Anatomy of a surge
Canada’s Trumpian nightmare is the Liberal Party’s dream
As the Liberals choose a leader, American aggression vaults them into contention
Illustration: Agnès RicartEditor’s note (March 6th): Since this article was published, Donald Trump announced that tariffs on Canadian goods covered by the North American trade agreement would be paused until April 2nd.
Until the stroke of midnight on March 4th, Canadian officials sought a reprieve from Donald Trump’s tariffs.
After waiting all day by the phone in vain, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, announced matching retaliatory tariffs of 25% on C$30bn ($21bn) worth of goods imported from the United States, with C$125bn more to follow after a 21-day consultation period.
The hope was that a staggered retaliation would offer time to talk Mr Trump down from his trade war.
“This is a very dumb thing to do,” said Mr Trudeau on March 4th.
A day later Mr Trump gave American carmakers a one-month reprieve.
Canada was unimpressed.
Automotive exports account for some 14% of the value of the goods it sends south. “We’re not interested in meeting in the middle,” said Dominic LeBlanc, the finance minister.
“Canada wants the tariffs removed.”
The tariffs are the latest and most intense in a stream of attacks that Mr Trump has launched against Canada since he took office six weeks ago.
His aggression has transformed the country’s politics.
Mr Trudeau’s Liberal Party suddenly finds itself atop some opinion polls for the first time in almost two years, having scraped historic lows just two months ago.
Mr Trump’s unsettling and relentless insistence that Canada join the United States as its 51st state or face staggering tariffs has cracked the basis on which Canada’s Conservatives and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, had built a double-digit lead in the polls.
The Liberals’ ascent has been dizzying.
One wonders if the newfound popularity can last.
But no matter how short lived, it gives the party a chance in an election campaign that could begin within days.
Mr Trudeau’s replacement will be announced when the Liberals’ leadership contest concludes on March 9th.
The winner will probably call a general election soon after.
The resuscitation is not an exclusively Trumpian phenomenon.
In early January opinion of Mr Trudeau had reached a nadir, driven down by his mishandling of the economy and an apparent inability to acknowledge the difficulties that created for ordinary Canadians.
Almost two-thirds of Canadians held a negative impression of him, according to Abacus Data, a polling firm.
When he announced his resignation on January 6th, supporters who had abandoned the Liberals began migrating back.
The party’s polling began to diverge from Mr Trudeau’s (see chart 1).
The ripples of Mr Trudeau’s departure coincide with the crumbling of Mr Poilievre’s message.
He had honed in on the hobbling effects of post-pandemic inflation on homeowners who needed to renew their mortgages.
He expanded Conservative support among younger and wage-earning Canadians by convincing them that “Canada is broken” and that Mr Trudeau was to blame.
But as Mr Trump repeatedly dismissed Canada’s viability as a nation-state, triggering a gush of Canadian patriotism, Mr Poilievre’s slogan began to strike a discordant note.
With economists suggesting Mr Trump’s tariffs could lop 2-3% off the country’s GDP, working Canadians who had been anxious about housing costs were suddenly wondering if their jobs might disappear entirely.
So since the start of the year the Liberals have gained ten percentage points, according to The Economist’s poll tracker.
The Conservatives’ lead has shrunk from 23 points to nine (see chart 2).
Under Canada’s first-past-the-post system, that may already be enough to make the election competitive.
If, compared with the last election, each party were to lift or lose their vote share by a uniform amount across all constituencies (known in Canada as ridings), the Conservatives—whose votes are inefficiently concentrated in the west of the country—would need a six-point advantage nationwide to become the largest party.
These circumstances have laid the ground for a Liberal leader willing to forcefully turn their back on Mr Trudeau’s economic record.
Enter Mark Carney. The former governor of central banks in Britain and Canada is the only contender for the Liberal leadership who is not tainted by previous support for the unloved Mr Trudeau.
Where his rivals have gingerly backed away from the Liberals’ economic record, Mr Carney has been blunt.
Profligate spending by the Trudeau government left Canada’s economy weakened and vulnerable, he said during a leadership debate on February 25th.
If Mr Carney has not dazzled Canadians in this race, his background, as the banker who steered Britain through Brexit and Canada through the recession of 2008, has certainly lent him an aura of reassurance.
Older Canadians, who tend to favour the Conservatives, have begun to move towards the Liberals because they see Mr Carney as a steady helmsman, says David Coletto, the boss of Abacus Data.
Polls which prompt respondents to consider Mr Carney as the Liberals’ leader give the party a larger share of the vote than those which do not, and put it ahead of the Conservatives (hypothetical polling should be taken with a pinch of salt).
He is seen as a tougher negotiator than Mr Trudeau, and less likely to roll over and accept Mr Trump’s demands than the leader of the opposition, Mr Poilievre.
Compared with Chrystia Freeland, one of his Liberal opponents, voters give Mr Carney particularly strong ratings on the cost of living and inflation, their weightiest election topic.
If Mr Carney becomes prime minister and rallies Liberal voters in pursuit of an incredible comeback, it will be remarkable but not unprecedented.
The Liberals’ polling surge has echoes of 1993, when the ailing Progressive Conservative party made Kim Campbell Canada’s first female prime minister.
Ms Campbell dramatically revived her party’s fortunes before it went on to a catastrophic defeat, losing 154 of its 156 seats (see chart 3).
Memories of her last-minute slump, as well as the Liberal government’s in 2006, could scare Liberals into gambling on a snap election soon after their leadership race wraps up.
The enthusiasm for a Carney-led Liberal Party could also prove to be a sugar high.
He is untested as a campaigner.
The Liberal leadership race has been brief and bloodless, with little heat applied to the former banker.
That would not be the case in an election campaign. Mr Poilievre has an unerring instinct for the jugular.
There are other reasons to question the Liberals’ surge.
Polling spikes sometimes reflect changing rates of response as much as real swings in opinion, a phenomenon known as non-response bias.
Different firms have found a range of voting intentions—from small leads for the Liberals to substantial ones for the Conservatives.
The 2020s are proving to be a tough time for incumbent governments.
The past year has seen Rishi Sunak and Kamala Harris join Ms Campbell as reboot failures in Britain and the United States.
At the least, Mr Trump has forced Canadians to listen to the Liberal Party’s pitch.
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