The Liberals won the Canadian election Monday, despite early polling favoring Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. The cause of Poilievre’s reversal of fortune owes to two factors. One, the Liberals replaced the unpopular Justin Trudeau with Mark Carney as prime minister before the election. Two, Canadians associated the Conservatives with Donald Trump, who’s seen as a national enemy.
The latter factor has made a number of American conservatives lash out at Trump. Apparently, it’s a massive loss that Pierre Poilievre is not the new prime minister. Except it isn’t. The election doesn’t actually matter to Americans. No matter who would be the new prime minister, Canada would attempt a tough line against Trump. Both serious options in Canada suck. The Conservatives are the equivalent of moderate Democrats. They are not Trumpists at all.
There is no real reason to be upset that Poilievre lost.
Poilievre was no Trump fan. He vowed to “retaliate” against American tariffs and repeatedly criticized the president for suggesting Canada should become the 51st state. His stance was not significantly different from that of the Liberal Party. Neither party looked to be a Trump ally. Each was going to be hostile to the current administration. If your main concern was getting a friendlier prime minister, there wasn’t much of a choice here.
If you were concerned with Canada adopting a more sensible immigration policy, Poilievre wasn’t great either. He has long championed immigration to meet Canada’s “business needs.” He believes employers should set the rates of immigration, which means they would happily welcome in hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign labor. At times, he did sound like he might support some cuts to migration. He believes the country’s immigration rates should be tied to housing development. Canada faces a housing shortage largely due to mass immigration. That might sound radical, but the Liberals also suggest a similar solution. Trudeau moderated his immigration enthusiasm during his last year in office. Carney continued this trend and campaigned on making immigration “sustainable.” The only notable difference between the parties is that the Conservatives emphasize cultural “integration” more than the Liberals.
However, Poilievre still catered to multiculturalism by playing dress up when meeting various minority groups, particularly with Sikhs. Trudeau was widely-mocked for his pandering outfits, but Poilievre did the same thing in his appeals to minorities.
One of Poilievre’s main issues throughout the campaign was the carbon tax, an onerous penalty imposed by Trudeau. Carney repealed the carbon tax when he took power, eliminating Poilievre’s primary campaign pitch and further diminishing the differences between the two.
There is a genuine conservative party in Canada. It’s called the People’s Party, and it got less than one percent of the vote. Canada’s system, like ours, makes it tough for third parties. Besides the two major parties, only the Bloc Quebecois and the far-left New Democratic Party make an impact.
The fact a genuine conservative party does so poorly and that the “Conservative Party” is so liberal speaks to the inherent “libtardism” of Canadians. This is a country whose national identity is based around not being Americans. Canadians and Americans have a lot in common. We both speak English and both countries were founded by Anglo-Protestants. Our cultures and accents are pretty similar. Canadians have to figure out ways to differentiate themselves. So they like to do the opposite of what Americans do. They love to think of themselves as more progressive and tolerant than their redneck neighbors. This makes them champion mass immigration, infringe on individual liberties, and boo our national anthem. If Trump does cool stuff as president, it’s guaranteed that Canada will move in a different direction simply because it doesn’t want to be like America.
It’s true that Trump’s tariffs influenced Canada’s elections. But of all the possible criticisms to make of this policy, making Pierre Poilievre lose is at the bottom of the list. Poilievre may have lost even without the tariffs. Canadians would’ve been disgusted with Trump as president regardless of the trade war. Merely being perceived as Trump-friendly is a disadvantage. In order to help the Conservatives win elections, Trump would have to not be Trump.
Our country shouldn’t be run on the basis of what will hurt the Conservative Party of Canada. America First means America First. Anything bold and controversial the president does will be unpopular with our northern neighbors. We shouldn’t care what they think. Canada is an unimportant vassal state that bases its whole identity on not being us. They can care about us all they want. We don’t need to care about them. American right-wingers should care about elections in countries that matter with serious right-wing parties, like Germany and France. We don’t need to care about the election results in Malta or in Zanzibar.
It would be nice if Canada did have a Trump-friendly right-wing government. But there was no chance of that. Whoever won would be an anti-Trump liberal. That’s why the election doesn’t matter.
If you’re Canadian and upset over the election results, I can understand. But it’s silly to be upset over the results if you’re an American. We have a right-wing administration in our country, and that’s what really matters.
