Post-Mortem for the Canadian Election

And a post-mortem for Canada?

Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?

So anyhow.

For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.

Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for ‘taxpayers’ to be used as a synonym for ‘the voting public’, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.

The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.

The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.

I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.

In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.

Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.

That is not, however, what happened.

The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.

Aside from the near-annihilation of the NDP, there have been a couple of amusing silver linings. Jagmeet Singh lost his seat, coming not second but third in his riding, getting only 18% of the vote. Singh has done the honourable thing and stepped down as party leader; he is, we may hope, done with politics, not that he cares as he managed to stay in parliament just long enough to secure his generous parliamentary pension.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre also lost his seat, getting trounced by the Liberal candidate in his riding. Despite having not only lost his seat but having snatched ignominious defeat from the jaws of all but certain victory...

The twerp is giving signs that he intends to do his best to hang on as party leader. Politics is, after all, all Poilievre knows how to do. He’s never had a real job. If he steps down as leader, and isn’t a member of parliament, then what is he? The answer of course is ‘an irrelevant nobody’.

There a few theories kicking around as to why the Conservative Party blew the election so badly. One popular narrative is that it’s all Trump’s fault: the orange emperor’s reckless talk of a 51^st state put Canadians on the defensive, and led to them rallying around the country’s natural governing party. Another, which I personally consider to have played a larger role, is that Poilievre is an unlikable, triangulating little coward whose sole advantage was that he was Not Justin Trudeau. Survey data from August 2024 bolsters this: 40% of Conservative Party support was purely dislike of Justin Trudeau.

Once Justin Trudeau was out of the picture, Not Justin Trudeau was forced to campaign on the issues, and a message of ‘well maybe we’ll reduce immigration a tiny bit’ wasn’t exactly what people who wanted to hear ‘we will send them all back’ were looking for.

The Polymarket odds shown above supports the interpretation that Poilievre’s timidity was the primary factor behind the loss. Trump’s 51^st state rhetoric started last November, but the Conservatives remained strong favourites to take control of Parliament up through February. When Carney entered the Liberal Party leadership race in mid-January, the CPC began to slip. As Carney became more likely to become the prime-minister, the odds slipped further, finally crossing over in mid-March, when Carney won the leadership race.

On the other hand, supporting evidence for the role played in the Conservative loss by Trump’s trolling can be seen in this breakdown by age cohort of the priorities of Canadian voters.

“Dealing with Donald Trump” is the absolute number one priority of Canadian boomers and it isn’t even close. Younger voters, however, do not care about Trump at all. They are far more concerned with the outrageous cost of living, the seemingly permanent housing bubble that’s locking them out of the real estate market, the sclerotic economy that hasn’t grown in a decade, and Canada’s collapsing standard of living. Notably, the only priority the olds sort of share with the youngs is reducing the cost of living, because high grocery store prices make it really hard to afford the packaged bus tour in spring and the Mexican time-share in January. Even that, however, is less important to the boomers than sticking it to the bad orange man. As for the others, the only thing boomers care less about than fixing the real estate crisis is making Canada a better place to live. This is because million dollar starter homes are not a crisis for them (they’re profiting from it), and because for boomers, Canada is already a great place to live (and they don’t care in the slightest that it has become a hellscape for their children).

Young Canadians understand all too well the boomers’ insouciant attitude of ‘Apres moi, la favela’, so it’s no accident that the election’s defining image was the Brantford Boomer caught at a Mark Carney rally. This is what ‘elbows up’ actually means.

Not that it really matters. The Canadian Conservative Party does not differ, in any meaningful way, from the Liberals.

Canada apparently has more Sikh members of parliament than India. Most of them are in the Conservative Party.

Over the last decade, the Trudeau regime stamped on the migration engine’s gas pedal, and shovelled an additional couple million citizens worth of coal into Canada’s urban real estate plants, mostly mined from the Indian subcontinent, most of which votes Liberal because the Liberal Party is the party of Indian-maxxing, and the one thing Indians seem to want above all else is more Indians. I guess not living in an overcrowded clamorous crumbling slum reeking of human effluvia makes them homesick, so naturally enough they are terraforming Canada to more closely resemble their native environment. The Indians were brought in to drive down wages, drive up housing, and pack the voting rolls, functions that they have performed exceptionally well. It’s doubtful the Liberals would have won so many seats without the new voters they imported, but at the moment that’s something of an academic question.

The response from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party’s ethnic cleansing operation has been to pragmatically shrug and bend over backwards to pander to the new ethnic vote. While the Liberal candidate was doing this:

Poilievre was doing this:

The Liberal promise is to keep packing in Indians as fast as they can. The Conservative promise is to continue the packing, but a little slower, maybe, depending, you know, say, can we talk about something else? Ending immigration entirely would be racist, and would annoy the corporate lobbies that want that cheap labour, which is a step too far when the promise to index immigration to housing construction threatens to bring down real estate prices (which the boomers will not abide). Neither party is going to reduce immigration by any meaningful degree – the difference between them is the difference between a white minority in ten years, or in twenty, but both are determined to get there in the end, and to keep going until the awful dystopia of the Canada 2100 plan – a hundred million Canadians by 2100 – is realized.

All of this made it rather difficult for me to get particularly excited about this election. It wasn’t much of a choice.

The only real alternative is Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada, who once again failed to make so much as a scratch – the PPC got around 1% of the vote, and 0 seats. The PPC has had a decade to try and make inroads, and it is the only party promising to dramatically reduce immigration, which is an extremely popular policy in Canada.

Given that most Canadians want immigration to be much lower (if not reversed), and that the concerns of a great number of Canadians – housing costs, cost of living, economic stagnation – are intimately linked to immigration, you would think the PPC would be a very popular party. Yet they have completely failed to connect. This is partly because the Canadian media has cooperated with the Laurentian elite in completely locking out the PPC by starving them of publicity, refusing to let them participate in debates, and so on, while of course calling them fascist nazi racists and all of the other bad words whenever the forbidden party’s name is whispered. Of course, this happens to all of the other populist parties, too, and that didn’t stop MAGA, nor has it stopped the AdF’s rise in Germany, the Rassemblement National’s progress in France, and so on. I suspect that the primary reason for the PPC’s failure to gain traction is that their strongly libertarian politics simply don’t resonate with Canadians, who are to the contrary a paternalistic, authoritarian people by temperament.

So what happens next?

One clue, I think, can be seen in the geographical distribution of the parties.

The Conservatives swept British Columbia (outside of Vancouver), and the prairies (outside of Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg). The Liberals grabbed Ontario, much of Quebec, and essentially every large city.

Separatist sentiment is already strong in Alberta, with a third or more of the population wanting to leave, and much of the rest being rather ambivalent towards the Canadian project. This is because Albertans get the short end of the stick when it comes to equalization payments, which are funds extracted from economically productive provinces and redistributed to economically moribund provinces.

Note in particular the vastly disproportionate funding sent to Quebec. Everyone associates sovereigntist movements in Canada with the French Canadians, but at this point the perennial Quebec separatist threats resemble the extortionate demands made by an emotionally abusive girlfriend to leave unless you buy her more jewellery. It’s just a little performance they put on, a bit of theatre to remind Ottawa to top of their credit card.

The electoral map and the equalization payment map are essentially the same map. Eastern Canada extracts wealth from Western Canada, which Western Canada naturally resents. Partly this is to bribe Quebec into staying in the country, but mostly it’s just a way for Eastern Canada’s elites to fatten themselves at Western Canada’s expense. Western Canada has spent decades trying to establish a foothold in Ottawa in order to ameliorate this situation, and Eastern Canada has frustrated this at every turn. There is no real common ground between them. The relationship is entirely parasitic.

With Alberta having been locked out of power yet again, it is extremely likely separatist sentiment in Alberta will increase by several notches. Indeed, according to the National Post, that is already happening, with the prominent Canadian politician Preston Manning – the leader of the Reform Party, which briefly took the Conservative Party’s place in the 1990s – predicting that Carney will be Canada’s last prime minister. If separatist sentiment surpasses fifty percent of the population, it could very easily lead to a referendum. Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith has already – as in today – passed legislation that dramatically reduces the number of signatures needed to trigger a referendum, and extends the timespan during which signatures can be collected. That makes a referendum much easier to achieve. Alberta is showing every sign of walking right for the door.

Alberta separating on its own would be a non-starter (unless it was immediately admitted into the southern union as the 51^st state), because on its own Alberta would be a landlocked state, surrounded to east and west by a country that would likely regard it with great hostility, and may well choose to violently contest the question the way Ukraine contested the separatist regions in the Donbass. If Alberta could convince British Columbia to join them, however, they’d have the makings of a viable country: self-sufficient in energy and food, and with access to the Pacific Ocean for trade. Alberta’s little brothers Saskatchewan and possibly Manitoba might well join them, though this matters a lot less than BC. Unfortunately BC, blue geographically though it is, is electorally dominated by Vancouver, which is of course a Liberal Party stronghold (and goes NDP whenever the Liberals don’t take it, as it did in the last provincial election). Vancouverites despise the redneck rig-pig cowboys in Alberta, and the sentiment is heartily returned to the effete pothead hipsters of Hongcouver, so the entire province of BC cleaving off to join a new Albertan state isn’t going to happen.

If the blue ridings could be separated from Vancouver, however, it just might work. Vancouver itself could just become an independent city-state, something which its residents – a great many of whom were born in Hong Kong – are quite accustomed to already, and might even prefer over being part of Canada proper. Sovereignty referendums supposedly have to be conducted by popular vote province-wide, rather than on a riding-by-riding basis, but that doesn’t strike me as any great obstacle. It is not law that decides whether one polity will be subsumed as part of another or not, but the willingness to fight.

Possible or not, breaking up British Columbia would only add to the complexity of the task of breaking away from Canada to form a new country. All things considered, it would probably be much easier for Alberta to simply apply for statehood ... especially considering that Trump is standing there with his hand open, ready and willing to welcome them (and their oil) into the union.

Glancing at a geographical map of North America demonstrates at a glance that the natural trade routes of the continent do not flow east to west, but north to south. Indeed, as this blog post about Alberta secession at Small Dead Animals notes, the volume of cross-border trade vastly exceeds the volume of Canada’s internal trade, which is partly a consequence of geography, but also related to Canada’s baffling interprovincial trade restrictions. Note also that Ottawa continually places obstacles in the way of Albertan hydrocarbon development, restricting natural gas exports and blocking pipeline construction; ostensibly this is for environmental protection, but the real reason is to keep Alberta from getting too rich and, therefore, politically powerful. Like any parasite, the Laurentian elite doesn’t want to kill the host, but neither can it allow the host to become strong enough to throw it off.

The border between Canada and the United States doesn’t follow natural geographical boundaries. In many ways it reflects the machinations of Britain’s imperial elite, who divided their colonists in North America against themselves the same way they drew borders in many of their other former imperial possessions in such a way as to separate large tribes and group the fragments together with small tribes, leaving behind countries weakened by internal squabbling. Canada’s historical purpose was essentially to deny the United States access to North America’s northern frontier, lest it become a continental empire that could no longer be contained. Obviously, the project of American containment failed, but the border remains. For now. The gravitational forces of trade and culture are powerful, and at this point of maximal weakness could easily shatter the fragile latitudinal thread that holds confederation together.

All of this talk of separation raises the question of whether the Canadian project is at all salvageable. My personal read is that, in its present state, it is not. Canada’s ‘live in the now, man’ baby boomers have demonstrated, once again, that their golden year comforts are of incomparably greater importance to them than their children’s futures, and they will not vote for anyone who threatens to harsh their buzz. The boomers are one of the most powerful demographics in the country.

Then there’s the immigrant vote. Canada is almost a third foreign-born, now – an increase of almost 8% under Trudeau.

While a handful of them can be induced to vote Conservative, by and large they break Liberal, which the LPC understands quite well. There’s every reason to expect this line to continue to go up, because the Liberal Party has every incentive to continue importing voters as fast as direct flights can fly from Amritsar.

Then there are the government employees. One in four Canadians works for the government, and the public sector is the fastest-growing part of the Canadian economy. Moreover, the public sector is disproportionately powerful, occupying between 44% of Canada’s GDP (if you look at direct expenditures only) and a gargantuan 64% of Canada’s GDP (if tax expenditures and price regulation are included).

Directly or indirectly, 2/3 of every dollar spent in Canada is spent by the government, and that money is spent by 1/4 of the population, who naturally enough manage to spend much of it on themselves. That is one heck of a rice bowl, and they are not going to vote for that rice bowl to get smaller. To the contrary, they will fight tooth and nail to hang on to it.

There’s a lot of overlap between these three groups – immigrants are heavily employed in the public sector, for example – but these three demographics add up to a sizable coalition that is very difficult to outvote, and whose collective incentives align almost perfectly in the direction of dragging the country by its throat towards the cliff’s edge of bankruptcy, where it will be thrown off into the bottomless pit of its future as a third-world failed state. By the time the boomers wander off to the great all-you-can-eat cruise ship buffet in the sky – which may happen sooner rather than later, given that the Canadian government is quietly pillowing them with the MAiD program in order to control costs in the collapsing health care system – so many immigrants will have been imported that the boomers’ absence will be more than compensated for.

Our Southern neighbour was, through the grace of God and the Constitution, just barely capable of wresting control of the federal government back from the left-wing death cult and commencing a course of chemo and radiation to burn out the metastasized tumours of the corrupt, self-serving managerial state that’s been strangling America to death for decades. It’s still much too early to know if they’ll succeed, but at least they’re getting the chance. Canada seems to have passed a tipping point. It’s all but impossible to see a viable path to electoral victory for a party that would administer the necessary medicine – dramatically shrinking the size of the state, slashing taxes, and above all remigrating the foreigners the previous regime flooded the land with – without which Canada simply has no future worth living in to offer Canadians. Necessary as it is, there doesn’t seem to be any hope of these reforms happening, because there are simply too many people in Canada who are profiting from national suicide.

Politics as normal doesn’t look like it’s going to solve the Canadian problem; abnormal politics may be the only way forward, perhaps in the form of a Maple Maidan ... though this would not save Canada, but end it. Still, we might imagine for a moment the possibilities that might come with a revived Conservative Party, one transformed as Trump transformed the Republican party – one which no longer pussyfoots around the immigration issue, but which forthrightly centres the interests of the Canadian people; a Conservative Party which stops trying to be Liberal Lite, but embraces Canada’s martial, traditionalist, imperial heritage; a Conservative Party which laughs in the face of accusations of racism, trolls its opponents mercilessly, and openly builds it platform around a program of dismantling the state machinery of the Liberal Party, smashing the rice bowls, and redirecting Canadian energies from supporting the lavish lifestyles of lazy government workers and back towards grand projects – the development and settlement of the North’s resources, the conquest of the Northwest Passage.

With the right leader, such a Conservative Party could galvanize a large fraction of the Canadian population. In Canada, the right man would not be a Trump, brash and gaudy, but a steadfast, plain-spoken, calm and competent leader, a modest technocrat with steel in his eyes.

It’s possible such a man could have won the last election, or maybe even the election before that. In a sense, that man did win: Mark Carney is not actually that man – he is not a man at all, but a snake – but he is an excellent facsimile. Carney projects a facade of strength and steady nerves that immediately won the boomers over. A Conservative leader who had those qualities for real, and who was moreover capable of galvanizing Canada’s abandoned youth with inspiring but practicable visions that could generate opportunities for them within the country, might have been able to pull off a victory without having to appeal to the immigrant vote at all ... meaning that he could also deport them, and give Canadians their country back.

But no such Canadian leader exists, the Conservative Party does not seem at all inclined to allow such a leader to rise, and the path that such a leader could navigate to victory gets narrower with every 747 that carries in another cargo of future Liberal voters in from the slums of Mumbai.

Thank you for giving your attention to this attempt at analysis of Canada’s recent election. It’s a hard subject to make interesting, as it really wasn’t the world’s most exciting election – going from a Liberal minority government propped up the socialists to a Liberal minority government propped up by the socialists isn’t exactly, you know, earthshaking – but my goal here was really to try and illustrate for my American readers the underlying reasons behind Canada’s political lassitude. If you found value here, and have found value before, perhaps you might be inclined to join the small, elite group who support this blog, making its writings available to the unwashed masses free of charge:

I’d especially like to thank my patrons. Your generosity is what makes it possible for me to write. As always, I apologize for what I can only call my laziness ... I have had neither opportunity nor, to be honest, inspiration these last few weeks, so it has been a light posting month. I sort of forced this piece out, as I felt it had to be commented on, though to be honest I’ve said a lot of this before and, probably, more eloquently and in greater depth and detail of analysis, for instance in Maple Maidan, which looked at how and why the US might pursue annexation:

and Ukrainada, which explores a scenario in which the globalist faction retains control of Canada and weaponizes it against the US: