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Update: minority Liberal government which will require help from the NDP to survive non confidence motions. Hopefully the NDP will be smart and tough enough to hold out for electoral reform in exchange.
The left-center NDP is being slaughtered and seems likely to lose its official party status.
Five months ago I would have said, and did say, that the Conservatives would form the next government, with Poilievre (a Trump figure) as Prime Minister.
Fortunately, Trump truly is a Christ-like figure, and raised the Liberal party from the dead. Poilievre mishandled Trump’s threats, saying that Trump had a point and so on. Living in an right wing echo chamber he thought that Canadians aren’t patriotic, and most are. This was an unforced error. Ontario Premier Ford did the opposite: he ran against Trump, called a surprise election and won handily. I despise Ford, but he’s a smart politician. Poilievre, on the other hand, is just an attack dog, and a true believer in Trumpist style right wing politics.
This isn’t to say I like the Liberals or Carney. Carney has the dubious honor of haveing beeen in charge of Canada and Britain’s central bank, and is the only central banker to blow housing bubbles in two countries. As for the Liberals, they were a terrible government and the only good things they did were forced on them by the NDP, whose support they needed to stay in government.
Trudeau’s liberals let in record numbers of immigrants and the result was massive increases in rent and a smother of wage gains.
The mistake that Canadian Conservative voters made, which Trump saved Canada from, was the assumption that Poilievre would be better. He would have been far, far worse. There was even talk of creating a Canadian “DOGE.”
Canada, much like America, needs a proportional vote system, so that the two and a half party monopoly can be broken up and a Trump-like figure locked out of government unless they can achieve a genuine majority.
We’ll see how Carney does. Though I don’t like his record, he has said some very sensible things about re-industrialization in Canada, including proper vertical integration. There’s almost no mineral resource Canada doesn’t have, if we want we can easily re-industrialize. He’s also talked some sense about the housing market.
Whether he carries thru remains to be seen. He won’t be fantastically successful, he’s still a neoliberal and committed to policies like low taxes on the rich, but as neoliberals go, he may turn out not too bad.
Fingers crossed.
Update 1: Looking like Poilievre may lose his own riding. For context, Poilievre is an MP in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, where the largest employer is the Federal government. Poilievre said he would gut the civil service and even threatened to DOGE it. Truly in the running for stupidest politician in the world.