May 3rd, 2025 | Grant Johnson

Five Things To Learn From The Election

Canada is not conservative and things can't really change.

Well, the big day is over and pundits across the land are writing the 20/20 version of where it all went wrong. I’m more interested in what this Liberal win can teach us about where we’re going, not where we’ve been.

1. Canada is not Conservative

For the longest time, I was a Pierre Poilievre skeptic. I didn’t think Canada would respond to his more aggressive Conservative tone. I thought that a country that rejected Andrew Scheer (Harper with a smile) and Erin O’Toole (Liberal-lite) needed a LESS conservative Conservative, in order to gain the center.

Then Pierre came along and soared in the polls.

It seemed that I was proven wrong. Perhaps I was just too pessimistic. By early this year I had succumbed to the reality that Pierre was going to be the next Prime Minister. 

And now here we are.

Why?

When Stephen Harper won his “Strong, stable, majority, Conservative government” back in 2011, I remember reading about a speech he gave to party stalwarts at Heritage Park in Calgary. The guy covering the event talked to a couple of forlorn looking staffers and asked them what they thought. They replied that despite the majority win, Canada was still a left-leaning nation filled with left-leaning people and anything conservative Harper tries to do won’t amount to anything.

This was an assessment for the ages.

The Conservative Party of Canada can’t win, because Canada is not conservative.

2. Pierre’s surge is just Trudeau fatigue

People never really liked Pierre that much, they were just tired of Trudeau and Liberals, and they blamed them for their woes. 

Pierre had the right swagger and rhetoric to please the 30% of Canadians who always vote Conservative, but when he surged into the 40% realm people should’ve realized it wasn’t due to his popularity. Even under Mark Carney, many conservatives and NDP alike see the same corrupt party. This drove up Poilievre's final numbers, but most people still aren't overly keen on him... they just wanted to beat the Liberals. In this case, in a few Ontario ridings, Conservatives dipped into some unionized NDP support. That support won't last when the NDP finally elect a smarter leader.

He still gained ground, but he’s just in the same category as Scheer and O’Toole. A certain segment of Canada’s population votes Conservative, but only because they have to.

3. Canadians are easily propagandized

I often frequent the website smalldeadanimals and have been for years. I remember an exchange in the comments section about ten years ago in which someone made the case that the mainstream media no longer held power over the masses and that the internet was informing and engaging people in a way that allows voters to have a better perspective. One of the responses was a snarky, condescending reply indicating that the commenter was naive.

At the time I too felt that we were on the cusp of a new age of new media and I felt that the criticism against it was out of touch and antiquated. 

I was wrong.

I wasn’t wrong about the new age of new media, but I was wrong in my assessment that Canadians would give a shit. 

Unlike the United States and the rest of the world, Canadians are mostly NPC and happy about it. They think what the TV tells them to think. They genuflect social cues aggressively and proudly. They follow like sheep. 

Podcasts, blogs, websites, newsletters, substack, yeah this stuff resonates with switched on people (mostly younger), but the masses of Canadians out there just think what power tells them to or not at all. In this case, power told them that Mark Carney is a daddy who will protect them from Trump. The end.

4. Baby boomers will vote for their retirement

The average age for a boomer in Canada is 66 years old. Most are not anywhere close to being ready for retirement.

“But what may be more worrisome is that a large swath of baby boomers, aged 55 to 64 and not yet retired, don’t      appear to have nearly enough savings put aside. Indeed, one in five haven’t tucked anything away, while close to half only have $5,000 or less in retirement savings.” - Financial Post 

Say what you will about Jagmeet Singh and his dental care plan. Canadian boomers love it and it’s indicative of a worldview that sees government largesse as inherently good. When people NEED that largesse it makes elections a slam-dunk. 

A big part of Mark Carney’s appeal for Boomers is that he gives off the boring old-man vibe who will keep things the same. This is the last big gasp for status quo Canadians before they’re going to be outnumbered at the ballot box.

5. Immigration WAS the great replacement

Not all immigrants vote Liberal, but in the aggregate, most immigrants vote Liberal. This is a dirty little secret that the mainstream will never acknowledge, but most immigrants today come from countries in which “good government” means “lots of free stuff”. 

“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy…” -Alexander Tytler (probably)

The above rule holds true for all people, but for immigrants more so. Why? They abandon their own countries in pursuit of economic gain. Heck, for many they are using Canada as a launching pad to get to where they really want to be, the United States. This pursuit of wealth first and foremost can inform their voting preferences.

Secondly, you dance with who brought you. Trudeau adopted the Century Initiative’s mandate of mass immigration and now there are millions of grateful Liberal voters who are only here because of that policy. 

Mass immigration leads to Liberal victories, so consequently, watch for more mass immigration.

“Let me be clear: We will never be the 51st state. We will bear any burden and pay any price to protect our sovereignty and independence.” - Pierre Poilevre

We are on our way to becoming absorbed by the United States. Maybe not as a state, but certainly as a territory like Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands. Given the practical realities of our military, economy and proximity to the United States, we are almost a territory now, just without the formality. A vassal state.

Mark Carney won’t change this, in fact he’ll make things much, much worse. At the age of 60 he’s not going to radically change ideological direction. He will double down on the same sorts of Trudeau-styled progressivism, but he’ll do it with a bankers veneer. The ESG, DEI, Net-Zero nightmare that has been explicitly pushed for the past two decades will remain and Canada will further decline. 

Canadians will blame Trump. 

Conservatives will have to figure out where to go from here. In many ways, they dodged a bullet because the next few years are going to be rough for Canada no matter who’s in charge. 

The problem is that Canada needed to change in order to thrive. Our chance to correct course was the election of 2019, but we blew it. Covid came along and totally crushed this country to a point at which recovery is dubious. We will probably never become what we could have been after the one-two punch of Trudeau and Covid. 

Now we’ve got Trump building America for the 21st century and we’ve got a Woke, progressive banker adhering to Klaus Schwab politics, guiding Canada towards doom for the next four years. We can’t keep going on like this and things that can’t keep going on… don’t. 

Our ruling class is bankrupt, our economy is in decline, our military is in collapse and our institutions are in dysfunction. Will we bear any burden and pay any price for this to continue?

I wouldn’t. 

Would you?