The Election That Asks Canada What Country It Wants to Be

This wasn’t supposed to be an election about sovereignty or tariffs. For the past year, Canadians have consistently told pollsters that their main concerns were housing, health care, and the Canadian economy. Young Canadians in particular, who have felt locked out of the future, warmed to Pierre Poilievre’s populist message that “Canada is Broken.” The Conservative leader’s message wasn’t just anti-establishment; it was a direct attack on institutional drift and a tired Liberal government that had failed to deliver on the promise that propelled Justin Trudeau to power in 2015. Then, Donald Trump returned to the White House and reframed the entire campaign. Tariffs, trade hostility, and talk of annexation have reset the national mood. Frustration gave way to fear. Older Canadians, especially, have responded by telling pollsters they are retreating to the Liberals and new leader Mark Carney not because of anything Carney has done on the campaign trail, but because he has offered something Poilievre (and, for that matter, Trudeau) couldn’t: a sense of steadiness when things suddenly feel unstable. Carney’s rise is not driven by a vision; it’s driven by a threat. And it’s here that history starts to rhyme. Mark Carney fits the moment the way Charles de Gaulle did for post-war France: an elite technocrat pushed into the service of his country. Like de Gaulle, he is more interested in policy than in performance. His message is an institutional one: protect sovereignty, invest in Canada, and carefully manage a disentanglement with the United States as Canada’s closest economic friend and neighbour. He is no populist, but during the campaign, he has shown that he understands sovereignty is a political emotion, not a legal concept. His high-spending platform speaks more to insulation than aspiration. In the face of an external threat, he offers comfort and a steady hand at the controls.

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Pierre Poilievre, by contrast, carries the burden of Neville Chamberlain not because he is seen as weak, but because he appears to have misread the moment. His perceived ideological proximity to Trump, once perhaps useful (see Conservative MP Jamil Javini’s widely reported friendship with US vice-president J.D. Vance), now feels like a vulnerability. Chamberlain, readers may recall, was accused of appeasing Nazi Germany until it was too late. But appeasement was not Chamberlain’s problem alone; it was his belief that the Nazi threat could be managed without fundamentally rethinking the order. That is now the position Poilievre finds himself trying to escape. He still speaks fluently about an overtaxed Canada and the institutional gatekeepers that need to be removed, but the conversation has shifted. The question is no longer about how to fix Canada’s institutions, but rather how to defend them. And the deeper divide here is generational. Carney is backed by boomers who see Canada’s existing institutions as worthy of protection. Poilievre’s support comes from younger voters who view those same institutions as barriers to their success, not as foundations. For one group, sovereignty means defending what was built; for the other, it means creating something new. Polling data support this, as younger Canadians increasingly believe that affordability is out of reach and that politics as usual offers little more than delay. These beliefs are shaped by lived experiences: debt, institutional failure, and “woke” policies that get them nowhere. These voters, most likely to be younger males, see in Poilievre not just anger but agency. Meanwhile, older voters, having personally benefited from decades of relative stability and growth, now see Trump’s return as a threat to the Canada they built, while accumulating RRSP and housing wealth along the way. They are turning back to Carney and the Liberals as a kind of strategic insurance policy—to slow, if not stop, the destabilization and restore predictability, at least for the moment. This is the reality that both leaders of Canada’s two major parties must face. Donald Trump exposed these fissures for Canada; he did not create them. Our economic, strategic, and generational vulnerabilities were already there, hidden below the surface, and now they are fully on display in the face of a hostile superpower that was once the blanket that hid them. Our sovereignty and inevitable progress, long assumed, are now contested. In that sense, this election echoes other moments in history when smaller nations were forced to reassess their position alongside a larger, suddenly destabilized power. For Canada, our assumption that proximity to America meant security courtesy from the United States has proven to be a dangerous bet to have made. We are now, more or less, in the same boat as the rest of the world. Like de Gaulle’s France or Cold War-era West Germany, the question now is how to assert our independence and protect our survival without provoking the bear, and how to build up resilience and reform and protect our institutions without isolating ourselves in the process. All the problems that existed before the return of Trump—affordability, housing, productivity, and health care—remain, and are even more urgent than before. On its final day, this election will not resolve those tensions. It will only determine which of them the country will be forced to confront first, no matter who ends up being our next prime minister. This story was originally published as “Canada’s generational divide and an election we didn’t see coming” by our friends at The Line. It has been reprinted here with permission. Please follow them on Substack.The post The Election That Asks Canada What Country It Wants to Be first appeared on The Walrus.