Until a few months ago, one of the few certainties in international politics was that the Liberals were about to lose power in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had become one of the most unpopular leaders in the world, and his conservative rival Pierre Poilievre seemed certain to win a general election that couldn’t be long delayed.

But in yesterday’s election the Liberals won a fourth successive term in office, and the conservative leader’s humiliation was complete when instead of becoming Prime Minister, Poilievre lost his own seat on the edge of Canada’s capital Ottawa, which he had represented for more than 20 years.

Jagmeet Singh – a Sikh who leads the leftwing New Democratic Party, which had been polling well against the unpopular Trudeau – also lost his own seat. The NDP is projected to collapse to just seven seats, which means it will lose official party status in Canada’s House of Commons (where the cut-off is twelve seats), losing money for staff and having fewer rights to ask parliamentary questions.

What went wrong?

First, the unpopular Trudeau fell on his sword and was succeeded by Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England.

Now, you might think that if a left-liberal party chooses a former central banker as its leader, this would significantly help the populist right, as well as repelling the more radical elements of his left-liberal party’s base.

But in Canada that didn’t happen. Carney presided over a rapid recovery in his party’s fortunes and has led the Liberals to victory, with nine more seats than Trudeau’s party took at the previous election in 2021. Turnout increased to 68.3%, very high by 21st century standards.

The Liberals finished just three seats short of an overall majority, so in theory will depend on support from other leftists, though in practice Carney would now only lose a parliamentary vote if the conservatives, leftwingers, and Quebec separatists all voted together. (No party has won an outright majority in Canada since Trudeau’s first victory in 2015.)

The biggest single factor in the electoral equation (after Trudeau’s departure) was Donald Trump, who is proving a massive liability to the populist right outside the USA, nowhere more so than in Canada. We are likely to see similar damage inflicted on conservatives at next week’s Australian election.

While the jury is still out on whether Trump’s increasingly incoherent and self-contradictory tariff policies will be good for the USA, the one country for whom they seemed very bad news indeed was Canada.

Even aside from tariffs, Trump seems to have gone out of his way to live up to the worst caricature of Americans, brashly insulting his fellow Whites, including in Canada. In typically immature style, he insisted on repeating these insults right up to Canada’s election day this week.

Poilievre tried to evade the taint of Trumpism, but ended up with the worst of both worlds: appearing weak to some of his ‘right wing’ base, but still inspiring anti-Trump revulsion not only among the left but among many ordinary Canadians. The fact that Canada has ever since 1945 had an especially large Ukrainian diaspora (totalling about 1.4 million) was just one more extra factor. Even though Poilievre has himself taken a strong anti-Putin line, no-one with Ukrainian ancestry is likely to vote for anyone who carries even the slightest stigma of Trumpism.

Some H&D readers will be tempted to argue that Poilievre lost votes through being insufficiently Trumpist. He has flipped around on immigration and social issues, though in the last year or two shifting to the ‘right’, and he is yet another in a long line of North American conservatives who have chosen to marry non-Europeans, in Poilievre’s case the daughter of Venezuelan immigrants (so at least, unlike US Vice President J.D. Vance, he married someone of semi-European ancestry!).

However, the facts are pretty clear. One thing that certainly didn’t happen was a collapse of Conservative votes to any party further ‘right’.

The People’s Party of Canada, founded by Maxime Bernier (an ex-Conservative) in 2018, had an especially disastrous election. Last time in 2021, they polled more than 840,000 votes (4.9%) and it was only Canada’s UK-style ‘first past the post’ system that prevented them winning seats. Yesterday this vote collapsed and the PPC has become a fringe party with just over 140,000 votes (i.e. 700,000 fewer than four years ago), amounting to 0.7%. Those of us who despise Bernier’s softcore Putinism (which at least he had the sense to disguise in the campaign video above, recognising its electoral toxicity) will have little sympathy for his party’s implosion.

Bernier is yet another of those ‘right-wing’ leaders who loves to bang on about ‘Judaeo-Christian values’: he will have to continue doing so on the Ziocon conference circuit rather than in Parliament.

Meanwhile, left-wing and Green voters seem to have swung tactically behind the Liberals. The Greens never were a substantial force outside a handful of constituencies: they lost one of their two seats, in one of yesterday’s few Conservative gains, and their nationwide vote has fallen from 2.3% to 1.2%.

The New Democrats suffered a stunning collapse, and it seems likely that when Justin Trudeau resigned earlier this year he ended New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh’s career as well as his own. The NDP vote fell from 17.8% to 6.3% and it seems that they have been reduced from 25 seats to 7.

As always in Canadian elections, the French-speaking separatists of Quebec retained their own block of votes and seats, but their influence depends on the broader balance of forces in Parliament. The Bloc Québécois has polled 6.4%, slightly down on its 7.6% last time.