An Analysis of the Canadian Election 2025:

David Parker, April 2 2025

This is the first Federal Election Campaign since 2004 that I will not be directly participating in. I have seen four CPC leaders come and go. In fact, I was there as a delegate at the founding convention that birthed the Conservative Party of Canada. I voted for Stephen Harper to be both the leader of the Canadian Alliance Party, and then the newly created merger between the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, now known as the Conservative Party of Canada.

Over that time, our party has had four leaders. Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer, Erin O’Toole, and now Pierre Poilievre. Only one of those leaders has won a federal election. Only one of them is likely to. At the height of the CPC’s power, when Harper had won a majority, there were multiple books and articles that claimed that Harper had changed Canada forever. That the conservative movement was ascendent and that the Liberal would descend further into obscurity. I believed this narrative, and at the end of Justin Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister is looked like that prophesy was being fulfilled. The Liberals were headed for a historic defeat and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party was ascendent.

Interestingly, the support for Pierre Poilievre has barely dipped in terms of popular vote. In January 2024, the CPC was polling at an average of 40% according to the polling aggregator 338.com. As of today, the CPC is polling at an average of 38%. Well within the margin of error and 1% less than the number that brought Stephen Harper his majority government in 2011. Yet, Conservative fortunes look grim in the 2025 election. Polling shows the Liberals getting a majority, something they have not achieved since 2015 and possibly getting a higher percentage of the vote than they did when Jean Chrietien got his super majority in 1993. What is happening? Are the polls lying? How do we explain Pierre’s massive crowds in contrast to polling averages that show him getting the same number of seats as Erin O’Toole did in 2021?

These questions can be answered simply by looking at the core of Canadian identity and the current geopolitical situation we find ourselves in. From the very beginning, Canadian identity has been simple: We are not American. The original population boom in Ontario came from Loyalists, my ancestors, who fled the American Revolution and were given land in Ontario in return for their loyalty to the British Crown. This is a well known undercurrent in Canadian culture for anyone paying attention.

Canadians, in general, define themselves in opposition to America. I spent nearly 200 episodes of my old podcast, The Canadian Story, interviewing people on Canadian identity. My conclusion after two years of interviews was that Canada didn’t have any kind of solid identity, but I was wrong, there is a core to the Canadian identity, and Trudeau and the Liberals understand this deeply. The core to the Canadian identity is anti-Americanism. It is a false sense of superiority towards America and Americans.

Once you understand this, the current election makes perfect sense. Canadians have been quietly anti-American in their core for their entire history. They are not doing it quietly anymore, and this is because Donald Trump has exposed them. Whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s economic policy of tariffs is irrelevant, Trump has highlighted the core of Canadian identity. This has created a visceral response from Canadians. The more “Canadian” someone is, the more visceral their response.

My prediction is that this phenomena will result in a Liberal majority government. For a few simple reasons. The first is that Canadians are liberal. Not just in the partisan sense, but in the oppositional sense of the conservative values of America. I highlighted this in an earlier post, but the simple truth is that the values of modern conservatism are not the values of Canadians. Self reliance, small government, individualism, and the entrepreneurial spirit are American values, so naturally Canadians look down on them. This puts conservatives in this country at a structural disadvantage.

Conservatives in Canada are trying to get people to vote against their core identity. The values of conservatism are not compatible with Canadian identity. Once you understand this the massive polling shift against Pierre Poilievre’s CPC begins to make sense. Canadians are always willing to vote for Conservatives when they get tired of Liberal corruption and incompetence. They elect “conservatives” like Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to clean up Liberal messes, but mostly they do it to punish the Liberals when they have gone too far. They do not vote for conservatives because they seem themselves in those parties.

When Canadians were fed up with the failures of the Justin Trudeau Liberals, they were willing to punish them by voting for Pierre Poilievre, but now that Canada is reminded of their true identity, anti-Americanism, they are repulsed by the values that they see as American, conservative values.

The final factor that must be pointed out in this election is the decline of the Bloc Quebecois and the rise of the Liberals in Quebec. This only makes sense if you understand what Quebec is, fundamentally it is a “nation within a nation” as Stephen Harper said. In the same way that Canadians identify themselves as “not-American” the Quebecois define themselves as “not-Canadian” or at least a “distinct society”. There is, however, one part of Quebec identity that trumps their anti-Canadianism, their French sense of superiority to Americans. When threatened with being annexed by America, the Quebecois suddenly become Canadian patriots, but never “conservatives” who might as well be Americans in their minds.

This is not the case for all “Canadians” in fact, it does not really represent the identity of Albertans at all. Albertans are fundamentally not Canadians. If anything, Albertans share much more in common with Americans than Ontarians, let alone the Quebecois. Albertans are entrepreneurial, they value personal responsibility and merit, and most importantly they value freedom. This is why, when looking at the polling, Alberta (and to a lesser extent Saskachewan) stand alone. They are the only provinces that are not reflecting this trend. Everywhere else in Canada is exposing their true colours. A country whose whole identity is born out of a misplaced sense of superiority, that is actually born out of envy.