Canada woke up Tuesday morning with a political hangover and more questions than answers.
Yes, Mark Carney and the Liberal Party won this week’s election. But to call it a victory is to miss the deeper story. This was not a triumph. It was a reordering. And if a realignment is underway, it is driven not by unity, but by fracture.
Start with the surface narrative. Carney succeeded in making the election a referendum on Donald Trump. The strategy was blunt but effective: Trump is back, and Canada needs a grown-up in the room. On that front, Carney crushed it. He outperformed Pierre Poilievre by double digits on questions of global credibility, economic stability, and leadership temperament.
Had this election been only about Trump, Carney might have delivered a historic majority. But it wasn’t only about Trump.
The bigger story lies in what happened around the edges and what it exposed about the political coalitions that once held this country together and are now pulling it apart.
Let’s start with the rubble.
The New Democratic Party didn’t just lose. It collapsed. Stripped of official party status, broke, leaderless, and irrelevant, the federal NDP now resembles a protest movement more than a political party. This isn’t just an electoral failure. It’s an existential crisis.
It is no longer unthinkable that what’s left of the NDP caucus could cross the floor to the Liberals. Nor is it implausible that the NDP and Liberals could one day formalize a merger. A new progressive vehicle for federal politics, built from the ruins of the old one.
But don’t let the Liberal victory fool you. Their foundation is shaky, too. Carney’s Liberals remain confined to Atlantic Canada, Ontario, and Montreal Island. They are all but absent in Alberta and Saskatchewan and struggle to speak beyond the corridors of downtown Canada.
This is not a united country. It is a divided one. And this week’s results simply confirmed what has been building for years.
We are fractured by region, generation, class, and gender. Cities went Liberal. Rural ridings went Conservative. Older voters stuck with the status quo. Younger voters drifted Right. Women leaned Carney. Men leaned away.
These aren’t new dynamics. But they are hardening. And increasingly, they’re cultural as much as they are political.
The Conservatives, for all their frustration, can claim some victories. They secured their highest share of the popular vote since Brian Mulroney. They swept the Prairies. And they have locked in a loyal base—angry, alienated, and deeply skeptical of Ottawa’s intentions.
But they cannot build beyond that base. Poilievre ran a disciplined, laser-focused campaign. He avoided gaffes. He stayed on message. But he could not offer comfort. He could not convince a nervous country that he was safe to hand the keys to.
That gap cost him everything, including his seat.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre attends a press conference after the French-language federal election debate, in Montreal on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Chris Young/The Canadian Press.
As for Carney, his real work begins now. He may have won a mandate. But it is a narrow one, geographically and demographically. His coalition is intellectually coherent in its opposition to Trump. But it is electorally unstable and unlikely to hold if the conversation shifts.
The Liberals didn’t inspire the country. They spooked just enough voters to survive.
While Carney braces for a trade war with Trump, the more pressing challenge may be keeping Canada from drifting further apart.
Urban and rural Canada are now different nations. The East sees Ottawa as a centre of gravity. The West sees it as dead weight. Young Canadians are staring down a future of debt and disillusionment. Older Canadians are clinging to stability that feels increasingly fragile. Our political consensus is cracking. So are our institutions: Parliament, the public service, the national media.
Trust is low. Anger is high. The middle class is buckling under cost-of-living pressures. The promise of progress has dimmed.
And yet, the Carney government shows every sign of focusing almost exclusively on the threat from Washington. That may make strategic political sense. But it leaves a dangerous vacuum here at home.
Ignore the fractures, and they widen. Paper them over, and they rupture.
Carney won the election. But he did not win the country.
And if he wants to hold it together, he will need to do more than manage the fallout from Trump.
He will need to confront something even harder: the possibility that Canada itself is coming apart.
