Carneyval In Canada

At the beginning of the year, the results of the Canadian election were a near certainty. Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) was up over 20 points in the polls, the Trudeau brand was beyond toxic and top Liberals were jumping ship.But then everything changed. Trudeau resigned, Trump took office and started threatening to annex Canada, the polls tightened up and now there is a need to do a post-mortem on why the Conservatives lost. The biggest reason for the massive swing is undoubtedly Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation. The defining trait of left-wing Canadian nationalism is anti-Americanism. It makes sense that when threatened by US, Canadians would default to Liberal Party.It should be noted that Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre got 41.4% of the total vote, which is higher than Trudeau ever got in his career, and a historically good result for CPC. However, this brings up the second reason why Poilievre lost: Jagmeet Singh.The collapse of NDP under Jagmeet will be studied for years. How the leader of a far-left socialist party could not capitalise on the fact that Liberals brought in an international banker, who moved his company to US and allegedly stashes his income in tax havens in the Caribbean, is beyond anyone’s understanding. Jagmeet was a complete disaster on nearly every metric as a leader, and as a result this caused most of NDP’s voters to consolidate behind Liberal Party. Add in the fact that Green Party strategically decided not to run candidates in most ridings, and the Conservatives had to face down a consolidated left in this election.Those were the factors that were beyond the control of CPC, but there were many mistakes too. The biggest complaint that most CPC supporters tended to have with the Conservatives’ campaign is that they ran scared. Basically, to borrow a sports analogy, they played not to lose. Up over 20 points, they did not push the pace and control the narrative of the election, but rather campaigned to avoid criticism. This manifested in a near six-month period where the only thing CPC would do publicly is wish different communities on their holidays.They also made the mistake of giving what was a very consequential election the most narrow framing possible. For the entirety of 2024, nearly 15% of Poilievre’s entire vocabulary was “Carbon Tax”. It was a “Carbon Tax election”, all of the Liberals got a nickname – “Carbon Tax Carney”, “Carbon Tax Chrystia”, basically anything that Poilievre didn’t like got a “Carbon Tax” put before it. It got very annoying.The pace of the election was stolen as soon as Mark Carney became the leader of Liberal Party. He declared the carbon tax cancelled, and asserted that he was a centrist outsider coming to bring change. And just like that, Carney had branded himself as the change candidate, stole CPC’s singular talking point and had taken control of the election narrative.Poilievre’s last big mistake was his choice of who to associate with and who to shun. Particularly, choosing the Khalistani movement over the Indian-Canadian community.During the six-month spree of happy holidays posting, there was one holiday that was quite loudly omitted, Diwali. In Oct last year, there was a rumour that the Conservatives were going to cancel their yearly Diwali on the hill party. Shockingly, the behind-the-scenes excuse was that they were told that if they ran the event they would be accused of meeting with Indian agents, so it was best to cancel. Needless to say, the Indian-Canadian Hindu community did not take their humiliation quietly.The last week of Poilievre’s campaign was full Khalistan Zindabad. He flew across the country to attend the Vaisakhi day parade in Surrey BC, the most radical of all the Khalsa parades in Canada. Pictures of Bhindranwale, Parmar and other so-called ‘martyrs’ were present, and journalists deemed to be unfriendly were harassed and threatened. The parade ended up foreshadowing what was to come for the Conservatives. They came in force and gave the Khalistanis everything they wanted. Yet, the Khalistanis gave a lifetime award to Trudeau despite the Liberals staying away from the event.The Conservatives’ grand pandering did not work. The promise of direct flights to Amritsar swayed exactly zero ridings with high Punjabi populations. Worse, there was a dedicated spite vote from some segments of the Hindu community who were purged from CPC ranks. In three ridings in the city of Brampton with a very large Indian-Canadian community, the People’s Party, which is basically a protest vote party, ran Hindu candidates that were cast off from the Conservatives and managed to make up the voting difference between the Liberals and Conservatives.At the end of the day Carney is now PM and Poilievre is in limbo after losing his seat. For India-Canada relations there is some good news. There is no way things can get any worse and Jagmeet no longer holds any power to carry out any more parliamentary political crusades against India.However, don’t expect things to get much better. Both major parties still have Khalistani factions within them that the current leaderships have accepted. There will be less open hostility towards India but the core problems still remain.The writer is a Canadian journalist