LATIKA M BOURKE: Is MAGA and Donald Trump Making Incumbency Great Again?

If Mark Carney wins the election he has called for April 28 Canada’s Liberals, and indeed beleaguered left-wing parties around the world, can thank one man for their rejuvenation — Donald Trump.

“He wants to break us, so America can own us, we will not let that happen,” the Canadian Prime Minister, just nine days in the job, said as he announced the start of the election campaign Sunday local time.

“We’re over the shock of the betrayal, we should never forget the lessons, we have to look out for ourselves.

“I’m asking Canadians for a strong, positive mandate to deal with President Trump.”

Few will have paid much attention, if any, to Canadian politics over the years. Despite being a G7 country, NATO member, part of the Commonwealth and one of Australia’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners, Canada has been a country that’s been easy to ignore and has never done much to change that.

But Donald Trump has transformed that, almost overnight, sparking a major reset in Canada’s foreign policy, its nationhood, sense of place in the world, revitalised the left and possibly — made incumbency look sexy again.

“2024 was the year of the anti-incumbent,” Canada’s renowned pollster David Coletto of Abacus Data told the Latika Takes podcast this week.

“Incumbency has advantages now in a world where people are looking for stability, they’re looking for sensible government, and that doesn’t necessarily need to be of a left-leaning government, but it needs to be one that seems in control, seems calm.”

The immediate beneficiaries of this shift could be two left-leaning governments about to face re-election, with Australians due to go to the polls themselves in May, either days or weeks after Canadians vote.

Just a few months ago polling showed it was possible that Anthony Albanese could be the third one-term left-wing government, following in the footsteps of US President Joe Biden and Germany’s outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

But Trump 2.0’s radical agenda and deliberate hostilities towards allies and friends could bring that trend to an abrupt end.

Just like Australians, Canadians were set to vote on the cost of living, housing and migration which all pointed to a wipe-out for the Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau who at one point was trailing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre by a whopping 27 points in the polls.

“People who voted for the party in the past had been leaving them in record numbers, hence the lowest numbers we’d seen in a very long time for that party,” Mr Coletto said.

Enter Trump 2.0 who has imposed tariffs on Canadian goods and repeatedly threatened to annex it and make it America’s 51st State.

“Their mindset shifted pretty much overnight when they were less concerned about how am I going to pay the rent or the grocery bill and much more focused on the existential threat of, will we even be a country anymore and what is the economic damage gonna mean for me?” Mr Coletto said.

The Liberals are now just three points behind the Conservatives in Abacus Data’s most recent poll. CBC’s poll tracker aggregating all polls shows the Liberals ahead by just 0.3 per cent. Such a swift and drastic turnaround has never been seen before in modern Canadian politics.

And the left’s reinvigoration, is ironically, all due to Trump.

His aggression toward Canada set off a crisis inside the government that triggered Justin Trudeau’s resignation from the prime ministership. Trudeau’s departure made way for the stunning rise of political outsider Mark Carney who replaced him as Liberal leader and prime minister, despite not even holding a seat in the House of Commons.

As a former Goldman Sachs man and central banker of two countries, Mr Carney is the very embodiment of the elite — and everything modern politics and particularly the re-endorsement of MAGA has repeatedly suggested voters are rebelling against.

But Trump looks set to be making not just the left but also the establishment sexy again.

“If you are diagnosed with cancer, you want the very best oncologist who has the very best training has the very best techniques in medicine,” Mr Coletto said.

“And you also want somebody who’s gonna hold your hand and tell you: ‘I’ve been here before, I’m going to get us through this.’

“And I honestly think if Mark Carney plays that card in that way, people will look past his wealth, look past his elitism, and they might realise we actually want an elite and that’s different than elitist.”

This is bad news for Mr Poilievre, the Conservative Leader who like Australia’s Mr Albanese is a highly institutionalised political creature, having sat in parliament for two decades.

However, due to his cutting communication skills, he was on track for a landslide victory. But now the very acts that made him so attractive in 2024, the year that voters around the world tossed out leader after leader, are Trump-shaped ghouls coming back to haunt him.

“Donald Trump is his kryptonite,” Mr Coletto said, adding that there was little tolerance for anyone in Canadian politics who either shared some of Trump’s worldviews or been seen to have cheered him on at any point.

Mr Poilievre has not expressed support for Trump and has been strongly opposed to the US President’s takeover threats.

But stunts like handing out doughnuts to protesting truckers during the COVID pandemic have become left-wing weapons, with Mr Carney observing that the language and tactics of the Canadian Conservatives look “uncannily familiar,” to those of MAGA’s.

Additionally, some Conservative MPs are avid Trump supporters and have worn MAGA hats.

“I asked a question on a survey, who do you think Pierre Poilievre would’ve voted for in the US presidential election?” Mr Carney said.

“A majority of Canadians thought he would’ve voted for Donald Trump.

“And so that’s the perceptual problem.

“Reality doesn’t matter, in the world of politics, it’s what people think that matters the most.”

So Mr Poilievre has gone from having a single unifying force in Mr Trudeau to one in Trump who is splitting the Conservatives and alienating potential voters.

The former UK Labour MP and aide to former prime minister Gordon Brown, Jonathan Ashworth, keeps a close eye on the left’s electoral competitiveness at his London-based think tank Labour Together.

“It is certainly true that 2024 and these early months of 2025 were about incumbents getting punished — particularly one-term incumbents,” he said.

“But there are just a few straws in the wind actually now, which have made me think again …. Is this a moment of the populist’s right peak?”

He said for as long as Mr Albanese remained competitive: “He could pull it out of the bag.”

“I’m not saying he is by the way, I’m just saying that a few months ago everyone was saying if you’re an incumbent you’re finished,” Mr Ashworth said.

“Things are shifting quickly.

“It’s certainly the case that the decisions of the populist right in the White House have given impetus to the Canadian Liberal campaign.”

Mr Poilievre, watching his landslide victory slip through his fingers, tried to reverse the tag.

“Mr Carney says that he will bring in an industrial carbon tax, this is another area where Mr Carney agrees with Donald Trump – they both want to tax Canadian industry,” Mr Poilievre said at his campaign-launch day rally.

“Is it time to stop putting the Liberal party first, it is time to put Canada First for a change.”

It’s just possible that MAGA is Making Incumbency Great Again.