Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.The Canadian federal election has just yielded a Liberal victory, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, an outcome Fox News and other media attribute to President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada’s economic well being and sovereignty.Trump’s statements, including suggestions that Canada should become the 51st state, did indeed shift the focus of the election from domestic issues to Canada’s relationship with the U.S. but was it a game-changer as many media have argued?Lots of circumstantial evidence suggests Trump’s various statements about his wish to absorb Canada or impose punishing tariffs on a whole range of Canadian products may well have influenced the voting of enough people to re-elect a Liberal Party government.On the eve of the election, Angus Reid, founder and chair of the Angus Reid Institute, told Fox News Digital , “It looks like there will be a Liberal government, which seems to be what the polls point to, and it would be a very big surprise if the Conservatives won.”.Trump posted advice to Canadian voters on his Truth Social site on election morning saying, in part, “Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America.”A very tempting offer to be sure, especially to the 43% of young Canadians aged 18-34 who would vote to become Americans if citizenship and conversion of assets to Yankee dollars were guaranteed. Surely, this large number of potential “traitors” is testimony to the salience our previous prime minister’s 2015 assertion that Canada is the world’s “first postnational state” with “no core identity.” Such sentiments are disproportionately held by younger Canadians who have been indoctrinated for decades with this ethos beginning in primary. If our identity is so weak or undefined, this surely gives Trump leave to pontificate on the advantages of absorption of territory with no socio-cultural systems or symbols worth recognizing, let alone defending. How can any country survive when they are taught that all they share are countless examples of past injustices against and victimization of its non-European people?.As for Canadian electoral politics, an Angus Reid Institute poll released on December 30, showed the Conservatives in super-majority territory with 45% support, compared to the Liberals at 11%. The results of a poll released on April 26 had the Liberals at 44% with a four-point lead over the Conservatives at 40%.What accounts for this huge turnaround, one that also points to a possible transient core identity?Polling experts claim this reflects a widespread concern over a trade war with the U.S. and Trump’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st state that quickly rallied support once again for the Liberal Party under Carney.Evidence for this comes from the April 16 electoral debate with conservative challenger Pierre Poilievre, where Mark Carney was quick to challenge Trump’s alleged plan to absorb Canada by declaring the American President to be the greatest threat our country is facing..“This election [is about] the question of who will succeed, and who will face up to Trump,” Carney said in the French debate.His comments came in response to Poilievre, who moments before had accused him of being too similar to his predecessor Justin Trudeau.“We are in a crisis. The most serious crisis of our lives," Carney reportedly added. “We have to react with strength, which will allow us to succeed with Trump.”Reports suggested that Carney also was increasingly viewed as the candidate more equipped to take on the tough negotiations that Canada will face to ease the steep tariffs Trump implemented this year. “This really has been an extraordinary election in that, by all rights, Canadians had it with the Liberals’ woke policies and with their misspending and didn’t like Trudeau,” Reid said..“Between tariffs and threats of annexation, Trump became the single most important issue in the country overnight," said Reid. "That gave Mark Carney an opportunity to be the first out of the gate to say that we’re not going to put up with this — we’re a sovereign nation and we’re going to fight.”Though neither Reid nor other pollsters mentioned “core identity” or “post-nationalism,” he also claimed that the Liberals’ improved showing was not just about Canadians warming to Carney, but also about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s failure to turn the dial from focusing on a consumer carbon tax, which the Liberal leader cancelled on April 1 in his first act as prime minister, and “still reflecting on Trudeau long after he had gone, instead of jumping right away onto the Trump threat and becoming something that he would lead the charge on.”The irony, in Reid’s view, is that “Trump imperiled the campaign of an individual who could be in many ways his stepbrother in Canada,” he said about Poilievre, who he called “mini-Trump,” and his “anti-woke,” smaller-government stance — “Trump-esque policies that the American right might want to see in Canada and certainly a lot of Canadians on the right want to see.”.Also, Poilievre has experienced a decrease in support for his Canada First message, which some reports indicate may be perceived as similar to Trump's America First agenda, though both are super-nationalist objectives. Ironically, if Reid and others are correct about Trump’s massive influence on the election results, Carney’s victory is also a victory for nearly all Justin Trudeau’s policies, including climate change, massive spending and borrowing, and identity-driven “woke” politics.If so, it’s more affirmation of the well-known aphorism that a good definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome.Yes, Justin Trudeau is gone, but his ideology is alive if not well in this four in a row wins: huge borrowing, massive public debt, unaffordable housing, reduced productivity, ethical breaches, a decline in global respect, and growing national division on controversial race, culture, and gender issues.As Troy Media has just argued, “Mark Carney is an accomplished figure, well-known on the international stage as a former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor. But his emergence as the Liberal leader raises a serious question: Are Canadians being offered real change, or simply a different face for the same political agenda?”This is a “political agenda” that was roundly rejected only a few months ago, an agenda that seemed destined to yield a majority Conservative government save, perhaps, for Donald Trump’s territorial ambitions and job-killing tariffs.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
