LONDON, Canada — Canada’s Liberals just pulled off one of the greatest upsets in modern democratic history: going from a predicted wipeout in December to victory on Monday night. To understand why, you need to look at the signs on the sidewalk.
I don’t mean the ones advertising Prime Minister Mark Carney’s triumphant party, though there were plenty of those. Rather, I’m referring to the ones outside many businesses, containing long lists of the Canadian-made products on offer.
The signs are part of a grassroots boycott of American-made goods, a movement launched in direct response to President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs and threats of annexation. A recent poll found that 61 percent of Canadians are currently boycotting American-made goods.
Trump has single-handedly created the greatest surge of nationalist anti-Americanism in Canada’s history as an independent country. And the Liberal Party, which campaigned as the party best positioned to fight Trump, just rode it to victory.
Politically, this is a massive own-goal on Trump’s part. Carney’s rival, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, is a populist right-winger who attacked the media and embraced conspiracy theories — basically as close to MAGA as you can get in mainstream Canadian politics.
Had Trump never uttered the phrase “51st state,” he’d be getting a friend in Ottawa. Instead, he has Carney — a longtime critic of America’s global economic dominance who campaigned on the idea that “the old relationship we had with the United States…is over.”
Trump has, in short, not only caused trouble for himself — but for the US. By pointlessly antagonizing a critical ally, he is damaging the fundamental architecture of American hegemony. The United States does not set the terms of global politics alone; it created a system of global rule that depends critically on the enthusiastic support of democratic allies. If politicians in those allied states are winning elections by promising a break with the US, then the foundations of that system are starting to buckle.
“In the past, the popularity, or lack thereof, of the US president shaped how far countries would go to help the US — so the US won’t get much help in the near future,” says Steve Saideman, a professor of international relations at Carleton University in Ottawa. “How long this lasts is not clear, but this is cutting deeper than Bush in 2003 or Trump 1.0.”
How Trump changed the course of Canadian history
Canada’s Liberal party has been in power for 10 years. This is longer than a party typically holds power in Canada (or any other democratic country, for that matter); voters typically get frustrated with the inevitable shortcomings of an incumbent government before then and look for change. For years, this frustration had seemingly doomed the Liberals: Their main rival, the Conservative Party, had been ahead in the polls since 2022. As recently as late January, the Conservatives were on track to more than double the Liberal share in the popular vote.
Over the course of just three months, the Carney-led Liberals went from more than 20 points behind to (as of this writing) a two-point victory. Whether that translates into an outright majority of seats in parliament is unclear — the Liberals may need support from a third party to govern — but there’s no doubt that they will form Canada’s next government.
Partly, this is a result of the Liberals’ decision to change horses. Justin Trudeau, who had been prime minister since 2015, stepped down as Liberal leader in December with a toxic approval rating (though he remained prime minister until March). The party needed someone like Carney, a central banker who is not a member of parliament, to wash off the Trudeau stink.
Yet that alone wasn’t enough on its own to change the polls: The Liberals continued to poll abysmally for about a month after Trudeau’s announcement. It took something extra for the Liberals to pull off last night’s upset.
That something, of course, was Donald Trump — and specifically the talk of making Canada “the 51st state.”
Trump’s first foray in this area, calling the prime minister “Governor Trudeau” in December, didn’t seem all that serious (the BBC reported it as a “light jab at his Canadian counterpart.”) But then Trump kept it up after his January 20 inauguration.
More than that, he escalated: Imposing heavy tariffs on Canadian-made goods whose stated rationale (nonexistent fentanyl imports) made no sense. In February, Trudeau declared that Trump was genuinely trying to take over Canada, and by March, polls showed that most Canadians agreed.
This proved absolutely disastrous for the Conservatives.
Their candidate, Pierre Poilievre, represents from the party’s right flank, his base are the kind of ideological conservative who may actually have positive feelings about Trump. Indeed, Poilievre’s style resembles Trump’s in a number of respects: He gives his opponents demeaning nicknames, inveighs against the “woke mob,” warns about a World Economic forum conspiracy against Canada, and brags about his “big beautiful bring it home tax cut.” Elon Musk endorsed him in January.
Poilievre’s campaign did not seem to understand their Trump problem — adopting “Canada First” as a campaign slogan in February, for example. Kory Teneycke, one of the party’s top strategists, publicly accused Poilievre and his team of committing “campaign malpractice at the highest level.”
Carney, by contrast, is generally seen as doing a decent job handling the America problem since he took office in March. His background in international finance — he led the Bank of England during Brexit — reassures many Canadians that he’s a stable hand at the tiller during a trade war. A mid-April Ipsos poll found that Canadians trust Carney over Poilievre by double-digit margins on key issues like “managing during tough economic times” and “standing up to President Trump.”
David Goodwin, a longtime Liberal organizer, decided to run for parliament this year for the first time — in a London-area riding that had been held by Conservatives for the last 20 years (“riding” is the Canadian term for electoral district). He told me that Canadians were uniquely horrified by Trump and repulsed by a Conservative Party that resembled his GOP, giving Liberals a chance even in long-shot districts like his.
“Because of Donald Trump, [the election] has really mobilized Canadians to get involved,” he told me. “We have never had a threat like this in my lifetime.”
At publication time, Goodwin is down over 10 points — a significant improvement over the last Liberal to run in his riding. And while he may not win, the national results have proven his basic insight correct. And the Liberals triumphed by capitalizing on it.
You wouldn’t like American allies when they’re angry
During the campaign, Carney talked tough about the future of the US-Canada relationship — promising something sounded a lot like disentangling Canada from the web of military and economic ties that bind it to the States.
This, experts told me, was likely a bit overheated. The Canadian military is deeply underfunded, and thus dependent on the United States for assistance in dealing with threats like Russo-Chinese adventurism in the Arctic. As much as Canada may court European or Asian markets, it’s impossible to trade as efficiently or profitably across an ocean as it is across an immediate land border.
Yet there are many possibilities between a complete decoupling and no meaningful damage to the US-Canadian relationship. It’s a near certainty that we’re somewhere in that range; the question is what that looks like.
“Carney is overstating the case a little bit, simply because it’s an election and that’s his issue,” says Adam Harmes, a professor at Western University who studies Canadian politics and foreign policy. “But that doesn’t mean he’s completely overstating it.”
There are a number of ways that Canada begin a move away from the US in practical terms, ranging from inking new trade agreements with the European Union to increasing its defense spending. But there is a deeper, and more worrying, dynamic at work here.
The United States does not owe its global dominance to American military and economic might alone. Rather, it has constructed a global political bloc — most importantly, the rich and powerful democracies of Western Europe and East Asia — that it relies on for all sorts of geopolitical tasks. All sorts of systems, ranging from the NATO alliance to the dollar’s status as global reserve currency, depend in part or in whole on these countries’ belief that the United States is a reliable senior partner who deserves their implicit trust.
That trust runs deep, and as such has survived major crises in the past. The George W. Bush administration was furious with Canada, France, and Germany for refusing to join the US invasion of Iraq, but the underlying relation between the nations remained strong.
But by threatening Canada’s economy, and even its very sovereignty, the second Trump administration has crossed a line. Canada can no longer assume that Washington has a baseline level of respect for Ottawa. It can’t even count on America as a friend in the short term. And worse, they don’t know when it will end: Even if you set aside Trump’s bluster about an illegal third term, there’s a real chance that the next Republican (say, JD Vance) would treat Canada the same way.
The threat to America here is not only that the Carney government does something painful in the short term, like counter-tariffs. It’s that his election on an anti-American platform is a sign that Canada as a country has lost faith in the US-led global system. If that’s correct, its leaders become more open to long-term changes to the global system — like moving away from the dollar as reserve currency — that it may otherwise have never contemplated.
In this, Canada isn’t alone. The upcoming Australian election has had a remarkably similar arc. The incumbent party, left-wing Labor, had been losing to the right-wing Liberal-National Coalition for much of the election. They started a comeback in late March, but only opened a clear and consistent lead after Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs. Australian analysts credit the Liberal rise to a backlash against Trump and politicians seen as similar in style.
Trump’s aggressive economic policy isn’t, as he claimed, making America Great or respected again. Instead, it’s having the opposite effect: turning longtime allies into places where campaigning against American leadership is a winning strategy.
“Trump is risking the fundamental infrastructure of American economic (and political) influence,” Dan Nexon, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, says.
So if we are indeed witnessing the beginning of the end of the American-led world order, the history books will likely record April 28, 2025, as a notable date — one where even America’s closest ally started eying the geopolitical exits.
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