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.