As we move closer to the U.S. election, CTVNews.ca will be examining the relationship between Canada and the U.S. in a series of features.
We may be on different timelines, but Canadians and our neighbours to the south are saying the same thing this October:
The election is coming.
On the far side of the border, early voting has begun, in earnest, ahead of a climactic showdown between U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, and former Republican president Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Canadians are, at most, roughly one year away from their next trip to the polls as our current government’s October 2025 expiry date approaches — if parliament doesn’t dissolve early, that is.
The latest Nanos ballot tracking shows Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party commanding a roughly 20-point lead on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP; what pollster Nik Nanos has referred to as a “dream scenario” for the Tories.
With more than $3 billion in trade crossing the Canada-U.S. border daily, whoever occupies the Oval Office next is sure to bring major impacts on Canadian economics and diplomacy, but what may be hard to nail down is how a post-Trump-vs.-Harris world will affect the political fortunes of Canada’s own leaders.
A Democratic or Republican shift in the American political landscape could prove to be a tailwind for that party’s Canadian contemporary, but some say the inverse is more likely: that a Harris or a second Trump presidency could push Canada’s electorate to the opposite end of the spectrum.
As months, become weeks, become days left before this U.S. election cycle comes to an end, here’s a look at what each outcome might mean for Canadian politics:
If Harris wins
Compared to the alternative, it should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might see kinship with a White House still in the hands of the Democrats.
Trudeau was reportedly Kamala Harris’s first call to a foreign leader after she took office as vice-president in 2021, and a summary of a meeting between the pair posted by the Prime Minister’s Office in May described them to be “look[ing] forward to opportunities to continue their strong collaboration.”
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris talks with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the balcony of the Eisenhower Executive Office building on the White House campus, Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Jerome Gessaroli, a senior fellow at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, says that the Harris/Walz campaign even shows some convergent thinking with Trudeau’s 2015 run for Canada’s top job.
“Voters see Harris, and saw Trudeau, as fresh faces in their respective runs for office – largely free from the burden of past policies,” Gessaroili wrote in a September column on the institute’s website. “Trudeau’s ‘sunny ways’ and Harris’s ‘politics of joy’ both seek to bring optimism into the political discourse.”
Don Abelson, a professor of political science at McMaster University, notes that with the renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal on the horizon, those kinds of relationships can be crucial.
“In the case of NAFTA, Canada was an uninvited guest to the table. It was by virtue of [former prime minister Brian] Mulroney’s relationship with [then-U.S. president] George H.W. Bush that we were able to force our way to the table,” he said in an interview with CTVNews.ca last week.
“What it boils down to is, what is the temperature like in the room? Can the two governments work well, together?”
Though some call Harris’s explosive momentum early in her campaign a good omen for Trudeau, Nanos notes that a win for the Democratic ticket could tell a different story to Liberal Party insiders: That swapping out their unpopular candidate could be the key to victory.
“What it’ll show is that the Democrats — who were not competitive with Donald Trump — turfed their own incumbent president (Joe Biden) … united around one candidate, raised funds and were back in the game,” he said in an interview Monday.
Nanos clarified that a Harris win wouldn’t necessarily be bad news for the Liberal Party as a whole, but Trudeau himself could likely face yet more pressure over his position as leader.
“In my experience, leaders that are facing a crisis of confidence within their own party rarely win elections,” Nanos said. “If Liberals cannot agree that Justin Trudeau should continue as prime minister, why should any Canadian?”
If Trump wins
On the other side of the great American coin flip, a return to power for former U.S. president Trump would be expected to bring changes to the United States’ policies on everything from his signalled 10-per-cent tariffs on imports (potentially including those from Canada), to the balance of money, power and military force in NATO.
Some federal Liberals have sought to link Opposition Leader Poilievre to Trump, accusing his party of “American-style” politics.
This summer, Ontario Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen went so far as to label Poilievre “Trump-North.”
Nanos calls a direct comparison between the two leaders “unfair” in terms of personal background and stated beliefs, but he says it’s reasonable to look at their tone and style in the political arena.
It’s not unprecedented for U.S. campaign strategy to echo over the 45th parallel, Nanos notes, with Mulroney taking cues from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” messaging in the 1980s, and former prime minister Jean Chretien’s parallels on policy with former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a decade later.
Should Trump win, though, Nanos says that Poilievre’s tone is liable to change, “to make sure that he has his own identity that is difficult to connect to Donald Trump.”
“What we could see is a greater focus on Pierre Poilievre’s personal story, which is very different than Donald Trump’s,” Nanos says. “He’s going to want to introduce himself to Canadians.”
Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre speaks about an opposition motion in the House of Commons, Tuesday, Sept.24, 2024 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
Polling from Pollara Strategic Insights in May found that Canadians view Poilievre as better suited than Trudeau to handle a Trump White House, and the Angus Reid Institute (ARI) in July found roughly the same regarding trade negotiations, but among not-fully committed voters, ARI also found NDP-leaning respondents were “more likely than not to say they could support the Liberals in the event Trump wins re-election.”
That kind of gut check, in what the Pollara survey release calls “conventional wisdom,” suggests a Republican win in November could drive a wedge between Canadian Conservatives and their voters.
“What percentage of Canadians would be prepared to embrace not only Poilievre, but a relationship between Poilievre and Trump?” Abelson asked. “There’s a strong desire in this country to still embrace more moderate policies.”
But Nanos says that historically, a trend of Canada politically tacking opposite to the U.S. hasn’t consistently been the case, with the Mulroney-Reagan and Chretien-Clinton years standing testament to that.
“It’s not necessarily a recoil effect against whoever the winner is,” he said. “It’s more like a recoil effect against certain types of politics.”
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan walk past a line of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, March 17, 1985, at the Quebec City airport. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson)
Trickle-down politics?
The past decade of Trump-era politicking and its precursors have been cited in attempts to understand and explain the passage of Brexit, the success (both recent and longtime) of leaders in Italy and Hungary, the resurgence of far-right parties in Germany, Austria and France, and the reinvention of modern Canadian conservatism, with the federal party bearing its name now on its third new leader since Trump set foot in the Oval Office.
But to Nanos and Abelson alike, it’s not a story that begins and ends with the former U.S. president himself.
“There are a lot of people that are struggling to pay for groceries and that are struggling to pay for housing, and they’re very frustrated and angry. And they see Donald Trump as a vehicle to punish the establishment,” Nanos said.
“These are forces that … many western democracies are caught up in, and how we react to them and how they play out politically can have a major impact on election outcomes.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump waves at a campaign event at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
But those forces of change aren’t all pushing in the same direction.
In the United Kingdom this July, a 14-year stretch of Conservative governments ended on the back of a landslide election win for the centre-left Labour Party, and though right-wing leader Marine Le Pen made gains in France’s legislative elections in June, a hardline-leftist coalition flourished as well, earning itself the position of France’s main opposition force.
To Abelson, regardless of how America’s Electoral College votes fall in the coming days, there’s a reckoning to be had about the political climate in which Canada finds itself, and about just how linked the country should be with its neighbours, near and far.
“We know that [Trump] took 75 million votes in 2020 … that huge bloc — literally, half the voters — support him and his policies. So if that indeed is the case, even if Harris wins, that bloc isn’t going away,” he said.
“My concern, as a Canadian, is that we are not doing enough to insulate ourselves from the political winds in the United States, and I think there’s more that we can do.”
With files from The Associated Press and The Canadian Press