LILLEY: Carney Liberals aided by NDP collapse, Trump's 51st state comments

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It was a campaign that went from a Conservative landslide to a Liberal landslide to an expected nail-biter. This campaign is one like no other with changing leads, changing narratives and one of the major players in the election not even a Canadian citizen.

Donald Trump popped his head in and out of the election, including a post to Truth Social on election day effectively asking Canadians to vote for Trump.

At the beginning of the campaign, it appeared that Trump would be the dominant issue. In the end, he drove many votes to Mark Carney and the Liberals, but there were still many voters turning to issues such as housing, affordability and a whole host of others.

The early numbers out of Atlantic Canada showed the Liberals leading in most seats, but the Conservatives picked up one seat — and were in contention to flip two others — and were outperforming expectations in the popular vote. Leger, Ipsos and Abacus all projected the Liberals to be pulling 57% with the Conservatives topping out at 37%. Instead, the Liberals were pulling 50% of the vote, as of this writing, while the Conservatives were taking 43% of the vote.

That outperforming of the polls is something that Conservatives hoped would extend into the rest of the country and it didn’t really happen. The bigger story, though, in this election is how poorly the NDP was showing compared to polling.

Just after 10 p.m., the NDP had only 4.4% of the popular vote across the country and was only leading or elected in three seats. That was half of the popular vote projected by the major polling firms, a huge drop from the 18% the party took in the 2021 election.

It seems that the party that likes to portray themselves as the conscience of Parliament, the party that sticks up for the little guy, is just fine backing a party led by a global banker who has owned private hospitals across Australia, denies health insurance to miners, runs toll roads through poor neighbourhoods in Peru and invests heavily in oil and gas outside of Canada, but not in Canada.

The Liberals appear to have won a narrow victory, but a victory nonetheless thanks to the collapse of the NDP across the country.

At the start of this year, it looked like Canada would see real change after a dark Liberal decade of rule in Ottawa. We’ve seen our economy slide, our GDP per capita drop compared to peer countries, our immigration system has been savaged and now the Liberals have been rewarded with a fourth term.

Carney is the beneficiary of incredible luck.

Had Justin Trudeau been leading the Liberal party during this election, we’d be looking at a massive Conservative majority. Instead, the Liberals swapped leaders and Trump kept inserting himself into the campaign — scaring progressives and older voters into the warm and secure embrace of Carney and the Liberals.

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The Liberals claimed that Carney was real change for the country, but that isn’t the reality. Late Monday, CTV was interviewing Carney’s closest adviser, David Lametti, a former Trudeau justice minister who helped bring about the crime wave Canada is experiencing thanks to Liberal policy.

We’ve changed the lead singer of the band; we haven’t changed the band or the songs they play.

Canada is not better off today than we were yesterday.