The Decibel - Carney wins, Liberals preside over ‘splintered parliament’

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

On Monday April 28, Canadians voted in another Liberal government.They are heading to the House of Commons with what appeared to be a minority government.The Conservatives gained seats and will form the Official Opposition; however, leader Pierre Poilievre’s seat remained undecided early Tuesday morning.Today, the Globe’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife and feature writer Shannon Proudfoot join us from the nation’s capital. They break down the surprises in this close race and what Monday’s results could mean for the direction of the country.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] 

On Monday night, the Liberal Party won the federal election, and a rare fourth consecutive mandate. I have a question. Who's ready? Who's ready? Who's ready to stand up for Canada with me? They likely have a minority government, but as of early Tuesday morning, it was still too close to call. Liberal leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to the country after the results came in.

Millions of our fellow citizens preferred a different outcome. And my message to every Canadian is this. No matter where you live, no matter what language you speak, no matter how you voted, I will always do my best to represent everyone who calls Canada home. The Globe's Bill Curry was at Liberal headquarters in Ottawa. There was just a loud cheer when the TV station that they are airing announced that there was going to be a Liberal win. I think it would be a shocking result for any Canadian who went back in time to December because a lot has changed in the last few months.

Conservative leader Pierre Poliev conceded the election. As of early Tuesday, his riding was still a tight race. Now I know that some of you might be disappointed that change did not get over the finish line tonight. Change takes time. The Globe's Stephanie Levitz was at Conservative Party headquarters. There are folks here who have really devoted a lot of time and energy and a lot of their life to helping Mr. Poliev fulfill his leadership and then be the leader of the opposition and then run in this election. And they're wishing it went another way.

Definitely, you know, a talking point in this space is how badly the New Democrats are doing. And I think for a lot of conservatives, especially people who are really following politics, they know that if the NDP are struggling, their hopes, the conservatives, the forming government, aren't great. On the West Coast, The Globe's Justine Hunter was covering those NDP struggles. There's a cash bar around the corner that just the last time I looked, the bartender was standing there by themselves.

So not a lot of, not a celebratory move by any stretch. Jagmeet Singh lost his seat and stepped down as leader of the NDP. The party is projected to win just seven seats, which means they won't have official party status. Almost eight years ago, I was elected the leader of this incredible party, this incredible movement. Tonight, I've been forwarded a party leader that I'll be stepping down as party leader

as soon as an interim leader can be appointed. Also in BC, the Green Party's Elizabeth May held on to her seat, but co-leader Jonathan Pedneau didn't win his in Montreal. The Bloc Québécois also lost seats in Quebec. So to help us make sense of Monday's results we're talking to Globe Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife and feature writer Shannon Proudfoot. They'll take us through what happened and where the parties go from here. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Shannon, Bob, thank you both for being here on such a late night. Happy to do so. Late night, early morning. Yeah, early morning maybe is more accurate. We are talking close to 1.30 a.m. Eastern. This is Tuesday morning after the election. We know we've got a liberal government. It's looking likely that it's a minority,

but that's still a little too close to call. But let's start with your reaction to the results. So Shannon, how are you seeing this? Well, the year of surprises has more surprises in store. The results don't align with most of what we've seen in polling lately or the sort of narrative that was building in this campaign. And we could see that quite early.

Like the first chunk of results come in from the East Coast where there's not a lot of seats in play, but we had heard from the parties that sort of if there was going to be a red wave, it was going to start out near the Atlantic Ocean and it did not materialize. And so then it was sort of like this, this kind of stop and go thing where there were some pickups, some dropped seats for the two leading parties. But in the end, we have a real minority government, like we can talk more about the seat breakdowns, but really not a conclusive result one way or the other, and some interesting questions about how a government is going to be formed out of this.

Yeah. Bob, what about you? What's your reaction to these results? Well, I think I was surprised, like everybody else. I was talking to people in the various parties earlier in the day, and the liberals were pretty confident that they were going to win a majority government. They had felt they would win anywhere from 184 to 192 seats. Clearly that did not transpire. And that's largely because they thought they had turned the situation around for them in Atlantic Canada and in Quebec and Ontario.

But the fact of the matter is that the conservative support was much stronger than anybody realized. Part of it had to do with basically the collapse in the NDP vote that many people thought would shift to the Liberal Party but it turns out that some of these NDP voters ended up voting for pure poly of in the Conservatives. So we are now into a situation of a minority government at a time when we're going to have to deal with Donald Trump and his tariff war against this country and its threats of annexation. So it's going to be a very difficult Parliament to be able to try to deal with Trump at is a tariff war against this country and its threats of annexation. So it's going to be a very difficult parliament to be able to try to deal with Trump at the

same time that Mr. Carney is going to try to keep his government alive. And we definitely are going to talk about Trump, but Bob you mentioned some of those seat counts that they needed for majority. So let's just talk about that briefly. The threshold for majority was 172 seats. The liberals have won 153 seats, and they're currently leading in another 12 writings, as of right now. That could shift by the morning. So total, that would bring them to 165.

So that's just shy of majority territory. If that is the case, if that's where we kind of settle out here, which of the other parties is likely to potentially hold the balance of power here, maybe be a governing partner for the liberals? Well, I think you're not going to have a governing partner in this particular instance. I think you will see a parliament that will be governed more on a piecemeal basis. They're going to have to reach out for times for the Bloc Québécois, which has more than

20-some seats, to be able to prop them up. But there'll be times when the block will not do so and they're gonna have to reach out to the NDP, hopefully that they will keep them alive. So it's going to be a good old fashioned brokerage politics over the next six months to a year, I suspect we'll be into an election campaign not long after a year is over

because there'll be no appetite for the Conservatives to keep this government in power for very long and the lesson that the NDP learned to their great misfortune was that if you get into bed with the Liberals for a long period of time you're likely to lose all your clothing, your house, your car, everything and which is what happened to Jagmeet Singh and the NDP. Your party leader, as we learned tonight, Jagmeet Singh stepped down as NDP leader. Shannon, I'm curious, though, just to pick up on this point

that Bob mentioned that this government might be short-lived in maybe a year here, he said. Is that kind of your read on the situation as well? Yeah, and what was interesting is just about, like in the last half hour, we heard Pierre Poliev come out and make a speech. And I was surprised by the tone he struck and what he had to say. He was out to very clearly put down a line that he's staying on as leader. He positioned this effectively, this election result as a success for his party. He highlighted that they have the largest vote share they've had since 1988.

He congratulated Prime Minister Mark Carney and when the room erupted in boos, he quelled it and said, no, no, gesture of respect here. He won, but he also went out of his way to underline, he called it a razor thin minority, that this is what Canadians had chosen to send back. I thought he really positioned this election result as sort of a qualified win for his party. He said he kind of can't wait to go back to fighting for the same issues. It sort of sounded like he was booking a part two, like to Bob's point about how we could be back here in a year or less. Obviously, part of that is he's staking a claim to stay on as leader and trying to prevent himself from being shoved out the window, which the

Tories have a habit of doing to their leaders after they don't win elections. He's obviously trying to sort of flex a little and also talk about his future ambitions for the party. But it was notable to me that there was no finality in his speech whatsoever. It was, this was a good result for us. You know, we kind of did the job, but we'll come back to finish it. Yeah. And I mean, to that point, right, the conservatives gained seats in this election, right? They won 143 seats. They're currently leading at this point in another four ridings. Last time they won 119, right? So they do have a bigger number here. Let's talk about the fact that this really seems to have been a two-party race between the liberals and

the conservatives. They both got over 40% of the popular vote. What does that tell us? Well, we have a country that's clearly divided. And, you know, the challenge for Mr. Poliev is even though he's done very well given the fact that after Mr. Trudeau left and Donald Trump came in, it looked like the conservatives were in deep trouble, and he's proven us wrong on that, but he's also made mistakes in his inability to seem to be able to reach out and grow the tent. And he needs to be able to do that if he's going to win a majority government

and defeat the liberals in the next election campaign. He can't be in a situation where he's at war with Doug Ford in Ontario or the premier of Nova Scotia, or that he treats somebody of the stature of Jean Charest like he's an outcast. Mr. Pauli had made a bad mistake in not listening to Brian Maroney, who went to Stornoway shortly after he became a Conservative leader, and he said, Pierre, you've got the base 100% behind you, but you've got to go fishing where the fish are.

To go fishing where the fish are, are not just conservative voters. It's the middle of the road Canadians who either vote center left or center right during election campaigns, and you've got to go to them and reach out to them. I think if he had done that, he might have defeated Mr. Carney in this election campaign. And I think there will be a reckoning as well when the Conservative caucus meets as grateful as they are that they didn't lose badly, but they've really held the government to, as he said, a razor thin minority. But he and his campaign manager, Jenny Beran, have treated their caucus and large segments

of the party as if they were children who had to be put in line. And I think they're going to want to have a great deal more input and a great deal more respect from the party leader. Although worth noting tonight that there was an interview on CBC with Jamil Javani, who would be one of his key MPs, where he absolutely went at Doug Ford with an axe. I think he's not doing a great job in running this province and now he's trying to exercise his influence over other levels of government. And it's not like this guy is doing anything particularly well.

You did used to work for him. I did. I'm speaking from experience. I tried to fix problems in this province. Like in the room, I was still at the Tory party. People in the room were applauding and people in media row were laughing out loud. It was that extreme. And we all know that nobody speaks out

in the Conservative Party today without permission from the leader. So I can't imagine Jimmy Ljubany was freelancing there. And he said that Doug Ford was like a hype man for the liberals and that he's not done a good job of running Ontario and he should just not done a good job of running Ontario and he should just worry about his own job. It was absolutely savage.

And so like to Bob's point that absolutely is some growth and recalibration they need to make. But tonight it doesn't seem like they're ready to do that yet. But I mean this is an interesting point though that you know they they did relatively well here. Can we just take a moment and look at the conservative strongholds in the country? Like where did the vote break down that actually was in their favor that maybe we didn't expect going into this? Well look, Southwestern Ontario is a classic example.

Conservatives have done very, very well in Southwestern Ontario. They've also done pretty well in 905. There had been polls that had been done just a few weeks ago that looked like the liberals were going to win the 905 region as well as 519, the southwestern Ontario, and that the conservatives and liberals were competitive in the Peel region. Well, what we've seen from the results in the election is that the Conservatives are actually pretty competitive in these very vote-rich areas and it's obviously become a big surprise to the Liberals that this happened and to Shannon's point, the Conservatives did okay in Atlantic

Canada and the Liberals were kind of, oh, we're gonna just sweep Atlantic Canada and then head into Quebec and pick up 40 or 44 seats and then we'll go into Ontario and then we're gonna have a majority. Well that's that hasn't happened. Shannon, I know that you actually spent the earlier part of the evening at the conservative headquarters in Ottawa. Can you tell me what that was like and how did the mood change over the course of the night as well? Yeah, it was really strange and tentative at the beginning. The thing that you notice right away is there weren't a lot of people there. It was in the main convention center downtown where all big political events and other events

happen which was kind of weird in itself because it's the place where they had the liberal Christmas party the day after Christia Freeland resigned which triggered Justin Trudeau's resignation. It's where they had the liberal leadership announcement when Mark Carney won the leadership two months ago. So it was this weird feeling of like going to a political haunted house. But there weren't a lot of people there. I'd say maybe three to 400 at its peak. And it looked like the room had been set up for twice as many. So not packed. I mean, people there had to sort of know and be reading the polls like everyone else. But in the early part of the evening, when all we had were the results from the East Coast, which that period lasted about two hours, and then all at once at 930

PM Eastern, you get the results from almost all of the rest of the country. And that's when the bulk of the seats come in. And there, as you know, Bob mentioned, I mentioned, the conservatives were actually doing better than expected. And every time they had these two big screens on either side of the stage showing the broadcast networks as they were sort of doing the seat by seat count, and every time one of the broadcast networks would show another seat tipping into the Tory column,

and a lot of these they were flipping back and forth because they were counting one or two polls at a time, people in the room would cheer. And then at one point, there was a moment where it showed 13 to 13 seats completely even between the liberals and conservatives. People cheered and then people started chanting, bring it home. But then as the night went on and once you started to see those votes come in from Ontario and Quebec and then across the prairies, it got more quiet. I would say the evening felt tentative all the way along. And then it was quite soon after that big chunk of votes came in. CTV, I think,

was the first network to call it as a liberal government just after 10 PM. And the room just, there was no booing. There was no howling. Everybody just kind of went quiet and stone faced. And people didn't leave after that. It was interesting. They all stayed, but the air kind of all went out of the room for sure. We'll be right back. Let's turn to the issue of Donald Trump because this has been hanging over the entire campaign. Mark Carney was asking for a strong majority mandate to deal with the US president. He didn't get that on Monday.

So how hard will it be for Carney to deal with Trump with his minority government? Well, I think it's going to be very difficult for him. Whether the conservatives or the liberals had won, I think a majority government would have made it much easier for whichever government to be able to negotiate with Trump. And we're in a situation now that this is a guy, Trump, who when he sees weakness, he will pounce. And when you don't have a strong majority government, you're going to be in a much more

difficult position when you try to negotiate on tariffs and security arrangements. It's going to be not only difficult for Mr. Carney to negotiate with that, but he's going to face a minority parliament where they are going to be on his case too, if they sense any kind of weakness. So I think the country is going to be in a difficult situation in terms of Canada-U.S. relations. I don't think you're going to see all the parties working together as one unit for Canada because that's just not the nature of minority parliament. So we'll see how that goes. And beyond that, I mean, Mr. Carney's got to bring in a budget almost immediately. And he's also promised to bring in legislation to tear down inter-provincial trade barriers.

So well, he will be facing confidence votes almost right away. I don't think the government's going to fall this summer or anything like that, but it's going to be a real test of Mr. Carney's ability to be able to manage a minority parliament. This is a guy who has never held any elective office. He's never been in a situation where he's had to deal with opposition parties who will have a lot of control over the agenda that he wants to put forward to the country. Okay, so Trump is definitely an issue he's got to think about. You mentioned some other things there as well, Bob.

Shannon, what's your thoughts on this? The biggest issue for Carney and the liberals going forward here? Yeah, well, I think the problem is exactly what Bob's getting at, which is that they're going to have to be fighting a two-front war. Donald Trump and the threat of tariffs is its own full-time job, as we've seen, and the election sort of crystallized around that. The country still has a lot of other big, big challenges. That was the election fight we were supposed to have. That remains an issue, you know, affordability, housing, stock, things like that. But then we've seen, we've seen a demonstration of this over the

last year or two, when the liberal party, the previous iteration of it was sort of consumed by its own internal machinations and the threats to its own political survival or wellbeing. And now Mr. Carney and his party are going to have to be sort of fighting the same two front war where they're trying to keep their government alive. They're trying to manage whatever dance partners they need, you know, week to week, vote to vote month to month, which is a lot, especially for a neophyte politician. That's a lot to juggle. And then also dealing with a massive issue that cuts across, you know, it's a foreign affairs issue, it's a trade issue, it's a domestic issue, as we've seen in terms of dealing with Trump. So their plate is really full. I mean, I guess the only hope for them

is that there's new leadership because over the last year or so, it became really clear that the liberal government under Justin Trudeau was just out of gas. Like they were just in a holding pattern. Now, presumably Mr. Carney won't have that because he's a fresh leader, but he has all these other sort of intra-political issues to deal with in terms of just keeping his government alive and managing whoever's going to help him do that. It's a lot. That's a lot to have to juggle. During this campaign, we have seen concerns about Western alienation.

How much of an issue do you think that this is going to be now that we have another liberal federal government? Well, I think it could have been a lot worse if Ontario had delivered a liberal majority government. But the fact of that that Ontario has elected a good number of conservatives, not only in Ontario, but also in Atlantic Canada, I think it strengthens the conservative position in saying, look, we can fight for pipelines and LNG facilities and other Western grievances in Parliament. There's no need to have referendums or to raise the threat of Western separation. I think that's,

that we may have dodged a bullet on that, and I certainly hope we have. Okay. I want to shift focus a little bit now and talk about the NDP. We touched on them a little bit, but let's talk about them a bit more because the party has won five seats. They're leading in two others at the moment. They won 6%, around 6% of the popular vote. And just for some context, the last election, they won 25 seats and 18% of

the vote. So drastically different numbers here. They look unlikely to retain official party status. As we mentioned, leader Jagmeet Singh didn't keep his seat, resigned as leader. What does all of this mean for the NDP? Well, the NDP are going to have to rebuild. They're going to have to look for a dynamic leader who will raise the left-of-center cause and they cannot afford to get into bed with the liberals. I mean that's the message. They cut a deal with the liberals for the last couple of years so they could do things like anti-SCAB legislation and pharmacare and dental care and those are all wonderful programs but the liberals get the credit for it and the NDP don't get the credit

for it and mr. Polly have also been very very successful in driving home the point maybe was too successful from his point of view but driving home the point that the liberals and the NDP are the same political party and so when it came pushed came to shove people just said well well, I'm going to vote for the liberals. I mean, why would I vote for the NDP? And the party has got a real, I wouldn't say it's an existential crisis because, you know, it's got deep roots in this country and they will come back, but it's going to be a long, hard slog for them to do so. We've seen this happen with the New

Democrats back during the Gretchen years, for example. They lost party status or should barely got party status, but they were on life support for a period of time and then they came back under the leadership of Jack Layton. So they need somebody of the caliber of Jack Layton to reignite the NDP flame, so to speak. But that's going to be a long, hard process. And what about the Bloc Québécois and Quebec? What did you make of how their vote went tonight? Yeah, I mean, the Bloc Québécois lost a good number of seats, and they were in the same situation there in the sense that Mr. Carney was able to convince Quebecers

that the Liberals are the best party to be able to take on Donald Trump, not only to protect Quebec's economy, but also to protect its culture and language from the threat of Donald Trump. That's been the message for them and that's where they were successful. We're obviously still waiting to see exactly how everything shakes out. We'll probably know sometime on Tuesday. But I guess what do we still not know here? Like what should listeners watch out for in the coming days? Well, there's sort of different categories of them. There's Mr. Poliev's own seat. Very interesting. Last time I looked, I've been sort of refreshing it on my browser. It was

they were had about three quarters of the votes reporting and he was still behind. So that raises some really interesting questions because he laid the line in the sand tonight that he's staying on as leader, but he could lose his seat in the House of Commons. AMT – A seat that he's had for almost 20 years it seems like, right? JS – We know the parties were pouring in resources there. You know the conservatives to preserve the seat. The liberals obviously seeing this as a huge trophy. The exact numbers of the seat counts because that minority margin is so close really matters in terms of the dance partners. Like Bob has already said, and he's absolutely right, that there's probably not going

to be sort of a consistent, like something like the Supply and Confidence Agreement, but there are more or less likely dance partners here. The conservatives are certainly not going to help the liberals out. Depending on where those numbers squeak just a little one way, a little bit with the other way, it looks like what remains of the NDP, that little rump put together with the single green MP could be enough to put the liberals over the line of 172. They might have to bargain with the block sometimes. Because this thing is such a sort of splintered parliament, it really does get into sort of the single digits when you look at how the pieces might come together. AMT – And you mentioned the single Green MP.

That is of course Elizabeth May out in BC. And they're actually down though. They had two seats before. Now they've just got her one seat. So that's where the Greens stand as well. Just lastly here, this looks like the third liberal minority win in a row now. What should we make of the fact that this country keeps

voting in a similar way? I think it's going to be very, very difficult for the liberals to win a fifth term. They were going to get tossed out and lose very, very badly until Mr. Trudeau was convinced to leave. And they had the good luck of Donald Trump coming in. And because of Mr. Carney's experience as a central banker, that changed the political dynamics for the liberals. And I think we're probably going to be in a situation where

when we have the next election campaign, I suspect the liberals will probably lose. And that's just because of longevity, and people will say, you know, let's give the conservatives a chance now. That would be my guess on what we should be looking for, but, you know, who knows in politics, right? I mean, nobody foresaw this amazing change in the political atmosphere from January when Mr. Trudeau left and Donald Trump went into the White House and started threatening the world with tariffs and threatening to annex the country. So I would be afraid to speculate beyond that. I agree with Bob. I think this minority win for the liberals was a really strange aberration. This was a collision of a whole bunch of really strange factors in timing and there's a million what-ifs

that underlie this. The 21 result I think was the public sending Mr. Trudeau to the timeout chair to think about what he'd done because he threw everyone a very opportunistic election that didn't need to happen. So there's sort of been we've returned the same result three times, but with different reasons for it. So yeah, I think the enduring thing to me here is the instability of the result we've gotten in a very unstable moment and that we're just going to keep having. I mean, I think of it through the lens of a news cycle because that's the life we live with our jobs. But the fire hose isn't going to turn off anytime soon, I don't think. We will leave it there.

Shannon, Bob, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. You're welcome. Thanks for having us. That was Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife and feature writer Shannon Proudfoot. That's it for today. I'm Maynica Ramon-Wilms. Our associate producer is Azra Souter. Our intern is Olivia Grandy.

Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.