A Victory for Boring White Guy Centrism
Facing an unprecedented threat from the south, Mark Carney convinced Canadians that sometimes a technocrat is the best brawler.
Mark Carney has done the impossible. A former central banker turned centrist politico, Carney’s brought his Liberal Party back from the electoral dead, winning a historic fourth straight term in government. Positioning himself as the tough, experienced pair of hands Canada needs to face down an unpredictable southern neighbor, Carney single-handedly saved the Liberals from annihilation in just a few short weeks.
The campaign was fought amid existential dread set off by Donald Trump’s repeated threats to Canadian sovereignty. The opposition Conservatives were aware that this was dicey ground for them—their leader, Pierre Poilievre, has an unmistakably Trumpist flavor and many saw him as too unwilling to criticize the American president, at least early on. Poilievre had long planned a campaign centered on housing, crime, and the cost of living, but Trump’s 51st state antics made that untenable. Caught without a plan, he tried to pin the bread-and-butter attacks he’d worked out for former prime minister Justin Trudeau on Carney. They just didn’t land. For Carney, technocratic chops are sort of a given; he could afford to make the election about his toughness in the face of the American threat. “President Trump is trying to break us, so that America can own us,” he thundered on election night. “That will never, ever happen.”
The results were what the polls had been predicting in recent weeks—with the added humiliation that Poilievre lost his seat in rural Ottawa to the Liberal candidate.
Granted, “Liberals win Canadian vote” is the “dog bites man” of election headlines. There’s nothing surprising about it. The odd thing is not how close the Conservatives came this time, but the fact that conservatives do sometimes get elected in a country where the centre left has got more votes than the centre right in every single election this century, and where the Tories seldom even crack 40%. (And yes, I know I could spell “centre” a different way, but they might revoke my Canadian citizenship if I did.)
The explanation is one of those aberrations that seems totally natural to Canadians, but will forever remain inexplicable to outsiders: Canada has not one but two centre-left parties. Cycle after cycle they refuse to team up, running candidates against each other even in districts where doing so splits the centre-left vote and opens a path for the Conservative candidate to sneak in.
The reasons for this are honestly hard to parse. The shorthand usually given is that the Liberals are really more like establishment centrists, while the New Democrats are social democratic. That may have been true once upon a time, but the Grits—as the Liberals are nicknamed—are way leftier than anyone in America would see as establishment, and the New Democrats have come a long way from their roots in prairie socialism.
For the last few cycles, the Liberals have gone increasingly woke to keep up with the urban zeitgeist, while the NDP has ditched its once hard-left platform to appeal to more moderate voters. As a result, the differences between them have been diluted to minutiae of interest only to a tiny, committed core of policy junkies. If you are very, very exercised about exactly which prescription drugs should be available on the public health system, you may have a policy preference between the Liberals and the NDP.
In practice, though, the split in the centre left plays itself out through personalities. Having two leftish parties to pick from allows disenchanted Liberals a safe place to bolt to when they’re fed up with a toxic leader. On rare occasions—like the freak 2011 election when the NDP ran under an exceptionally charismatic leader—the NDP can even overtake the Grits… though of course that only means electing a Conservative government. In Quebec, the dynamic is even screwier, with leftish-minded nationalist voters having not one but two alternatives to the Grits, giving rise to no end of tactical voting dynamics.
This year, Liberal-NDP fluidity was particularly obvious: back when it looked like a bone-tired Justin Trudeau would lead the Liberals one more time, their numbers tanked and the NDP surged, splitting the centre-left vote and making a Conservative landslide seem inevitable. As soon as Trudeau stepped aside in January and was replaced by a compelling new leader, those wandering Liberals headed right back home, ensuring a historic fourth term for the party, though under a very different man.
The speed with which the polling flipped when the Liberals switched leaders points to one of the best things about my adoptive country: Canada just isn’t that polarized. People don’t build identities around the party they vote for. The result is electoral fluidity unimaginable south of the border, a sure sign of a much more cohesive political culture.
But there’s a hitch. When no party is truly awful, you get plenty of multi-party races with weird local dynamics. In the suburban/exurban space around Toronto pundits know as the 905 belt—for the region’s area code—the NDP vote simply collapsed. You’d think that would be good news for Carney, but no. Amid rising concern over law and order, large portions of it seem to have switched to the Tories instead of the Grits.
Conservative strength in the Toronto ‘burbs was the surprise inside the surprise inside the surprise this year, and it means the Liberals will likely fall just four seats short of an outright majority. That means Carney will still have to cut deals with minor parties to get key pieces of legislation passed, just like Trudeau did. A minority government is not quite the result the Liberals dreamed of. But considering they were 25 points behind in the polls three months ago, they’re in no position to complain.
It’s a testament to Canada’s depolarized politics that no one expects a Liberal minority to mean parliamentary gridlock. The last two parliaments have worked with minority governments, and the bargaining process that ends with the NDP and Bloc Québécois voting to support key government bills is well institutionalized by now. Canadians take a certain pride in the thought that when compromise is needed, compromise is worked out. As Carney often said on the stump, Canadian revulsion at U.S.-style polarization is one key reason why the country could never become the 51st state.
In all, Carney’s successful repositioning is more a matter of style than substance. Yes, he ditched the toxically unpopular consumer carbon tax Trudeau had championed—neutralizing one of the Conservatives’ most effective attacks in the process—but for the most part, his moderation is temperamental. A one-time central banker to not one but two G7 nations—Canada and the UK—Carney nonetheless retains a kind of down-to-earth charm that makes him seem like the kind of Davos man you could have a beer with. Too staid and technocratic to get sucked into culture war controversies, he exudes seriousness. And that seems to be just what Canadian voters were in the market for.
Because the looming menace from the south has hung over this campaign throughout. When the country that accounts for over 70% of your foreign trade openly wants to take you over, you better think carefully about who you want at the helm. With his commitment to boring-white-guy centrism, his reputation for technocratic competence, all leavened with his hockey player’s determination to brawl when the time comes to brawl, Carney embodies the kind of consensus liberalism Canadians instinctively identify with.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
Due to an editorial error, the original version of this article misspelled Ottawa.
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After delivering copious Trump hate and fear to gaslight Canadians to vote for their liberal prison guards, the MSM will pivot again to blame Trump for the outcome.
But there is a saying in democracy that voters generally get the government they deserve. Canadians are apparently not yet evolved enough to recognize media manipulation and vote for their country over petty political identity.
I found this an interesting summary of Canada's both current and longer-term political situation. Nice write-up. Thanks!