Bulwark Takes - Canada’s Liberals and Mark Carney Win Huge in Backlash to Trump

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Tim Miller is joined by J.J. McCullough to discuss Canada's election, where Mark Carney and the Liberals scored a major win while Trump’s influence dragged down the Conservatives. Subscribe to J.J.’s YouTube Channel

Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller for the Bulwark, and we did it, Canada! We did it! Oh, Canada, our home and native land. I can do it all if you want me to. True patriot love. I went to a lot of hockey games as a kid. What a win for Mark Carney. I've just seen it. I was downstairs watching the CBC as they made the official call that the Liberals will control the government. It might be a minority government.

It might be a majority government. We're going to bring in our resident Canada expert, JJ McCullough, to tell us about how things are looking and how things are shaping up exactly as far as the scope of the victory. But first, before we get to JJ, I just wanted to focus on the bulwark specialty, which is the fact that this was an absolutely humiliating defeat for Donald Trump. Humiliating. I know he tried to spin it with the Atlantic as a strong thing that he could single-handedly tank a conservative's campaign. But yeah, no, your ability to crush your own side is not actually a sign of strength. It's a sign of unbelievable unpopularity and incompetence and absurdity. It is a sign that, frankly, when the rest of the world looks at you, Donald Trump, they see a big fat loser. And, well, that's how many of in his treatment of our ally up north,

that he managed to take a campaign that the Conservative Party in Canada, Pierre Palliev, was on a glide path to victory. We're unprecedented territory here. Something else we'll get into with JJ, but the the conservatives were on a glide path to victory and and the trump stank was so putrid and so intense that the wind blew it north across the border and it completely infected all of pierre's entire campaign there was nothing pierre could do to get the stink off of him. And so there really is no other way to look at this, except a massive L for Trump, a massive L for conservative parties around the world in Western countries, at least, that are trying to navigate the Trump question, right? How to deal with someone that has turned our friends into a

foe. Not Western countries. Let me put that more accurately. Conservative parties in countries that had traditionally been American allies. Because Donald Trump is so committed to bullying, or to trying, failing, but trying to bully our allies. Trying to punish them economically. Trying to rub their face in the dirt i essentially every ally except for israel and our new ally of el salvador that has been donald trump's mo and so it becomes very challenging if you're in the conservative party in those countries to balance how to deal with you know who the person that should be your reliable ally,

but who instead is trying to use his tiny little fingers to wedgie you. And that's what was happening to Polyev. He got wedgied. Trump took his tiny little fingers and he wedgied Polyev. And as a result, you know, they both ended up with shit on their fingers. Just, you know, anyway, excuse me for enjoying it. You know, we've had a couple of L's here lately. I don't know if you've noticed down here in the States. pleasure watching the Canadians just in pretty short order, frankly, deliver a massive, massive L to Trump and to Polya, but more importantly for me, by extension, Trump. So I am going to pull up here, my friend JJ McCullough, for folks that want to go deep on what was happening in the writings. I'm learning all the terms and following the Canadian election so closely.

I'm learning all the terms. We're going to see what's going on in the writings. We're going to see what we could learn demographically from some of the exit polls. I think there's some interesting things that I've seen there on the CBC. because JJ's interviewed Pierre and has a perspective on what's happening there, as to just how the extent of the sadness coming from the Canadian conservatives who thought that they were ascended. So we're going to get into all of that right now. All right, so we're going to bring in my friend JJ McCullough, Canadian YouTuber. JJ, you just missed my intro then there, which was essentially that it was a big night for the Fuck Trump Coalition. And the people that wanted to say fuck Trump were successful and that all the other, you know, little random local issues or concerns, provincial concerns up there.

Took a second, took a backseat to that. Is that a fair assessment of the state of play? Or is this just my American, Americanophile, Trump-centric brain that is processing this in that way? Well, yes, despite Trump's best wishes, he did not win the Canadian election. I don't know if you saw that bleep where he was, seemed to be implying that people should vote for him. But no, like we do know from polling data that one of the big sort of divides among Canadian voters was what they considered the front of mind issue. And if you were likely to vote for Carney, which we now know more Canadians did than not, your front of mind issue was Trump. If you were voting for Pierre Polyev and the Conservative, your front of mind

issue was a whole host of things. In fact, there was no consensus issue among Conservative voters. You know, some thought that it was just time for a change. Some, you know, believed in his policy agenda. You know, some had anxiety about the cost of living. You know, some hated the Trudeau legacy, you know, as a medley of different issues. But in that sort of binary equation, and let's be clear, this was a very binary election in a way that feels quite unprecedented in Canadian history. The Carney proposition, it looks like might have even been a 50% beyond 50% proposition. So it is a very dramatic and decisive win for Carney's theory of the case, which was the FU Trump theory. I was watching the CBC, you know, which I don't usually do. Quite a, just quite a different whole just vibe. I'm like muchBC, you know, which I don't usually do. Quite a, just quite a different whole just vibe.

I'm like much more, you know, we're stripped down. You know, we don't have all the graphics. There's no magic wall. Yeah, yeah. There's no magic wall. But anyway, it was kind of a PBS vibe to it, I guess, which makes sense. And they were saying that in the early exits, which, you know, I'm sure are about as reliable as they are here, but just directionally, that you saw that divide also between older voters and younger voters. That older voters who, you know, for whom, you know, the history with America is more central to maybe their worldview, like the Trump situation was their top of mind issue.

And with younger voters, it was more of a mix. I mean, does that sound right to you? Yeah, that does sound right. And you know, this is sort of it's a somewhat nuanced topic, because it does get to sort of like a lot of kind of complex generational issues about like what it means to be Canadian and how Canadians sort of see themselves. But definitely like boomer age Canadians, especially boomer women, frankly, who we know from sort of early polls went huge for Carney, they have a certain stereotype of Americans and American government and Republicans and all of that. And like Trump is just kind of like the horrible sort of platonic ideal of every sort of like boomer anxiety about

the evil Americans, the ugly Americans, the Americans who are sort of coveting Canada and want to conquer us and want to take us over. And that sort of paranoia and fear has been a sort of animating force in a certain kind of boomer Canadian politics. Do we call it paranoia anymore? Maybe it was paranoia last year, but maybe now it's just, maybe they're just early now. Well, that's what I mean, right? It's like Trump just reinforces and confirms and validates a certain theory of America that people like me, pro-American Canadians, had spent so many decades denouncing and saying, no, the Americans aren't so bad. They don't hate us. They don't want to conquer our country. What are you talking about? And then Trump comes along and validates that. And then, you know, people rush to support a candidate who,

and let's be frank, like Carney ran a very nakedly anti-American campaign. He would say it's not just Trump, it's the Americans. The Americans want our country. They want our resources. They want our land. They want our water. They want to take us. And I, Mark Carney, you know, great civil servant and professional, you know, bureaucrat, administrator, I'm the only one that can guarantee the safety and security and sovereignty

of Canada. And that pitch clearly worked. Yeah, it was a big moment for us globalist technocrats, you know, JJ. I was feeling a little chill as a globalist technocrat saying that one of our own could kind of rise to the top through anti-Trump we're we're still i mean the numbers are still coming in here obviously we've had an official call they're still trying to figure out if it's going to be a majority or minority government um but i mean it's for for those of us uh we have some canadian viewers are very familiar with this but for the american viewers like it is a gaining of seats we're looking at uh from trudeau do we think can we tell at this point? Yeah, it looks, well, I mean, yeah, it is frankly still too early for me to say that. I mean, Carney's popular vote numbers are very high for a

Canadian election. You know, I don't want to get too in front of my skis here, but yeah, I mean, it does feel like Carney is establishing himself as a pretty decisive figure, in part because he has unified this very broad coalition behind him of young people, of old people, and of people of sort of the moderate left and the far left. You know, Carney's great victory in many ways is that he killed off the further left kind of social democratic party, the NDP, which had traditionally sort of split the vote on the centre-left and was often responsible for allowing sort of conservative victories to slide up through the middle. So, you know, I was just doing a podcast with some sort of conservative victories to slide up through the middle.

So, you know, I was just doing a podcast with some sort of center-right Canadians, and it's kind of a difficult lesson for a lot of, I think, more center-right Canadians to learn, which is that it seems like the fundamentals, if we're dealing with a two-party system, Canada is a pretty center-left country, and that's a hard environment for conservatives to compete in. Yeah. It's interesting that you say that because it was something that hadn't really clicked with me um until i was like paying closer attention to all this today was that a big part of carney's gains were from you know these other parties like people that would have otherwise gone and if you're green or even the quebecois i mean looks it looks like carney's doing better in quebec than a lot of liberals had in the past and so it wasn't really i know there's some i'm sure loss from polyev but like it seemed like a lot of the gains were

you know from people that have a more left or more regional disposition that like were so grossed out by the trump factor you know that it was just like, we're going to vote for, like, we'll coalesce behind Carney. Does that sound like a pretty decent explanation of what happened? Yeah, like the poll, the polling data does sort of seem to suggest that, that like, Carney was winning a majority of like, NDP voters. I'm not sure if he was winning a majority of Quebec law voters, but I'm sure he was like, winning a majority of like, Green Party voters and things like that. This is what we've sort of seen, like there's been, like in some ways Canadian politics is becoming to resemble more like American politics in the sense you're getting these very sort of unifying leaders who are sort of like function as a kind of culture,

cultural figurehead in addition to just being a politician. And these people are just very effective at sort of bringing the whole tribe together. And it's interesting because, like, you know, Carney is a technocrat. He is a sort of serious sort of credentialed sort of guy. And yet he has had an appeal to Canadians of all flavors of the left. And I don't know if, like, maybe there's a sort of American lesson in there as well, is that you don't necessarily, I suppose, have to be a kind of stereotypically like, hey, fellow kids kind of guy to win the votes of young people or progressive people.

If you just exude a sort of competence in the face of the, you know, an existential threat, very high stakes politics, you know, people will apparently rally behind you. Yeah, that's interesting. So we were talking about that a little before you hopped on. So your sense is from like, because since you're in YouTube world, like you have your hand on your finger on the pulse of like lefty so a lot of like far left types out there like lefty canadians yeah you know who are not maybe center left technocrats you know they have more radical views but even the sense was even they were rallying around carney just out of out of negative polarization basically yeah absolutely like the polling data suggested that's the case. And just like anecdotally, like it's interesting,

I've just been, you know, having I'm here in Toronto right now, you know, hanging out with some of my younger friends, some of these sort of like lefty types. And it's just interesting, like how sincerely like pro Carney they are. Like when I was growing up, you know, to support the Liberal Party, you know, kind of had the same sort of cringy energy that you sometimes see far left Americans have when it comes to the Democrat Party. It's like, I don't want to support the Liberal Party, you know, kind of had the same sort of cringy energy that you sometimes see far left Americans have when it comes to the Democrat Party. It's like, I don't want to support the mainstream center left party, you know, like, I want to support the like, left wing fringe as a sort of show of how much of a rebel I am. But that seems like it's kind of dissipating and the dying off of the of the further left party that, you know, people used to go for. And as well, just

like the decline of Trudeau's brand of politics, you know, Trudeau, who we previously thought was like, you know, a great, deeply skilled at appealing to young people because he exuded that that hello, fellow kids sort of energy. It's it's it's just interesting. I think if you're a center left person, there's there's a lot to sort of find perhaps inspiring here that there is a style of politics that can be successful that doesn't have to be so overtly sort of pandering you know yeah yeah well i mean do you need an enemy to make that happen maybe perhaps you need somebody like trump trying to wreck your entire country and like to take your land perhaps but uh it is encouraging though because you could imagine a different way right where there would be some kind of radical left reaction to what Trump did. It wouldn't have been a center left. It had been ascendant.

You could imagine that. I want to ask you one more thing about the conservatives, but just looking at Quebec. And again, I'm doing amateur Steve Kornacki work right now. The Times has a nice little chart here where you can see the ridings. Riding is what we're calling it uh the writings where uh the bloc quebec won and like what is happening in those this time and i mean it you know it looks like about a third of them the liberals are winning right um and so and that's it's a pretty you know you don't have to go much further than that to kind of see it's sort of it's happening

yeah no and and that that sort of upsets you know's sort of happening. Yeah, no. And that that sort of upsets, you know, another sort of conventional theory of Canadian politics that it was all very tribal, very regional. You know, French Canadians would never support, you know, a man like Carney, who is not from a French Canadian background, who doesn't speak English or doesn't speak French that well. It was funny. The little CBC person was giving a just a little Canadian shade. Like, you know, of a canadian nice shade attack on carney for his bad french speaking yeah but it does suggest that like again like that maybe like some of these identity politics kind of things are just less relevant than we think they are like if you just exude a certain competence that you can have a sort of broad

appeal and maybe it's just as simple as just being a highly credible political figure um lastly so are your canadian the center you said you're on a center right podcast you know you kind of like are the canadian conservative types are they mad at trump like one of the frustrating things for me down here is like no matter how much trump rubs like republican party guys face and shit they know you, you know, I never get the satisfying moment of them being like, Tim, you are right. He sucks. He's hurting me. Can I get that satisfying moment in Canada? Are the Canadian conservatives ready to, to, you know, give them the middle finger? Yeah, I mean, I think you'd have to like, I've been thinking like, what must

be going through sort of Pierre Polyev's head right now? I mean, he was leading in the polls. Victory was all but assured. You know, some of it is Trudeau's decision to step down. Like, we shouldn't overstate that because, you know, Pierre was never popular. Pierre was popular relative to Trudeau. And once you get Trudeau to the picture, you know, everything sort of changes that way. But no, it is true. It's like an election that Pierre wanted to fight on the Trudeau record, on economic policy, on cost of living, on all of these other things, did in many ways clearly become, in the minds of most Canadians, a referendum on Donald Trump. So, you know, Pierre tried to denounce him. I know that David Frum has brought this up on your podcast as well. Pierre was always in a difficult position because there is, you know, a faction of conservatives that don't want

to hear bad-mouthing of Trump, let alone bad-mouthing of America. So, but yeah, I mean, it's going to be hard. Like, it's going to be hard to tell this story in any way in which Trump does not loom as the dominant figure. When we read the history of the 2025 Canadian election, you know, 30 years from now, there is no universe in which Trump is not as important to that story as Pierre and Carney. All right. Do you want to sing any Canadian hymns or give a big, you know, I don't know, Canadian curse word to Donald Trump or anything, JJ? I'll leave that to you, to you, Canada-file Americans, because I have a feeling that Carney is now going to emerge as sort of like, you know, a kind of de facto resistance leader in the minds of many, of many Americans.

Mr. Carney, you're welcome on this show. Any day. I would love to have you JJ McCullough. He's got a YouTube feed. He doesn't always do politics over there. He does fun stuff too. It's a great feed. You should go enjoy that.

You should go peruse his like flag videos. He did really, there's really good flag videos, a bunch of other stuff. And we appreciate your service on this very busy night. Congratulations to Mark Carney. F you, Donald Trump. Everybody subscribe to the feed. We'll see you soon.