In an election that seemed all but guaranteed to land Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in government, Canada instead re-elected Mark Carney’s Liberal Party for another four years. Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, first became Canadian prime minister in March, taking over from the scandal-mired Justin Trudeau. The increasingly unpopular Liberals were set to be overthrown by the populist-leaning Poilievre, until US president Donald Trump’s threats to annex the country. This derailed the national discourse and caused liberal-left voters to rally behind Carney.

The Liberals’ victory, however, was extremely narrow, and their fourth term in government is set to be a rough ride. For starters, Carney will have to form a minority government. It will also have to contend with the fact that Poilievre’s Conservatives made significant gains among younger voters. For those aged between 18 and 34, support for the Conservatives outpaced Liberal support by 44 per cent to 31 per cent. Young Canadians remained impervious to Carney’s anti-Trump appeals – only 18 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds were worried about Trump, compared with 45 per cent of voters over 60.

The youth were not the only group the Liberals failed to win over. In Western Canada, Trump’s threat to make Canada the 51st state provoked little concern, and Alberta and Saskatchewan remained Conservative strongholds. In fact, voters in these provinces were far less fearful of Trump than they were of Carney’s green agenda.

The Trudeau government – in power since 2015 – had already done its best to alienate the Canadian West with its unpopular federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act 2018, more commonly referred to as the carbon tax. As the biggest oil-producing provinces in the country, Alberta and Saskatchewan were most affected by this. Although Carney scrapped the carbon tax ahead of the election, he has shown every indication that he intends to continue with every other aspect of Trudeau’s Net Zero agenda. After all, in 2021, Carney said he believed that half of the world’s oil reserves need to stay in the ground.