Lessons from Canada: Is it time to stop trying to ape populist politicians?

Wouldn’t it be something if Donald Trump, the figurehead of the global rise in right-wing populism, ended up being the one to derail it? The movement that brought him to power ultimately undone by his own chaos and excess. It might almost make his absurd and chaotic second term feel worth it. Almost.

While that may sound like wishful thinking, the headlines coming from Canada this week could suggest otherwise.

In a rare piece of good news for progressives, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party pulled off a remarkable political turnaround in Canada, winning a fourth successive mandate.

At the start of the year, the Conservatives held a 25-point lead, and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, looked certain to become the next prime minister. That’s when Carney, the former Bank of England governor, entered the race, replacing the then unpopular Justin Trudeau as party leader.  

But a remarkable campaign dominated by Trump’s punishing tariffs on Canada and ludicrous rants about “one of the nastiest countries”, Carney swiftly turned the Liberal’s fortunes around.

In a particularly bitter blow for the Tories, Poilievre even lost his own seat in Carleton, Ontario to his Liberal opponent Bruce Fanjoy. This made him the first major party leader to be unseated in a general election since 1993 when then-prime minister Kim Campbell of the Progressive Conservatives lost her seat.

Uniting progressives

Carney’s victory wasn’t built on peeling away Conservative voters. The Tories, in fact, held up reasonably well. Instead, his success came from consolidating the progressive vote, siphoning support from the New Democrats and Greens, and even taking seats from the Bloc Québécois, the centre-left party devoted to Québécois nationalism.

His pitch was centrist rather than leftist, which carefully distanced him from Trudeau’s unpopular policies like carbon tax and capital gains. This was despite the Conservatives seeking to tie him to Trudeau, citing his previous advice on the economy and climate. But Carney ran on his experience and establishment credentials while, as he had never sat in parliament before, avoiding any taint of incumbency.

Carney’s secret weapon

He presented himself as the prime ministerial candidate who would most effectively stand up to the boorish and bullying tactics of Donald Trump.

And there seems little doubt that he owes his victory to Trump. The President’s repeated threats to impose punitive tariffs on Canada and his bizarre fixation on making the country America’s ‘51^st state’, provoked a surge of patriotic, anti-US sentiment. Today, two-thirds of Canadians consider the US to be unfriendly or an enemy, and 61% say they have started boycotting American companies. The Liberals harnessed this sentiment to their political advantage.

Even on election day, Trump couldn’t resist one last meddling outburst. In an especially erratic social media post, he urged Canadians to write his name on their ballots — a bizarre intervention, even by his standards — in pursuit of his fantasy of annexing 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.

“It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!”

The Liberals meanwhile portrayed Poilievre, who was once regarded as Canada’s Trumpian figure having embraced some Trump-style policies, such as cutting foreign aid and defunding state media, as aligned with the US president.

There is little doubt that his demise and Carney’s rise could be seen as directly attributable to Trump.

Lessons beyond Canada

Carney’s path to power offers lessons beyond Canada.

He didn’t chase the right or adopt its populist rhetoric. The Conservatives’ reliance on worn-out ‘common sense politics’ slogans failed to connect. Carney, by contrast, came across as the more stable and competent option, boosted, ironically, by Trump’s clownish interference.

This is why Keir Starmer, and those directing Labour’s strategy, namely campaign chief Morgan McSweeney, should tread carefully. Emulating Reform’s playbook to chase right-wing votes, or remaining silent on Trump, may come back to haunt Labour.

Take the party’s recent announcement that it plans to publish the nationalities of foreign criminals in the UK for the first time, a move civil servants have long resisted over concerns about data quality and moral implications.

The shift appears politically driven with short-term gain the goal. A Labour source quoted in the Telegraph, boasted: “Not only are we deporting foreign criminals at a rate never seen when Chris Philp and Robert Jenrick were in charge at the Home Office, but we will also be publishing far more information about that cohort of offenders than the Tories ever did.”

The announcement caused outrage. Migrant charities and MPs accused the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper of pandering to racism and stoking the possibility of riots. Fizza Qureshi, the chief executive of the Migrants’ Rights Network, said publicising foreign national offenders’ nationalities was a “blatant exercise in scapegoating”.

One Labour veteran said: “This is pandering to Farage, plain and simple. We need to fight prejudice not reinforce it.”

 “Unbelievable! This plays straight into Farage’s hands. Labour is playing a very dangerous game,” wrote Leeds for Europe.

It followed similar outrage in February, when, after footage showing people being removed from the UK was released for the first time,  left-leaning Labour politicians accused the Home Office of “enabling the mainstreaming of racism”.

Around the same time, the party published adverts on social media boasting about their record of deporting ‘illegal’ migrants, alongside a ‘Breaking Point’ style picture of a queue of silhouetted migrants, a tactic that was widely condemned during the Brexit campaign.

Commentators have pointed out that Labour’s approach appears aimed at countering the rise of Reform  by adopting a similarly hard-line rhetoric on immigration.

As journalist Adam Bienkov warned:

“The direction of travel is clear. Faced with opinion polls showing Reform level, or ahead of Labour, Keir Starmer is engaging in an obvious attempt to outdo Farage’s party at its own game.

But for Bienkov, this strategy is doomed for failure, as it was for the Tories when, while in government, they too tried to upstage Reform on immigration.

“All this achieves,” Bienkov argues, “is to raise the salience of immigration as an issue on which Farage and his party can, and will always, go further.

“It also creates a situation in which all three parties are engaged in a perilous contest to make Britain as hostile an environment as possible for anyone not born in the UK.”

And if this week’s difficult local elections for Labour and the Conservatives – marked by sweeping gains for Reform – teach us anything, it’s that voters who want Reform policies will vote for Reform. 

Then there’s the question of how Starmer should deal with Donald Trump himself.

Mark Carney made standing up to Trump’s bullying and defending Canada’s independence the centrepiece of his campaign, something voters handsomely rewarded him for.

Such a bold anti-Trump position contrasts to that of Keir Starmer, who is much more cautious when it comes to dealing with the US president, trying to strike a balance between distancing himself on Trump’s attacks on Zelensky and his aggressive trade tariffs, and avoiding overt criticism.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey meanwhile, doesn’t share such caution. Ahead of this week’s local elections, he said:

“Voters in Canada have elected a Liberal government on a clear mandate to combat Trump’s dangerous populism. Across the globe, it is liberals who are taking the lead in standing up for prosperity, security and democracy in the face of Trump, Putin and the rest.”

Others however, have urged caution in drawing parallels between the Canadian election and UK politics, particularly when it comes to how Keir Starmer might position himself in relation to Donald Trump.

Luke Tryl, UK director of the More in Common think tank, warned against assuming outcomes in one country will mirror those in another.

“I am always nervous about reading across from elections elsewhere and here. There are various potential lessons – the fact that Carney managed to consolidate the left around him.

“For the moment, people tend to think Starmer is getting the balance right [on Trump].

“… I think the impact on our politics will be much more marginal than in Canada, because obviously they are right next door, and Trump isn’t yet asking us to become the 52nd state.”

As Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney took a clear and unapologetic position on Brexit, warning that leaving the EU risked plunging the UK into recession. His anti-Brexit approach made him a target for the pro-Brexit right-wing press, but it also showed a level of conviction rarely seen in today’s political leadership.

Rather than courting the right, Carney gained votes by uniting the left, aided in part by Donald Trump’s unwelcome interference.

Labour, by contrast, risks alienating its progressive support by chasing the right-wing vote. In doing so, it offers little that inspires, let alone galvanises.

What Trump provided for the Liberal Party was unambiguous evidence that populist politics is a game played by rich men for their own gain at the expense of the majority. Trump unwittingly provided an enemy for Canadians to coalesce against which wasn’t immigration, or woke, or the deep state and all the other fictions created by right wing politics. And of course, Carney played his cards well with clarity and seriousness mixed with wry humour, and just the right gravitas.

In so doing he showed that charisma doesn’t have to be the shallow showmanship of the likes of Trump.

The Labour government and those advising them should take due note.  

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch.  

The post Lessons from Canada: Is it time to stop trying to ape populist politicians? appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.