
The most consequential change demonstrated in Canada’s election is that the political right has lost its inherent liberal grounding. Its identity is no longer tethered to liberal economics or trade, to liberal constitutionalism or due process, or to the liberal international order. What it offered voters instead was culture war issues and economic populism.
Given that the Conservative Party lost dramatically this time, it is easy to miss that the combination of anemic market liberalism with a far more hardline right-wing cultural agenda got electoral results. The Conservatives’ 41.3% of the vote share (as mentioned above) represents more popular support than any government, minority or majority, had mustered since 1988. The Conservatives only lost because their opposition consolidated, handing the Liberals 43.7% of the vote, based broadly enough to deliver the seats they needed.
In other words, this election result does not demonstrate the collapse of illiberal right-populism. It demonstrated that right-populism has substantial and robust support in a country that is held up as a beacon of hope for the liberal democratic order.
It’s been hard for those used to our old politics to accept how easily economic policy fades into the background in right-populist politics. Politicos and pundits, especially those who see themselves in the center, want to be able to focus on their idea of substantial policy. But the once-peripheral culture war issues are increasingly the lines along which voters and parties sort themselves. Poilievre gets that, and that’s the hand he played.
Canada Could Veer Even More Right than Poilievre’s Populism
The good news is, of course, that Canadians rejected the outright authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s government—at least so long as we are under attack by it. But we can’t conclude that the Canadian right might not get there or that it will break from the global new right. Most of global illiberalism is not as nakedly authoritarian as Donald Trump.
There are several strains of right-populism in Canada vying for influence. Poilievre’s populism differs from both the populism of Ontario Progressive Conservatives and the Ron DeSantis-like politics of Alberta’s United Conservatives. Also in the mix is the anti-immigration nationalism of the Coalition Avenir Québec.
What Anne Applebaum calls Autocracy, Inc. also tries to influence the Canadian right. The far-right Hungarian government works hard to build ties with Canadian Conservatives and sends speakers to its events. Russian state media and right-wing media in the U.S. also hold sway over Canadian influencers critical of the left.
A new right that looks like Canada’s Conservatives in 2025 is far from the worst possible outcome. But it demonstrates an illiberal trajectory that its leader showed is electorally viable.
Had Poilievre shown himself to be more committed to liberalism or less committed to campaigning on the cultural goals of the new right, he might have successfully channeled the discontent of the Canadian electorate to shake up our dysfunctional politics and start putting our broken governance in order. Being able to embody the change candidate that the Canadian public had been clamoring for never required abandoning liberal commitments or leaning into culture war preoccupations.
Perhaps it was Poilievre’s opportunism that led him astray. In the politics of the 2000s, Poilievre might have promised to govern like Stephen Harper. Faced with the 2020s, he prioritized and drove forward new right, populist, culture war politics over a small-government liberal vision. The illiberal right wins when it brings along even those who are not true believers.
The Canadian election has not given defenders of liberalism victory, but time. Right-populism still enjoys support. And now the right knows it can deliver. All of the problems that made Canada ripe for an illiberal populist message remain. We must also reckon with the Trump presidency. Reactionary right-wing politics won’t simply fade away. They need an answer. To offer one, liberalism can’t just wait. It has to adapt, too. It has to address its own shortcomings and fight back.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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I’m not entirely clear on how carbon pricing is “a market-based response to climate change” when it’s implemented by government fiat (i.e. not the market).
I don't think Poilievre losing is welcome news at all. We had a guy, Poilievre, who wanted to allow housing to be built, and wanted to move away from disastrous energy and climate policies. Now we get a central planner who, in his first week, has threatened to "punish" companies don't help him achieve Net Zero.