The new Canadian parliament won’t survive Trump
Two narratives were at play in Canada’s election: either the Great White North was going to continue on its liberal sonderweg, rejecting the Right-populist surge that has erupted elsewhere in the West — or it was going to take the same plunge into the unknown that their American and British cousins had taken with Trump and Brexit.
Instead, they have delivered a muddled, mixed result that neither fully confirms nor denies either of these projections. With the long, dramatic count not yet completed, it looks like the parliament will be divided between a returned but humbled Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney, holding on to minority status, and a rising but still not triumphant opposition Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Both these parties made sizeable gains, the more consequential performance likely coming from Poilievre, who stole a number of working-class seats from progressive parties. But both will nonetheless also have to deal with the sting of dashed expectations. Neither side was handed a decisive victory: Carney and Poilievre each fumbled the historic leads they held at different turns of the campaign, failing to provide a compelling or unifying vision of leadership before the electorate.
Bonus Ignatieff!
h/t DS
