× Expand Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney smiles onstage at his campaign headquarters after the Liberal Party won the Canadian election in Ottawa, Ontario, April 29, 2025. Mark Carney has pulled off the ultimate political masterstroke. Late last year, the Canadian Liberals began building tents in the wilderness.

From coast to coast, millions of alienated voters were ready to ditch Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and hand over power to Pierre Poilievre, an unremarkable Conservative member of Parliament. Then along came Donald Trump, talking trash about tariffs and Canadian sovereignty. Once he made it clear that Canada becoming the 51st state wasn’t just some throwaway line, the idea became more threatening to people on both sides of the border.

Just in case anyone thought that this disastrous reset of U.S.-Canada relations would be over soon and revert back to “normal,” the president topped off his unrequited annexation obsession with a global trade war. Trudeau, his sometime nemesis, departed the scene leaving Carney to lead on through the trade skirmishes. “America wants our land, our water, our resources, our country,” Carney said in his victory speech early in the a.m. on Tuesday.

“But these are not idle threats: President Trump is trying to break us, so that he can own us—that will never, ever happen.” More from Gabrielle Gurley On the campaign trail, the genial, low-key former central banker talked up his crisis management skills, his handling of the recession of the late aughts as governor of the Bank of Canada, and his delivering of (unheeded) warnings to the British about Brexit as governor of the Bank of England. Suspicion followed the political newcomer as he stumped around Canada with his sterling, if ultra-elite, Harvard-Oxford-Goldman Sachs-central bank-adviser-to-prime-ministers résumé. But rather than being a barrier to electoral success—as it might have been absent the threatened economic meltdown—his financial cred won over Canadians disgusted, dispirited, or both, by the sudden trade crisis.

“The Liberals in Canada were losing big,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told Politico, “until our president kept mocking Canadians, our neighbors and close friends.” Though the 37-day campaign seemed to be an easy exercise for political neophyte Carney, governing will a be challenge of a different order of magnitude. He’s got to suss out a parliamentary tool kit, build relationships with the two parties that can backstop his government, prod the country’s 13 provinces into new economic arrangements, and reposition his nation so it can step out of the shadow cast by the United States to take up a leading role on the international stage. “His election says, ‘Listen, the old relationship is over.

It is gone—we have to figure out what to do next,’” says Tari Ajadi, an assistant professor of political science at McGill University. The Liberal Party leader returns to Parliament with 169 seats in the House of Commons, just three seats short of the majority that would have spared Carney a minority government. He’ll have to work with the separatist Bloc Québécois and the progressive New Democratic Party, which both lost seats to pass legislation.

Many BQ and NDP voters went over to the Liberals to keep the Conservatives out of power. The Liberal Party leader returns to Parliament with 169 seats in the House of Commons, just three seats short of a majority. MAGA-adjacent slogans and policies diminished Poilievre’s appeal.

Phrases like “Axe the Tax,” “Stop the Crime,” “Build the Homes,” and many similar others were unveiled so regularly that they became “verb-the-noun” memes. His “Canada First” slogan recalled the GOP’s “America First.” He promised to cut the ranks of civil servants and to defund the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the respected public outlet, which became two of his most unpopular promises. Even his longtime constituents didn’t trust Poilievre to run the government or handle the tariff fallout—and all they had to do is look south of the border to see what an extreme version of civil services cuts looked like.

Poilievre lost his own seat to a Liberal challenger in an Ottawa riding (district) that he’d held for two decades. “You’re in Ottawa, a city primarily inhabited by civil servants,” says Ajadi. “Your platform talks about gutting the civil service.

There’s a lot of people worried about their jobs who are not going to vote for you.” There may be calls for Poilievre to step down as the Conservatives’ leader—or, given the party’s better-than-expected nationwide showing, he may persuade another member of Parliament to give up their seat to allow him to run in a safe Conservative riding. Another Conservative minus the Trumpist tendencies might have had a better shot at ousting the Liberals. But even with Poilievre at its head, the party reached its highest percentage of the vote, 41 percent, since 1988.

It did attract blue-collar votes in automotive industry hubs like London and Windsor, Ontario. The final totals, however, showed there are limits to these kinds of appeals, especially in a party that is a coalition of populist and progressive conservative factions. Carney did not emerge completely unscathed from the campaign.

He came in for criticism for his prickly responses to questions about his management of two investment funds totaling $25 billion that had been registered in Bermuda during his tenure at Brookfield Asset Management, a global investment firm headquartered in Toronto. Both Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, accused him of seeking out a tax haven to avoid Canadian taxes. He also had to weather revelations that he hadn’t acknowledged that Trump had brought up the 51st state question again during a March phone call.

(The prime minister had said that Trump had indicated that he respected Canadian sovereignty.) The prime minister’s elbows-up approach to the U.S. has, at least for the moment, forced the president to drop the personal insults like those he’d hurled at Trudeau. Trump called Carney to congratulate him and agreed to meet “in the near future.” Carney told the BBC on Monday that an in-person visit would be arranged once the U.S. demonstrated that there is a “serious discussion to be had” that respects Canadian independence and sovereignty.

“What concerns Canada is what is really motivating Donald Trump,” says Ajadi. “Is he looking for a renegotiation of the USMCA agreements? That’s not bizarre, but if it’s something else, then there’s a considerable level of disagreement there.” Linguistic regulations especially around French-language issues are essentially nonnegotiable.

Matters touching on the environmental regulations are sensitive matters for Canada’s indigenous people, who wield considerable political power nationwide. Trade talks can’t get snagged on critical issues that could potentially lead to a snap election that Carney might lose. The tariff war has reoriented the Canadian economy.

Carney has drilled into the country’s 13 provincial premiers that Canada does not need 13 different sets of rules and regulations framing everything from doctors’ professional certifications to linguistic requirements to trucking standards—interprovincial trade barriers that date to the country’s founding. He will also have to navigate provincial leaders’ demands for assistance as they respond to the trade war’s economic disruptions. On the international front, Carney already knows the political players in Great Britain and the European Union, an advantage he has in the trade war.

Almost immediately after becoming prime minister in March, Carney traveled to London and Paris to begin filling in the economic and political gaps left by Trump’s global retreat. “He had very little interest in genuflecting to the Americans,” Ajadi told me. The stakes get even higher in June when Canada hosts this year’s G7 summit in Alberta.

Canada currently holds the G7 presidency, so in addition to the pressing political and economic agendas, the summit will place the prime minister in the forefront of NATO discussions on the evolving role of its mutual defense obligations, defense spending parameters—Trump often complains that Canada doesn’t pull its financial weight in the alliance—as well as Arctic security concerns. Ukraine will figure prominently; Carney has invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to attend. He’ll also have to figure out a way to contain the Maple MAGA elements in Alberta, one of the country’s most conservative provinces.

Danielle Smith, the Alberta premier, is Trump’s closest and most vocal Canadian ally. “There is a massive incentive to stay strong in the face of the Americans,” says Ajadi. “Mark Carney wants to confer a sense of kind of authority around those things.

He wants to build relationships and partnerships, and, at the same time, he does not want to show up Donald Trump.”