Even as Democrats remain mired in a postelection funk, centrist liberals in other major Western democracies are enjoying renewed energy and popular support thanks to the threat of Donald Trump. One of the curiosities of Trump’s worldview is that he regards traditional American allies as exploiters of the United States who deserve punishment: hence his trade wars against Canada, Mexico, and Europe, as well as his calls for Canada, Greenland, and Panama to be absorbed by the United States. This has been a boon to center-left parties that, previously facing right-wing populist insurgencies, now have the opportunity to recast themselves as defenders of the national patrimony.

Canada is a particularly striking case. Until recently, the Liberal Party, which has governed since 2015 under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was facing an electoral trouncing in the upcoming election. A decade in power had taken the sheen off Trudeau’s boyish charm, with the lingering traumas of Covid disruption and inflation demoralizing Liberal Party voters and making swing voters receptive for a change. The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), under the deft leadership of Pierre Poilievre, a whip-smart anti-woke troll in the manner of JD Vance, had crafted a powerful anti-system message: “Canada is broken.”

But once Trump started saying Canada has no reason to exist as a separate nation and should become the 51st state, the entire dynamic of Canadian politics was transformed. Broken or not, Canada had to be defended. And the Liberals were in a much better position to present themselves as the party of national unity in a crisis than the insurgent Conservatives, the social-democratic New Democratic Party (or NDP), or the separatist Bloc Québécois. Having governed for 70 years in the 20th century, the Liberals are known as Canada’s “natural governing party”—the perfect party to rally behind in a crisis.

On February 19, after a quick party leadership race, the Liberals switched out Trudeau for a new leader, former banker Mark Carney, who embraced the mantle of being a national unity leader. During the turmoil, the Liberals have enjoyed a historic polling surge. As recently as January 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, the CPC enjoyed a massive lead over the Liberals: 44.8 percent to 21.9 percent according to the polling aggregator of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Since then, the polls have been upended, with Liberals leading, with 37.8 to 37.2 for the CPC. This improvement by the Liberals is largely driven by the collapse of support for the NDP and Bloc Québécois. The NDP had effectively been a junior partner to the Liberals since 2021, which saw the Liberals falling short of majority status and needing bolstering in Parliament. But the Trump threat undermined the NDP’s claim that it deserved to be rewarded for pushing the Liberals to the left on policies like extending dental care.

Left-of-center voters, fearing Trump and thinking the CPC was too Trumpist for comfort, have rallied to the Liberal banner. The closeness of the current polling is deceptive, because support for the CPC is thick in rural areas and Western Canada, while the Liberals enjoy an enviable spread across the country that gives their votes more “efficiency” (to use the jargon of political science).

Given the polling surge and current mood of anti-Trump Canadian nationalism, it wasn’t surprising that on Sunday Carney called a snap election, to be held on April 28. The Liberals have good reason to expect a majority government, although given the briskness of Canadian election campaigns an upset can’t be ruled out.

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But winning elections is only part of politics; governing is equally crucial. While I don’t doubt that the Liberals have an excellent shot of winning the election, my fear is that Carney’s politics of centrist unity will fail to turn nationalist passion into policies that solve deep seated social and economic problems.

Instead, Carney is likely to continue with the neoliberal weakening of state capacity which will make Canada vulnerable both to internal right-wing populism and also to attacks from Trump’s expansionist agenda. In some ways, Carney is the Canadian version of Joe Biden in 2020: the safe placeholder candidate who promises a return to normality in troubled times. But just as Biden proved unable to master the moment, there is every reason to dread that Carney’s politics of ancien régime restoration will simply delay the triumph of the far right.

Carney is in every cell of his body a neoliberal technocrat—albeit a neoliberal who presents himself as possessing an enlightened social conscience. Born in 1965, Carney studied at Harvard and Oxford before working as for 13 years as a consultant for Goldman Sachs. In 2003 he joined the Bank of Canada and held a variety of government posts. In 2007, he became governor of the Bank of Canada. He went on to become governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. Then he became vice chairman of the Brookfield corporation, a multinational valued at nearly $1 trillion (its New York holdings include Brookfield Place).

Given this background, it’s not surprising that Carney’s earliest moves involving making the Liberal Party, already not a firebrand party, even more centrist. His first act as prime minister was to remove the consumer carbon tax that he had previously supported as a market-friendly climate change solution. Then Carney canceled a proposed hike in the capital gains inclusion rate. Both these moves are sops to conservative voters, with the cancellation of the capital gains hike overwhelmingly benefiting rich taxpayers.

Writing in Canadian Dimensions, James Hardwick noted that Carney, in his 2021 book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, acknowledges major problems like climate change and economic inequality but insists that they can be solved by technocratic tinkering and improved social consciousness. Carney in his manifesto writes that “individuals and their firms must rediscover their sense of solidarity and responsibility for the system. More broadly, by rebasing valuation on society’s values, we can create platforms of prosperity.”

As Hardwick observes, they lofty sentiments hardly address the scale of the problems facing Canada and the world:

This is the core of his vision for a better world. He sincerely believes it is possible to create an ethically responsible brand of neoliberalism.

Ultimately, Carney has no interest in challenging the power of corporate oligarchy; instead, he wants to use market incentives to encourage oligarchs to act in a pro-social fashion. He believes the excesses of capitalism can be reined in by creating the right measures and metrics and benchmarks.

On Substack, the journalist Luke Savage provides an equally devastating analysis of the massive discrepancy between the current world crisis (a crisis that Carney understands as well as anyone) and his anemic solutions:

Lacking a serious analysis of power and simultaneously operating within the boundaries of the very system he is supposedly critiquing, Carney in turn leaves us with prescriptions that are both hazy and unsatisfying. Some moral persuasion here, a more ethically-conscious business class there, a few minor adjustments in state regulation, and—alakazam!—a kinder, gentler global capitalism awaits.

To get a feel for just how inadequate Carney’s alternative to Trumpism is, it is worth watching an ad he posted on Saturday featuring the comedian Mike Myers. In the ad, Carney and Myers, both wearing patriotic hockey shirts, meet up in an ice rink and watch a hockey game. Carney quizzes Myers—Canadian-born, but currently a resident of the United States—about various aspects of Canadian popular culture. They banter about the children’s show Mr. Dressup (which featured the puppets Casey and Finnegan), the rock band The Tragically Hip, and the Stompin’ Tom Connor song “Bud the Spud.”

For Anglo-Canadians of a particular generation (40 and older) this ad is a wonderful trip down memory lane. It was much praised on social media. But the pop culture references in the ad will have little resonance to young people (Mr. Dressup, Canada’s counterpart to Mr. Rogers, last appeared on television in 1996), nor among many immigrants to Canada, nor among French-Canadians.

It’s not just the narrow reach of the ad that is the problem. Carney’s nationalism is nostalgic and bloodless. Early incarnations of Canadian nationalism have always involved robust collective state projects: the continent-spanning railway line of the 19 century, the creation of a national healthcare system, the bolstering of support for Canadian culture via a national broadcaster, the promotion of national bilingualism.

In the current crisis, economic turmoil might require similarly bold policies. A more visionary nationalism might push for strengthening our alliances with Mexico and the other nations of this hemisphere aside from the USA, bolstering our population by programs to recruit disaffected Americans, investing in high-speed rail and rebuilding our fraying healthcare system. As a neoliberal, Carney refuses to exercise the policy imagination the moment requires. Trump is a genuine fascist threat inside America who is also menacing Canada with talk of annexation. By doubting the reality of Canadian sovereignty and the security of its borders, Trump talks of his northern neighbor the same way Vladimir Putin speaks about Ukraine or Benjamin Netanyahu speaks about Gaza and the West Bank. A threat of this magnitude requires a fighting spirit, not a nostalgic one. You can’t fight fascism by conjuring up memories of the TV puppets you loved as a child.