Canada: Thoughts on the 2025 Dominion Election

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The 28 April, 2025 Dominion election has come and gone in Canada and we have elected our forty-fifth Parliament. This is what a Dominion election is about. We go to the polls to choose who will represent our local constituency in the House of Commons, the lower house which along with the Senate, comprises Parliament, the traditional institution in which by ancient prescription the legislative powers of the Crown are exercised. This is good and as it should be.

The members of Parliament are divided into factions which we call parties. An unfortunate side effect of a Dominion election is that one of these parties wins a larger number of seats than the others. If that party wins 172 seats, they have an outright majority of the seats in the House. If they win less than 172 but more than any other party they have a plurality of the seats. In either case, this party is said to have “won” the election and is customarily invited by the King or, more commonly, his vice-regal representative the Governor General, to form the next government. The King, Parliament, civil service, and courts are all “the government,” of course, but in a narrower sense of the term the government consists of the ministers who make the day to day decisions of the King’s Privy Council, the institution in which the executive powers of the Crown are vested. The leader of the winning party becomes the first minister of His Majesty’s government, the prime minister who chooses a cabinet of other executive ministers to head such ministries as finance, transportation, and dog-walking.

In this election, the Liberal Party won a plurality that came just short of a majority. Initially this was reported as 169 seats but a recount in Lower Canada has since reduced it to 168. I found this outcome disgusting and appalling. The Grits have been in power for the last ten years during which period they have: 1) sabotaged the country’s economy, 2) waged war on the memory of her founders and historical leaders, 3) showed alarming disregard for their accountability to Parliament, 4) trod roughshod on the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians supposedly protected by the Charter they are always patting themselves on the back for introducing in 1982, 5) shoved the insane cultural revolutionary ideas regarding sex, gender, race, and the like that are currently called “woke” down everyone’s throats, 6) reignited the national unity crisis that had finally died down after the first Trudeau premiership, 7) brought in an inexcusable number of new immigrants exacerbating the housing and affordability crises they the Liberals had created, 8) adapted and encouraged provincial governments to adapt policies that enable and encourage rather than hinder and discourage a lifestyle of drug abuse, 9) repeatedly attempted to take control over what Canadians say or think on the internet in the name of fighting “hate” while presiding over and tacitly encouraging a huge wave of hate crimes directed against Christian churches, and 10) took what Pope John Paul II had dubbed the “culture of death” to the nth degree as over the course of their decade in power euthanasia was first legalized for those already dying, then expanded to include virtually everyone else, and actively promoted to such an extreme that even the United Nations condemned it. I could say more, but I’ll limit the list to one each for each of the years they have been in power. The point is they did not deserve another term in office, much less an increase in their seat count.

Four months ago, when Captain Airhead, having made himself the most loathed prime minister in the history of Canada – if not the entire Commonwealth – finally got the hint and resigned, we were more sick and tired of the Liberals than we had ever been. Their comeback cannot be attributed to the qualities of the man who replaced Captain Airhead. An economist by education, Mark Carney spent most of his career in banking, investment and central. He was an advisor to his predecessor and so could not credibly claim to be a clean break from him, especially when it was obvious that he was Captain Airhead’s hand-picked choice as successor. He completely lacks his predecessor’s charisma and bears an uncanny resemblance to James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld as portrayed by Christoph Waltz in the Daniel Craig films. These aren’t the makings of someone capable of breathing new life into the corpse of a political party.

That the Liberals won another term and even increased their seats to four short of a majority is all the more astonishing in that the Conservatives also gained seats. In fact, the Conservative seat total went up by twenty four since the previous Dominion election. The Liberals only gained sixteen seats. The collapse of the New Democratic Party is what made this possible. The NDP went from twenty-four seats to seven, losing seventeen seats and their official party status. That the NDP was reduced to single digit seats and that Jimmy Dhaliwal lost his own seat and stepped down as leader of that awful party I would count among the positive outcomes of the election with one caveat, that they are part of a larger shift that is not positive. The Lower Canadian separatists also lost ten seats and the Green Party lost one bringing its seat count down to one, that of its former leader Elizabeth May. That the Liberals and Conservatives both saw large seat increases, while the smaller parties saw devastating losses, is indicative of a shift on the part of the electorate to thinking in terms of a two-party rivalry. That is the way the American system operates. It is not how ours is supposed to operate.

That brings us to the reason for the Liberal comeback. It is almost entirely due to foreign interference in the election. No, not interference by Red China, of the type the Liberals have been trying to cover up for years. Interference by the leader of Canada’s oldest frenemy. I hate to use this pop culture portmanteau but no other word adequately describes the relationship between the United States and Canada. Canada and the United States were founded on opposite principles and ideals. The United States was founded on the idea of cutting ties to the Christian civilization of Great Britain and Europe and establishing from scratch a new secular country based on ideals derived from abstract reason. In other words she was founded on liberalism. In defiance of this concept, Canada was founded on loyalty, on retaining ties to British and European Christendom, and adapting the institutions of the old country to the circumstances of the new. In other words, she was founded on conservatism. This would make the two countries natural enemies. Nevertheless, for most of our history we have enjoyed the world’s longest undefended border, have been each other’s largest trade partner, and fought on the same side in two World Wars and several other global conflicts. This is how friends behave. So, frenemies.

The current president of the United States is a man allegedly recruited by the KGB in 1987. If true, his seeming attempts to engineer the collapse of international trade and history’s biggest stock market crash since his re-election last year become explicable as the actions of the ultimate Communist sleeper agent seeking to destroy capitalism from within. It would not be the first time a Communist was elected president of the United States running on the Republican ticket. Whatever the truth of that may be, about the same time he started dropping tariffs the way his predecessors dropped bombs, Krasnov the Orange began saying that our country should become his country’s fifty-first state. Initially this seemed like a joke at the expense of Captain Airhead, but he has kept it up ever since, including a particularly loathsome social media post addressed to the Canadian electorate on the day of the election.

That Carney’s Liberals were able to translate Krasnov’s threats into enough votes for themselves to come back from political death is clearly the explanation of their victory but the explanation itself needs an explanation. After all, the idea of Canada becoming an American state is abhorrent and loathsome to almost all Canadians including those, like myself, who find the thought of voting Liberal just as repugnant. The idea that the Liberals are the best choice for dealing with Krasnov’s Anschluss threats makes no sense. The Liberals have a new leader with no political experience, their own policies are largely to blame for the economic weakness that Krasnov is exploiting, and, most importantly, the Liberals have always, since the nineteenth century, sought to more closely integrate Canada with the United States.

While it was Brian Mulroney who signed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement with Ronald Reagan in 1988, this was in betrayal of his own party’s traditional position. Free trade with the United States was always the position of the Liberals. Sir Wilfred Laurier ran on a platform of free trade – he called it “reciprocity” – with the United States in 1891. The same year, Goldwin Smith, a Liberal intellectual, published a book Canada and the Canadian Question in which he maintained that Confederation was a mistake and that Canada should seek to join the United States. John Wesley Dafoe, who for the first half of the twentieth century edited the Winnipeg Free Press, which then as now was a Liberal – big and little l – newspaper, and was Sir Wilfred Laurier’s biographer, entitled his history of our country Canada: An American Nation (1935). The absence of “North” was deliberate. Dafoe saw Canada as the same kind of country as the United States, a country built on the foundation of liberalism by breaking ties with Old World Christian civilization, albeit by means other than a war of independence. This interpretation of Canadian history is the Liberal interpretation, what Donald Creighton, who like myself vehemently disagreed with it, called the “Authorized Version.” Even in the 1960s, when the Liberal Party leadership fell into the hands of Communists, it remained the party of Americanization. Lester Pearson, who had been an informant of Elizabeth Bentley’s Soviet spy ring in the 1940s and who betrayed Canada’s traditional loyalties in his actions in the Suez Canal Crisis to serve the interests of both the United States and the Soviet Union, acted on behalf of JFK when he ousted Diefenbaker in 1963. His successor, Pierre Trudeau, who had visited the Soviet Union towards the end of Stalin’s regime as a delegate to a Communist conference and as a far left journalist helped engineer the “Quiet Revolution” against established Roman Catholicism in Lower Canada in the 1950s, who admired Mao and basically never met a Communist he didn’t like, as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, got all his inspiration for his “communist” innovations from American models – LBJ’s “Great Society”, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the American Bill of Rights. More recently, Captain Airhead was a disgustingly obsequious “Amen Charlie” to the American president, at least when Obama and J. Brandon Magoo held the office.

To summarize, the Liberal Party’s track record is such that they are the last party in Canada that ought to be trusted with handling a threat of being swallowed up by the United States.

It turns out that they did not need a reliable track record in standing up to the United States on behalf of Canada to be elected. All they needed was to make standing up to the United States and more specifically Krasnov the central issue of their campaign. By doing so, they aligned themselves with the thinking of most Canadians that an existential threat to our country must be treated more seriously than any other matter. And yes, despite the efforts of some who ought to know better to pretend otherwise, Krasnov’s rhetoric does indeed constitute an existential threat. Lying through his teeth about his country subsidizing ours to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars[1], Krasnov keeps claiming that the only alternative is for us to become an American state. If we became an American state, our country would cease to exist, therefore this rhetoric, however much worded politely in a Corleoneish “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse”[2] manner, constitutes an existential threat.

By treating Krasnov’s threats to Canada as the central issue they were the Liberals were able to win an election they did not deserve to win. For the Liberals to win, the Conservatives had to “lose”, that is, if increasing your seat total by twenty-four deserves to be called “losing.” The Conservatives did not win the plurality or the majority that they had seemed on track for winning until Krasnov opened his big mouth, but a Dominion election is not the same sort of zero-sum, winner-take-all affair as an American presidential election. That is not how the Westminster parliamentary system works. The Conservatives as the second largest party remain His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and in a much stronger position than before apart from the fact that their leader lost his own seat.

No, that is not my trying to put a positive gloss on a disappointing outcome. If there is one thing Canadians need it is a better understanding of and appreciation for our constitution.[3] As for disappointment, my disappointment in the composition of the forty-fifth Parliament lies in the fact that the Liberals won and not that the Conservatives lost. Maxime Bernier has been saying, ever since he lost the race for the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer and formed the People’s Party of Canada that the Conservative Party is now conservative in name only. He seemed to devote most of his energies during this campaign to telling this to audiences of American television stations which may explain why the People’s Party’s portion of the vote dropped to below 1%. As it so happens, I agree with his assessment of the Conservative Party although I reject Bernier’s measuring stick for determining conservatism. Bernier’s standard of conservatism is what has been called conservatism in the United States since World War II which is a form of what everyone, everywhere else in the world, calls liberalism. It is a better form of liberalism – lower taxes, freer markets, a lighter state, basically everything ancient Israel asked of Rehoboam after the death of Solomon – than what currently goes by the name liberalism in North America – basically, what Rehoboam, following the bad advice of the young and ignoring that of the elders who had advised his father, gave them – but it is still properly called liberalism rather than conservatism. If the Conservative Party were actually conservative in other than name it would have won this election hands down because there would not have been the slightest doubt that it was the best choice to stand up to Krasnov’s bullying. Real conservatism is about protecting the good things that have been handed down to us and passing them down to those who will come after us, about adapting traditional institutions rather than inventing new ones from scratch, about respecting the sacred and refusing to subordinate all of life to the values of the marketplace. A Conservative party that was actually conservative – or better yet actually Tory[4] – would have seen Krasnov’s suggestion that Canada join the United States as an offense against everything for which it stands.

Having said that, I think that actions that cost the Conservative Party the votes they would have needed to win were mostly those of others than the party leader and those actually running in the election. The Alberta premier’s warning that the country would face a national unity crisis if the Liberals won the election most likely had the opposite effect of what was intended. In my youth, Lower Canada would frequently use the threat of leaving and breaking up Confederation to obtain what it wanted from the Dominion government. This was not well received out here in the prairies and I very much doubt the similar rhetoric from Alberta took well outside that province. Danielle Smith in this case should probably be viewed as the messenger rather than the one making the threat. On election night, as the results from Atlantic Canada started to come in and the Liberals took an early lead but well before the outcome of the election could be reasonably called, I observed Albertan hotheads commenting in online threads about how they were done with Canada, were going to leave and take their province with them, and basically carry on like crybaby Hollywood liberals do every time they lose an election. [5] It was rather satisfying, amidst the disappointment of the Liberal victory, to see these types lose.

Then there was the commentary from the Conservative Party’s supporters in the media. Yes, these are vastly outnumbered by Liberal Party supporters in the media, but they do exist. Their approach to Krasnov and his threats did not do the Conservative Party any favours. Initially, when the threat was only of tariffs they justified Krasnov by saying that his demands were not unreasonable and were that we do things we should be doing for our own sakes, like crack down on fentanyl. They were not entirely wrong, except in that Krasnov seemed to be demanding that we prevent people from leaving our country the way Communist countries used to (further evidence that he is KGB?) Unfortunately, this persisted long after Krasnov’s threats had gone from tariffs to Anschluss.

Worse, these commentators often came across as mocking and ridiculing Canadians for being angry at Krasnov’s attacks and for standing up for our country. The more responsible Conservative commentators, like Brian Lilley, were careful to direct such criticism only towards the Liberals and NDP and not for expressing Canadian patriotism in itself but for their hypocrisy in having spent the last ten years bashing the country, her history, and her heroes. Less careful commentators, however, often came across as suggesting that the only ones expressing Canadian patriotism were the Liberals and the Left in general or even as mocking Canadian patriotism in itself. I recall one commentator describing the booing at the American national anthem at sporting events as “jingoism at its worst.” Seriously? The president of the neighbour country says that our country shouldn’t exist and should be swallowed up by his and booing his country’s national anthem in response is a worse form of jingoism? As with the “I’m going to take my province and leave” types, there is satisfaction in seeing the sort of person with so little judgement or taste as to express such nonsense lose.

Unfortunately the price of such satisfaction is having to put up with the premiership of Blofeld, whom Krasnov seems to adore.

God Save the King!

[1] Krasnov was referring to the United States’ trade deficit with our country and to our insufficient spending on defense. Even if the trade deficit was as large as that, and it is not, it is much smaller and disappears when energy exports are taken out of consideration, it would not amount to a subsidy, because a trade deficit is not a subsidy. A subsidy flows in one-direction, from subsidizer to subsidized. A trade deficit is what happens when two parties are exchanging cash for other goods in both direction, and party A buys more of party B’s goods for cash than party B buys of party A’s goods. Party A is not subsidizing party B, because party A is getting party B’s goods in return for his cash. In the case of Canadian and American trade the only thing that resembles a subsidy is the fact that the United States buys energy resources from us at well below the market value. That is us subsidizing the United States, not the other way around. As for our insufficient spending on defense, while I find this objectionable it does not amount to the United States subsidizing us and is in fact our business and not Krasnov’s. There is only one country that has ever tried to conquer Canada, and that was the United States in the pre-Confederation period of the nineteenth century. Krasnov’s claim that the United States has been “protecting” us is identical to when a different kind of “Don” sends his thugs to a shop owner to collect a payout with threats to the effect of “This is a pretty nice place you got here. Would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”

[2] Okay, maybe the “Don” in the previous note is not such a different kind from Krasnov after all.

[3] Among the things they need a better understanding of is the fact that a constitution is a set of governing institutions, the system by which they operate, and the traditions that inform and shape them and not a piece of paper that magically prevents the government from abusing its powers. If Canadians understood this better, they would not commit such errors as to think that Canada had no constitution prior to 1982, that the Liberals gave us our constitution in 1982, or that the Charter is our constitution (it is part of our constitutional law, but not the whole of our constitutional law, much less the constitution itself) and would be more enraged at the offences the Liberals keep committing against our constitution.

[4] A Tory is a specific kind of conservative by the meaning of the word I have provided in the text of this essay. Conservatives tend to prefer monarchy, Tories are monarchists and royalists, respect for the sacred is part of conservatism, orthodox Churchmanship of Toryism.

[5] Many Albertans and neoconservatives elsewhere in Canada see Alberta as the most conservative province in Canada. This, however, is based on making American “conservatism”, i.e., the older form of liberalism, the standard of conservatism. By the standard of actual conservatism, Alberta is arguably the least conservative province in Canada. It has been, at least since the oil boom, the province of the young and the rootless, by which I mean that a large part of its population are people who moved there from elsewhere in Canada, from the United States, and from further abroad in their youth in the hopes of becoming rich. — Gerry T. Neal