“It’s a great time to be a Liberal in Canada.”<\/p>\n
Those were the words of a smiling Tanveer Shahnawaz, the Liberal candidate in Beaches\u2014East York, celebrating his victory Monday night. They may also be the political understatement of the year. Shahnawaz was one of three Liberals who swept Monday’s federal by-elections, winning his Toronto riding with 56 per cent of the vote. The party also held North Vancouver\u2014Capilano in B.C. and took Chicoutimi\u2014Le Fjord from the Conservatives in Quebec.<\/p>\n
That last victory matters most. Chicoutimi\u2014Le Fjord had been held since 2018 by Conservative MP Richard Martel, who Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed to the Senate in July. The contest was expected to be a tough battle between the Liberals and the Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois. Instead, Liberal Daniel Gobeil won handily<\/a>\u00a0with 51 per cent\u00a0of the vote, the Bloc got 33\u00a0per cent,\u00a0and\u00a0the Conservatives collapsed to\u00a013 per cent.<\/p>\n Gobeil’s candidacy was a clever play in a region that has been hard hit by U.S. tariffs. The former head of Quebec’s milk producers entered politics just as the trade war came to a boil, with Canada’s dairy supply management system on the front burner. Monday night, Gobeil declared that the Liberals’ wins helped “maintain Canadian unity.”<\/p>\n Therein lies the particular \u2014 and familiar \u2014 genius of the Liberals’ strategy.<\/p>\n As Canada goes elbows-up in response to U.S. President Donald Trump, the Liberal Party is steadily identifying its brand with the nation itself. It’s a page from a very old Liberal playbook: Lester B. Pearson gave Canada the red-and-white Maple Leaf flag in the 1960s, while Pierre Trudeau championed official bilingualism and multiculturalism in the 1970s. Over generations, Liberal governments successfully conflated Canadian identity with party colours, symbols, policies, and institutions, cementing their reputation as Canada’s “natural governing party.” Carney is now pulling off the 21st-century version, with Trump supplying copious amounts of glue.<\/p>\n The biggest losers Monday night were therefore the Conservatives. No one expected them to win Beaches\u2013East York, but they captured just 15.5 per cent of the vote there, while the NDP tripled their vote share to 26 per cent. But Chicoutimi\u2013Le Fjord was far worse, losing a seat they had held for eight years, and handing Bloc Leader Yves-Fran\u00e7ois Blanchet a devastating, if obvious,\u00a0line<\/a>: Canada might have a two-party system of Liberals and Conservatives, but Quebec\u00a0has one between the Liberals and Bloc.<\/p>\n The results\u00a0follow\u00a0more grim numbers\u00a0for\u00a0Conservative leader\u00a0Pierre Poilievre. A\u00a0Liaison Strategies poll<\/a>\u00a0released Monday put the Liberals at 46 per cent and the Conservatives at just 29 per cent, their\u00a0lowest level in the pollster’s tracking. That will inevitably revive questions about Poilievre’s leadership just as Parliament prepares to return.<\/p>\n But Monday’s results may have implications beyond Ottawa.\u00a0In Quebec, the Trump effect could breathe life into a party that only months ago\u00a0was the walking dead: the Coalition Avenir Qu\u00e9bec.<\/p>\n Like Ontario Premier Doug Ford in the provincial election in 2025, and Carney in the federal race that same year, CAQ leader\u00a0Christine Fr\u00e9chette has made Trump a central character in\u00a0her\u00a0campaign, calling him her\u00a0“real adversary.”<\/a> Even more remarkably, the leader of a party created to transcend the federalist-sovereigntist divide is making a baldly federalist appeal: faced with an unpredictable and hostile United States, Quebec is safer within Canada \u2014 and the CAQ is the best party to stave off the\u00a0 separatist designs of the Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois.<\/p>\n It may be working.\u00a0Polls by\u00a0Pallas\u00a0Data poll<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Leger<\/a> show the CAQ rising to second place, while the Quebec Liberals are falling. Meanwhile PQ leader Paul St. Pierre Plamondon declared that he would postpone a referendum until after Trump leaves office.\u00a0With Canadians rallying around the flag,\u00a0incumbency,\u00a0stability\u00a0and unity\u00a0are\u00a0the political currency\u00a0du jour, regardless of the party\u00a0that’s\u00a0selling them.<\/p>\n Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia’s national politics columnist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It’s a great time to be a Liberal in Canada.” Those were the words of a smiling Tanveer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[17,36167,735,47251,1643,60025,60024,144,122,111,25608,60123,241,28],"class_list":["post-192351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-canada","tag-caq","tag-carney","tag-chicoutimi-le-fjord","tag-conservatives","tag-daniel-gobeil","tag-gobeil","tag-liberal","tag-liberals","tag-mark-carney","tag-monday","tag-monday-night","tag-quebec","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}