While Canada won a temporary reprieve from Donald Trump’s tariff threats on Monday, the mercurial U.S. president could still be a significant presence in the upcoming federal election.
The saying goes that a week is a long time in politics. In 2025, Trump’s first two weeks back in office has seemed like multiple lifetimes — at least in terms of the impact on the Canadian political conversation.
The opposition Conservatives have been laying track for a year to make the upcoming election about the carbon tax. But with the threat of Trump’s tariffs hanging over Canada’s head and Liberal leadership frontrunners backing away from a consumer carbon price, the pressing political question appears who is best to lead the country through a potential trade war with our largest economic partner.
Dan Arnold was the Liberal Party’s lead pollster during the 2019 federal election — the last time Canadians went to the polls while Trump was in office. Arnold said that at the time, Trump had been in power for roughly three years and the North American Free Trade Agreement had been renegotiated, making the U.S. president a “secondary concern” for Canadian voters.
It could be different this time around, according to Arnold.
“Elections are more often than not about the future than the past, so what happened in the past in 2019 was relevant, (but) now tariffs are the present and the future. And I think that’s … going to be a lot more on people’s minds because it’s ongoing, and also I think there’s probably more of a direct threat,” Arnold said in an interview with Global News.
Whoever ends up prime minister after the next election will have to get used to drinking through the American political firehose.
Trump and his team entered office just over two weeks ago with a flurry of executive orders — some believed to be unconstitutional by his critics — on everything from deporting undocumented immigrants to curtailing transgender rights to the U.S. leaving the World Health Organization.
They’ve also taken steps to fire federal employees, ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the government, declared a national border emergency and a national energy emergency, and issued a blanket pardon for demonstrators and far-right militias that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2020, while targeting the FBI agents who investigated their crimes.
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Amidst the flood of executive actions, Trump also moved to impose blanket tariffs on all Canadian, Mexican and Chinese goods entering the U.S. It’s a political strategy that seems designed to overwhelm the opposition, American voters and even allied countries.
On Monday, the Mexican and Canadian governments were able to convince the administration to back down on the tariffs, at least temporarily — largely in exchange for border actions both countries had promised to do already.
Hamish Marshall, the Conservative Party’s national campaign director in 2019, said while he believes Trump will play a factor in the upcoming Canadian campaign, affordability issues will remain top of mind for most voters.
“(Trump) was a useful bogeyman for the Liberals. I don’t think it so much changed a lot of minds, but it was a good way for the Liberals to motivate their base to come out and vote,” said Marshall in an interview.
“I think they’re going to try” to use Trump that way again, Marshall said.
“Whether it will work or not is another story … I think the cost of living is still going to be the dominant issue in the campaign.”
An Abacus Data poll released in mid-January found that 67 per cent of respondents listed “the rising cost of living” as the top issue facing Canada, followed by health care (40 per cent) and housing affordability and accessibility (38 per cent). The survey interviewed 1,500 Canadians from Jan. 9 to Jan. 14 and has a margin of error comparable to 2.3 per cent.
Dan Mader, who served as policy director for Erin O’Toole’s 2021 campaign, doesn’t anticipate that will change before the next general election, expected this spring shortly after Parliament resumes under a new Liberal prime minister.
“People have been thinking for quite a while about the possibility of Trump becoming president and the reality of him becoming president and how that will impact things … but some things are still going to be issues. Cost of living is still going to be an issue,” Mader said.
“Despite Liberal leadership candidates backing away from a consumer carbon price, how much they can be trusted for having it for so long and what impact on families anything else they do is going to have are still going to be issues, and still going to be issues that play to the Conservatives.”
But there does seem to be some movement in the national polling numbers, according to the latest survey Global News.
The Conservatives still enjoy a commanding lead at 41 per cent support nationwide, followed by the Liberal Party (28 per cent) and the New Democrats (16 per cent). But that’s an eight percentage point jump for the Liberals since Ipsos’ poll in early January, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives, who dropped five percentage points over the same period. The NDP were down one percentage point.
The Ipsos poll was conducted between January 30 and February 3, and interviewed 1,000 voting-aged Canadians online. It is considered accurate within 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Whether the movement can be attributed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement he intends to step down, the looming threat of Donald Trump or some combination of the two is unclear.
There is another “X” factor those in Trump’s orbit could influence a Canadian campaign, however. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is now playing a central — and unelected — role in the Trump Administration’s push to slash the civil service and sharply curb government spending, has not been shy about meddling in foreign countries’ domestic affairs.
Musk has used his $44-billion soapbox, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, to support far-right parties in Italy, Germany and criticize the U.K.’s Labour government, and to encourage Trump to punish his native South Africa over “white genocide” conspiracy theories.
While Canada has no real equivalent to Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) or Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), Musk has repeatedly praised Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and suggested he should be Canada’s next prime minister.
Most of the conversation around foreign interference in Canadian elections have focused on hostile foreign powers attempting to covertly influence the country’s politics, but Musk’s interventions are very much overt. And while most Canadians are not on X — and more have been leaving since Musk’s takeover — internet chatter has a way of making itself into real-life conversations, according to Concordia professor Fenwick McKelvy.
“Content is constantly shared across platforms. It’s important to recognize that any one platform is part of a network of content circulating, and even if Twitter or X is not as influential as it once was, it’s still influential in certain circles and that content does still circulate across the internet,” said McKelvy, whose research includes social media and internet policy.
“It’s really quite exceptional.”
With a mere 17 days, Trump and his acolytes effectively upended the Canadian political debate. And there’s more than 1,400 left in the U.S. president’s term.
