What The Hell America!

American liberals in search of hope can look to the Canadian election. Just five months ago, the country’s incumbent Liberal Party appeared headed for an epic defeat. It trailed the Conservative Party by 25 percentage points, and its leader, then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, had an approval rating of just 22 percent. Forecasters predicted that the Liberals would win 35 seats in the country’s 343-seat Parliament, compared with 236 for the Conservatives. Instead, the Liberals are set to win at least 155—a plurality larger than they had before.

How did the party pull off this astonishing feat? To many, the answer is that they didn’t: Donald Trump did. “The Conservatives’ 25 percentage point lead in the polls has swiftly turned into a single-digit deficit as Mr. Trump has become the race’s dominant issue,” The New York Times wrote three weeks ago. “Trump Effect Leaves Canada’s Conservatives Facing Catastrophic Loss,” read an April 16 headline in The Guardian.

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The theory of the case is straightforward. The Conservatives were cruising until Trump threatened to annex Canada and slapped tariffs on its exports. At that point, they were finished. Canadians rallied around the flag, which meant rallying around the incumbent Liberal government. They turned on the Conservative Party’s leader, Pierre Poilievre, whose “Canada First” slogan and promise to fire “woke” bureaucrats sounded a lot like Trumpism.

But the Liberals’ victory is not simply the product of American politics. It is also the result of the formidable political talent of the party, which has now won four consecutive elections and governed the country for 10 years and counting. And its leaders have spent their time moving the country substantially leftward. Whatever adjectives American progressives might use to describe Democrats—feckless, weak, pathetic—the Canadian Liberals are the opposite. In fact, they may be the most successful left-of-center party on the planet.

Yesterday was not the first time the Liberals have surged back from near defeat. They have governed Canada for much of the country’s history, but in 2011, the party won just 34 seats—coming in third for the first time ever, behind the progressive New Democratic Party. The Conservatives, meanwhile, won a majority in Parliament. The Liberal Party was on the political margins, with no clear path back to relevance. Then, in 2013, it selected Justin Trudeau to be its leader.

In the two years that followed, Trudeau completely reversed the Liberals’ fortunes. Promising “sunny ways” and progressive policies, he won a large majority in 2015. Then he went about making good on most of his pledges. The Liberals expanded the Canadian version of Social Security. They passed an infrastructure bill that was larger, as a percentage of GDP, and greener than the one Joe Biden enacted. They banned more than 1,000 types of guns. They increased immigration. They legalized marijuana.

The Liberals went on to win two more elections, in 2019 and 2021, and to pass even more progressive legislation. Prodded by the New Democratic Party, the Trudeau government established a “pharmacare” program that will make certain essential drugs free to all Canadians. It created a free dental-insurance program for Canadians who make less than $90,000 (in Canadian dollars, or about $65,000 in the U.S.) a year. And it created a sweeping, $10-a-day national child-care program; as a result, Canadians parents now spend a third as much on child care as they did in 2021.

Trudeau presided over an expansion of Canada’s welfare state so enormous that it would make Senator Bernie Sanders blush, and he did it while winning three elections. When he left office last month, he was the longest-tenured progressive leader in the global North.

True, he left with dismal ratings, such that his party felt the need to push him out. But the Liberals handled this with supreme competence. Consider that when the Democrats forced Joe Biden to step aside after his disastrous debate performance, they handed the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris, who refused to break with him. The Liberals, by contrast, passed over Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and elevated Mark Carney, a respected political outsider unencumbered by Trudeau’s baggage. Upon becoming prime minister, Carney immediately killed Trudeau’s most hated policy: the carbon tax.

Trump, of course, played a part in the Liberals’ triumph, with his threats to annex Canada. But the Liberals also did an excellent job of capitalizing on the U.S. president’s bombast. They cut ads that juxtaposed Trump’s rhetoric with Poilievre’s. They cultivated a sense of Canadian nationalism. And the party’s members elected Carney—the candidate, according to polls, voters thought would best handle the U.S. president.

Read: Why Canadians are better than Americans at protesting Trump right now

The Liberals’ success story may not be replicable in the United States, but the Democrats could stand to learn a few things from their northern neighbors. When Canada’s Liberals tossed aside an unpopular candidate, they didn’t hesitate to replace him with the most viable alternative— regardless of seniority within the party. They were also ready to jettison an unpopular policy that many members believed was right on the merits: The carbon tax was good for the environment, but killing it helped keep Liberals in power and protect their other achievements.

Carney may well struggle to hold on to power for as long as Trudeau did, given that the Liberals have fallen just short of an outright majority in Parliament; even the most successful political parties rarely win five straight contests. But the Liberals are an electoral machine—something of a rarity on the center-left—that would be foolish to bet against.