Mark Carney's Lego Majority: One Brick at a Time

There have been 24 Canadian prime ministers with 13 of them leading coveted majority governments. Mark Carney just became the 14th, but in a singularly unprecedented way: he built it, like some sort of Lego construct.

One year after rescuing Canada’s Liberal Party from electoral disaster, Carney has strengthened his hold on power. A year ago this month, Canadians delivered a result that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier: another Liberal minority government, this time under him as their newly chosen leader. Now, after three byelections and a number of floor crossings from opposition parties, the Liberals have a majority for the first time since 2019.

It’s been nothing less than an astonishing reversal of fortune for the Liberals. For more than two years, the opposition Conservatives had held a comfortable advantage in the polls with many analysts and talking heads treating a Conservative victory as all but inevitable.

Yet on election night on April 28, 2025, the Liberals finished with 43.8 per cent of the vote, edging out the Conservatives at 41.3 per cent, while the socialist NDP and separatist Bloc Québécois dropped sharply from their 2021 levels.

Two major developments upended what had appeared to be a predictable political landscape — and, if the byelection results are any indication, their effects may be lasting.

The first was the return of Donald Trump to the United States presidency. This brought an immediate wave of tariffs and an adversarial posture toward Canada. The policy shock had economic consequences, but it also triggered a shift in how Canadians perceived the risks facing the country.

The second development came in early January 2025. Justin Trudeau resigned after intense internal and external pressure with his departure resetting the Liberal brand almost overnight.

The Trump Effect

Taken together, these shocks reshaped voters’ priorities. Instead of evaluating parties along familiar ideological lines, as well as being influenced by a pervasive dislike over Trudeau’s style and stewardship, many Canadians approached the election as a question of who could best protect the country during an unusually turbulent moment. It seems that a year later, voters are still regarding the Liberals generally in this positive light.

New data from a 2025 study of the election has helped illuminate this dynamic. When asked which party was best suited to manage Canada’s relationship with the U.S, Canadians across nearly all partisan groups — including those who typically support other parties — chose the Liberals most often (57.8 per cent).

While Liberal and Conservative partisans selected their own respective parties more than 80 per cent of the time, what’s noteworthy is that strong majorities of NDP (71.6 per cent) and Bloc (62.8 per cent) supporters also selected the Liberals.

The crossover voting significance of this pattern is hard to underestimate. The American relationship (the U.S. remains Canada’s largest trading partner) dominated voter concerns during the election period with twenty per cent of Canadians mentioning the relationship with the U.S., Trump or tariffs as the most important issue in the 2025 Canadian federal election.

This was the second most common response behind the general economic concerns so common in almost every other industrialized nation, which were closely tied to the U.S. situation. About thirty per cent of Canadians said the economy was the most important issue.

Who’s the Best to Handle the Economy?

Historically, Conservatives benefit when voters prioritize economic competence, but in 2025, the disruption caused by U.S. tariffs did not translate into increased trust in Conservative stewardship. Voters seemed to equate the main opposition party with the Trump Republicans, a feeling exacerbated by leader Pierre Poilievre’s aggressive confrontational style which echoes that of the American president.

Instead, a sizable majority of Canadians supported the use of retaliatory tariffs (68.7 per cent), and more Canadians identified the Liberals as the party best able to manage the economy (48 per cent versus 39 per cent for Conservatives). This shift in perceived competence had profound collateral effects. Strategic voting among NDP supporters, in particular, proved decisive. While partisans typically remain loyal to their own party, 2025 saw an unprecedented number of traditionally NDP voters casting ballots for the Liberals.

With Carney newly installed as leader, the Liberals entered the election presenting not continuity but transformation in the face of Trump’s threats about making Canada the 51st American state. With this new message, he was able to effectively revitalize the party and make it appear that the ruling party embodied change, not the Conservatives.

Thus, riding this ongoing trend, on last Monday night, the rookie prime minister clinched a razor-thin majority in special elections on Monday night, bolstered by five defections from two different parties during the past five months from the NDP and Conservatives. Liberal candidates Danielle Martin and Doly Begum both claimed victory in their Toronto districts — putting Carney over the top. Later on in the evening, the final constituency, Terrebonne, which had been previously decided by a single vote and then had that result overturned by the courts, came in for the Liberals with a majority of 731.

No modern majority government in Ottawa has ever been built this way.

Theoretically, this unprecedented feat will keep Carney in office until 2029, unless he calls an election sooner than that, which remains a possibility given his party’s substantial lead in the polls. As of this date, the Liberals hold a thirteen‑point lead in national vote intentions with Carney’s net favorability sits at +20. For the moment, it gives him runway to execute his ambitious “Canada Strong” agenda, including a slate of protectionist policies focused on reducing Canada’s economic reliance on the U.S., though because of their very transformative nature, any effects might not be clear until years later.

With these results the government argues that a majority, no matter how slim, will bring stability and security to Canada amid global disruptions driven by certain world leaders, though they would not explicitly name Trump. The opposition parties argue that how the Liberals got to that status was due to undemocratic backroom deals, subverting the will of voters who thought they were getting elected representation from one party, only to get another. These considerations, while not without merit, cannot change the new reality in Ottawa. Floor crossing (i.e. switching parties) is permitted by the Constitution.

Having achieved majority status, Carney is now free from having to work with other parties in the House of Commons. The Liberal government can push through bills and spending — a reality that will put pressure on the prime minister to ease Canadian’s cost-of-living concerns, since he can no longer blame other parties for obstruction. It’s all on him now.

This should play to the prime minister’s strengths. Having spent his career at the Banks of Canada and England, and honed his strategic skills in the private sector, Carney has shown strategic sense in lowering trade barriers between the provinces all the while circling the globe striking investment and trade deals with Europe, India, Japan and other allies. As he so bluntly stated during the World Economic Conference at Davos, he is looking to build a Third Way consisting of Middle and Small powers removed from but not entirely divested from the American economic orbit.

What a majority does is give the administration time to plan. And the time invested in doing that now with a clear head and pragmatic objectives, will move Canada from Trudeau’s identity-based politics and haphazard approach to governance.

Ans yet, despite opposition MPs hammering away at Carney over high grocery prices fueled by inflation and a nationwide housing shortage, “Carneymania” continues to sweep the nation. Recent polls show he has high approval ratings among Canadians and has even made unexpected gains in staunchly Conservative regions, such as the Prairies.

The first move of Carney’s majority government last Tuesday morning was to announce relief for Canadian consumers facing skyrocketing gas and diesel prices as the U.S.-Israel war on Iran drives up costs at the pumps as he has to start showing Canadians that affordability is his priority. It also remains to be seen if he looks at completely removing the federal gas tax as part of this.

For his part Conservative Leader Poilievre, whose party once had a twenty-point poll lead over Trudeau is now shut out from another try at becoming prime minister for at least another three years, though Carney could call an election sooner. Questions around Poilievre’s survival have circulated in Ottawa for months, after four of his MPs defected to the Liberals. So far, as no rival has emerged to challenge his leadership. Conservative MPs largely backed Poilievre ahead of Monday’s special elections, downplaying concerns about their political fortunes, but this has not quelled speculation that more Conservative lawmakers will cross the floor. And it’s a sure bet that the Liberals are having no end of backstage conversations with their opposite numbers with the added enticement of being part of a majority government.

Carney’s majority returns the Liberals to a status not seen since Justin Trudeau swept into office in 2015, ending the Conservatives’ near-decade in government. It’s a parliamentary distinction that means Carney does not have to call an election until 2029 — past the expiry date of Trump’s second term.

Carney convinced Canada he was the best person to take on Trump, telling Canadians, “We will have to do things that we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible.”

A Long To-Do List

Here’s a high-level view of the to-dos on Carney’s list:

Trade & Commerce

Governing with the power of a majority will help Carney pass legislation to implement trade deals more expeditiously, but it’s unlikely to change his U.S. trade strategy — a topic where there’s already rare cross-party unity that continued reliance on America is a bad thing. There’s broad support for Carney’s “Buy Canada” policy that pushes back against Trump’s tariffs, earning a spot in the U.S. Trade Representative’s growing list of Canadian irritants.

And while Canadians continue to view Trump’s America unfavorably, Carney’s team knows it’s risky with to poke the orange bear too much ahead of a high-stakes review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (CUSMA) this summer. This is where his government’s new majority status can prove useful in getting new energy and transport projects built to help sell more Canadian energy and food exports to the world.

Carney has set an ambitious trade diversification goal to double non-U.S. exports to $300 billion CAD by 2030. More trade with China, much to the Trump administration’s annoyance, is a key part of that strategy. As is closing new trade deals with India, Thailand, Philippines, Mercosur, ASEAN and Saudi Arabia — which all could be implemented by year’s end, depending on how quick Carney’s government is at moving bills efficiently, which will test the efficacy of his team.

Defense

Carney needs to put some meat on the bones of his commitment to meet NATO’s defense spending targets, facing a looming political deadline of July 7th when the NATO leaders meet for their summit in Ankara, Türkiye, to demonstrate he’s serious about meeting the alliance’s new 5 percent of GDP target by 2035.

As a first step, to expedite procurement in Canada, Carney has established the Defense Investment Agency. Ottawa is contemplating two major military purchases — a new fleet of 12 diesel-powered submarines and CF-18 fighter jet replacements. The agency has given the two submarine bidders — Germany’s TKMS and South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean — until April 29th to finalize their bids.

Much more sensitively, the fighter-jet decision involves American-made Lockheed Martin F-35s and Sweden’s lower-cost Saab Gripen fighter. If Carney selects any other option than the American one, he risks re-igniting Trump’s wrath, jeopardizing CUSMA negotiations, though early indications are that he might take the pragmatic path and give the president an easy win.

Energy & Power

Carney is expected to try and revive his climate credentials (he was UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance) in the coming weeks when he announces plans to at least double the generation of clean electricity in Canada by 2050. Just before the Easter weekend, Carney met with Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston to discuss the Wind West Atlantic Energy project which would call for moving electricity east to west, within Canada, instead of shipping it north-south to the U.S. Ottawa has also signed a MOU with energy-rich Alberta, which could lead to a new oil pipeline from the province to West Coast, though that is contingent on a private entity coming forward to bankroll the project and currently facing opposition from First Nations groups as well as skepticism from British Columbia.

Tech

The Liberal government considers AI “key to our economic destiny” and has hinted it is ready to regulate big tech. It is poised to release an AI bill designed to keep foreign tech companies from exploiting the data and personal information of Canadians. The Trudeau government was unable to pass a previous iteration of the bill because it could not get the backing of enough opposition MPs. With a majority, Carney can push it across the line.

Carney has proclaimed “digital sovereignty” as important to Canada as pipelines and ports. Accordingly, he’s directed his Major Projects Office to develop a sovereign cloud to store government information as an effort to rely less on big tech firms like Amazon, Microsoft and Google which control most of the nation’s cloud infrastructure.

AI is also at the center of Canada’s new defense industrial strategy. Carney’s government is trying to incentivize tech companies to collaborate with the military to help scale up startups. The goal is to attract C$500 billion investment while creating 125,000 new jobs.

At the Liberal Party convention over the weekend and just prior to the byelections that sealed his majority, Carney used an uncharacteristically fiery campaign-like speech to share his vision for the country, while calling for a “united, ambitious and confident Canada.”

“This is not the time for politics as usual, for petty differences, for political point-scoring,” Carney told party members in Montreal. “United, we will build ‘Canada strong,’ a Canada for all. A ‘Canada strong’ that no one can ever take away.”

Now that Mark Carney has a majority, Canadians will be counting on it.