Rightwing Consolidation And American Annexation: Canada's 2025 Election in the Shadow of Trump

The first part of a two part analysis.

Trump and Carney at the G7 meeting in Canada, June 16, 2025 -- public domain image

By Gabriel Haythornthwaite

Canada was due its next horrific Conservative administration after nine years of disastrous Liberal rule. Domestically, the Justin Trudeau government delivered deep health care transfer rate cuts two years before a pandemic and record deficits to finance COVID corporate welfare. The latter fueled record profits and biting inflation while Ottawa abetted spiraling housing rents and deepening impoverishment.

Liberal foreign policy more than matched the hard-Right nature of the government’s corporate-enthusiast domestic agenda. Trudeau and his US-cultivated foreign minister Chrystia Freeland took up a neocon hard line to support Donald Trump 1.0 coup-making in Bolivia and Venezuela, picked a wise political fight with China on the Orange Menace’s behalf and then leveled up to join the conflict instigation dog-pile against Russia in Ukraine. To the bitter end of his tenure, Trudeau the Younger did not waver in his support for Israeli apartheid in its fascist prosecution of a second larger al-Nakba in Palestine.

Of course, there was the odd success here and there. Using flowery climate change rhetoric as cover, the Liberals turned a steady public subsidy flow to fossil fuel polluters into a veritable flood. The advocacy NGO, Environmental Defence, estimated this tsunami of handouts reached $18.6 billion in 2023 and an astonishing $29.6 billion in 2024. A good chunk of this oil-rinsing public largesse has gone towards paying a high market value for the leaky Trans Mountain pipeline while upgrading the abomination with the obvious future plan of selling it back to corporate profit looters for a song.

The most prominent economic move of the Trudeau decade was the renewal of corporate free trade along lines led by the Trump cabal in 2020. The energetic MAGA administration got its way by working out a deal with Mexico beforehand, successfully whipsawing the befuddled Canadian delegation headed up by the mover and faker Freeland. The USMCA sequel to NAFTA has proven to be tremendously helpful in the current trade war started by Trump.

Alas, all this rightwing Liberal policy did nothing to mollify corporate resource interests—so dominant in the West—whose political wing, the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives, repeatedly assailed Trudeau as a dedicated communist.

Imitation may be a high form of flattery, however, Poilievre’s pale imitation of the American far-Right did little to endear the career MP to Herr Trump, who returned to the White House in January after a four-year golfing hiatus. Trump was weirdly and unintentionally helpful by threatening a national takeover on the eve of the federal election, thereby undoing a two-year Conservative lead.

With polling in January forecasting a 20+ point Tory margin over the prorogue-clinging Liberal regime, a landslide election win call for Poilievre began to quickly evaporate in February. By March 18th, two days after Mark Carney’s blowout party leadership win, the influential aggregate polling site, 338canada.com, was projecting  a narrow Liberal majority government.

Poilievre choked in the face of Trump’s gleeful promise to make Canada the American ‘51st state’ through the ‘economic force’ of tariffs. After weeks of denial about US annexation intentions, Trudeau in his final days as PM was strangely more potent while politically posthumous. Trudeau’s unequivocal call for a trade war response to sweeping Trump tariffs contrasted sharply with Poilievre’s three-week silence on the matter.

The historic comeback of the Bay St. Liberals against their Trumpy Tory foes resulted in a near-total consolidation of the April 28th vote into an American-style Democrat versus Republican situation. The combined Liberal-Conservative vote at 85% was the highest of any election since 1958. The smaller liberal parties have been devastated; the Bloc Québécois humbled by an imperial nationalist wave, the NDP cut off from official party supports and the Greens trimmed to recycled leader Elizabeth May’s single seat.

At the same time, neither of the large corporate parties got things entirely their way. The Poilievre Cons were blocked from power but nonetheless outperformed corporate polling, gaining two dozen ridings (including 13 from the NDP) and holding Carney three seats shy of a majority. The outcome of a third-time unlucky Liberal minority government denotes a decade of elite deadlock between the duopoly parties. 

In broad terms, leftists are yet again looking at an election outcome where all 343 seats have been won by rightwing parties tightly aligned on key questions of corporate economic control, endless business hand-outs and a massive war budget boost at the behest of Washington. With only regressive political leaders on deck, continuing Trump annexation threats foreshadow unprecedented anti-democratic dangers in Canada.

There is also, as ever, openings for building democratic politics anew, if only we would begin to do so. Part one of this essay starts with a surly survey of the election outcomes for the three main Anglo parties, i.e. the Bay St. Liberals, the Trumpy Tories and the Not Democratic Party. With that rundown of rightwing politics in hand, I turn to the main implications of April 28th in the way of elite appeasement of the Trump takeover threat and the open emergence of a far-Right fifth column aiming to start American annexation on the prairies.

Having offered so much cheer about the rightwing trajectory of the country towards a US far-Right takeover, this essay will conclude in part two with an examination of the longer-term political dynamics of the annexation threat in Canada and the strategic starting points of the democratic political struggle needed to combat regressive Trumpism and liberal appeasement in Canada.

The Great Gaslight

Progressive liberals are breathing a collective sigh of relief. The very worst Con option has been held at bay and our renewed Liberal rulers want us to think the worst has passed. A plurality of Canadians have succumbed to a spectacular gaslighting campaign which refashioned globalist banker Mark Carney into a national saviour against the Trump American threat. The great gaslight of 2025 was accomplished through remarkable PR, geopolitical posturing, the deployment of civic cynicism and the repackaging of hard-Right economics as the epitome of public interest.

Entering stage Right, Carney was introduced to our political scene through a highly effective choreographed interview with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in January which has since garnered 6.6 million views on YouTube. Riding a wave of officialdom accolades for saving capitalist economies from corporate malfeasance (first as Canada’s and then the UK’s central banker boss, both under deeply reactionary Tory governments) Carney projected tough talk against Trump while vanishing debate about the Trudeau decade in power.

Drawing on his background as an accomplished transatlantic economy czar, Carney’s pre-election week as unelected PM prioritized shuttle diplomacy with British PM Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. In doing so, Carney pulled off a master stroke of political obfuscation with media images and statements hinting at European support for Canadian sovereignty without any explicit reference to the Trump annexation threat.

Stronger than ever, civic cynicism in the liberal camp was promoted during the election from on high. Headlining this establishment push was the myth of ‘strategic voting’ which obscured, yet again, the vital lack of influence voters have on government policy and practise. The corporate class is the only organized force in politics and they prove that by ensuring all credibly contending parties are essentially dedicated to their rightwing prescriptions in government. The ‘strategic’ attempt to unite anti-Conservative votes at the riding level is effectively about putting the best placed rightwing liberal party in charge of appeasing the rich through austerity, privatization, regressive taxation and corporate welfare. 

The civil push for a consolidated liberal vote fell just short of a Carney majority, which many liberals feel would be better to have in dealing with Trump. Yet, to use the key examples of corporate free trade and public health care, successive Liberal and Conservative majorities have mightily advanced the Americanization of public policy. In the matter of free trade, the US-Canada treaty in 1989 was ratified by a second-term Brian Mulroney ‘Progressive Conservative’ majority. The NAFTA plunder sequel in 1994 was enacted without revision by the Jean Chrétien Liberal majority government despite their 1993 election pledge to renegotiate the agreement.

Public health care—the pride and joy of Canadian policy achievement—has been under siege from Americanized privatization for decades. After years of Mulroney Conservative squeezing of provincial health transfer rates, the Chrétien Liberal majority deepened the austerity blitz against health care in 1995. These federal policies drove deep provincial cuts which, in turn, created the morass in which our semi-privatized system languishes today. This disgraceful anti-democratic record was repeated by Trudeau the Younger when his 2015 majority regime carried out Harper-majority plans for a major cut to health care transfer rates in 2017.

And so the anti-public austerity stage is set today. In February, Carney stated his intention of unleashing another round of real-term health care and other social program cuts but quickly changed his story in the face of criticism. Yet, using the voice of the slavery-endowed King Charles III, Carney has confirmed an unprecedented assault on the federal contribution to public health and other services in the form of a 2% cap on nominal program spending.

The 2% cap will undoubtedly translate into unprecedented public provision cuts in real terms considering current heightened inflation alone. Adding in a recently announced maniacal war spending boost of 50% in just the next fiscal year alone plus billions in tax cut gimmicks and the policy equation clearly points to a concerted Liberal onslaught against what’s left of federal public health support.

On the Backfoot

The best liberal election night news story was the shock double pantsing of Pierre Poilievre. Trump deserves much of the credit by unloading a mountain of annexationist dung on the Con leader’s hitherto open road to the PMO. Adding hilariously gratuitous insult to considerable injury, Trump spared no public contempt for Poilievre who did not meet the President’s high standards for a ‘MAGA guy’.

The shortfall of the Conservative party on April 28th was highlighted by the embarrassing loss of Poilievre’s 20-year seat in Carlton to a well-targeted Liberal campaign. Even before Carney’s coronation as Liberal leader and PM, the prowess of the party’s PR machine was on full display in its honed attacks on Poilievre, correctly pigeon-holing him as a career politician lacking vocational experience all while plausibly casting the Tories as a political vassal of Trump. Now the lifelong MP will owe his return to Parliament in part to PM Carney’s good graces, a debt that is certain to be collected in due course.

Poilievre’s Con campaign was effective in its tactical deployment of mobilizing rallies. Hiding from local debates drew poor reviews but many of the Trumpy candidates would likely have made things worse for the party by actually showing up. On the other hand, Tory regressive messaging was laughably low-rent and muddled, combining a robotic MAGA-lite war on woke (implausibly masquerading as a ‘Canada First’ response to Trump!) with petty decoy outrage around a trimmed-down carbon tax limited to industrial polluters and the total non-danger of convicted mass murderers being given early release. All while praising the mass murder of Palestinians by retro-colonial Israel, lamely deflecting the genocidal blame onto Iran and Hamas.

Facing a media establishment that leaned strongly towards a rightwing banker as the next Prime Minister, the Conservatives tried to counter this trend with a public appeal from a heavily bleached version of the last Con PM, Stephen Harper. The resurrected ghost of Conservative past pitched the regressive case for federal power by testifying that Poilievre was the better former employee over Carney to lead and fix the country but good. The best part of Harper’s propaganda broadcast was its short 50-second length, presumably to aid his speedy return to the crypt before sunrise.

In at least the mid-term, the federal Conservative party is in a vulnerable political place between a rabid Trumpian annexation wing, a pragmatically plunder-minded Doug Ford Ontario faction and the broader public which reviles Herr Trump and his odious gloating over the prospect of a hostile takeover. The maverick sheen of the Tories’ Convoy-auxiliary wing has faded precisely at the moment in which the party is widely seen as traitors by the liberal majority.

Orange Crush

In an even more devastating repeat of the 1974 election—in which David Lewis’ NDP lost half their seats as punishment for supporting a Trudeau the Elder Liberal minority government—Jagmeet Singh’s formal backing of Trudeau’s last term directly led the Not Democrats to a historic worst result. The NDP’s 1.2 million vote draw was down a whopping 60% from 2021 and their narrow hold on seven seats was well short of the 12 needed for official party status.

By banishing the Not Democrats to shit party status in the House of Commons, the electorate clearly spurned the NDP’s case for Liberal collaboration which rested upon ruthlessly means tested dental- and pharma-care programs. These policy trophies were poor camouflage for the NDP’s support of rightwing corporate free trade and mountains of COVID corporate welfare. Nor did Singh’s election Hail Mary passes for improved unemployment remuneration, higher taxes on the rich or ending public handouts for the fossil fuel cartel resonate with the public. None of those items were part of NDP demands for the confidence and supply agreement struck with the Liberals in 2022.

Few will mourn the clown-car wreck of NDP 2025. Pitiful to the last, Singh’s election night resignation speech began by congratulating Carney and offering his steamrolled party’s support for the Liberals’ kabuki fight with Trump as part of ‘Team Canada’. However, the Not Democrats’ sidecar status in government was quickly jettisoned by Carney at a press conference on May 2nd who engaged queries about a new agreement with the NDP with a contemptuous, “why?” Why, indeed. There are much better partners to be found in the Conservatives or even the bloquistes.

The future of the Not Democrats looks even dimmer. Despite having election support from BC and Manitoba Premiers David Eby and Wab Kinew, each busy running ‘open for business’ regimes, Alberta’s NDP opposition leader Naheed Nenshi quickly responded to the electoral fiasco by formally breaking the automatic membership link between its provincial section and the ruined federal party.

Don Davies, one of the seven shipwreck survivor MPs, has promised as interim leader to conduct a “thorough review” of the disaster in parallel with a leadership contest. In a May 7th statement, which should have been accompanied by a laugh track, Davies contended that the coming party review will be an “open, grassroots process” which highlights the need to “reconnect with working people and show them that the NDP is their party, the one that fights and delivers for them.”

This bold statement to restore the NDP as the chief political patron of the working class is a rhetorical contrast to decades of lionizing business interests and the ‘middle class’, not to mention the staunchly rightwing priorities of the governing NDP in BC and Manitoba. Citing the party disaster review as a grassroots process also clashes with the longstanding bureaucratic marketing orientation of NDP campaigns. The comic claim of a grassroots return is strongly belied by a leadership race which requires an obscene $150k entrance fee for candidates, five times that of the 2017 contest.

Having spent the 2025 Elections Canada limit of $35m—a party record—to wind up akin to the Titanic, the NDP is like an underwater gambler desperately seeking a credit extension, so the outrageous leadership fee is an understandable cash grab. However, given the historic low flicker of the party whose only evident purpose is to advance political and professional careers, how many ambitious NDPers will pony up this king’s ransom for the dubious privilege of captaining this capsized ship?

So, what will the Not Democrats learn from their disaster review? Days after the wipeout, NDP press secretary Mélanie Richer firmly landed on the ‘fault in the stars’ narrative, “If you remove the geopolitical situation…you would look at the party and you would think they'd be running a perfect, beautiful campaign." In other words, the federal NDP’s worst ever performance was in spite of the party’s campaigning perfection. Add the tokens of impermanent means-tested programs enacted late in the Liberal-NDP coalition arrangement and what we have here—by Not Democrat logic—is wicked bad luck and an ungrateful public.

The Art of Appeasement

Carney is undoubtedly a more compelling rightwing leader for the corporate class than either his loathsome rival or dithering predecessor. Carney has struck a careful tone in dealing with the Trump threat, balancing a formal opposition to American annexation with a demonstrated desire to maintain the subsidiary character of Canada’s relationship with the US. Carney has flashed policy appeasement signals to Trump in the way of a border crackdown—advanced by recent draconian legislation aimed against migrants and refugees—and, more significantly, in pledging a mad run in endless military spending.

Military appeasement takes its most concentrated and harmful form in plans to accede to the arbitrary NATO spending demand of 2% national GDP on war outlays. NATO demands are in fact American dictates, as that organization (founded in 1949 to start World War Three with the Soviet Union) has never been anything other than a vassal alliance for Washington under the thin pretense of collective defence.

Demonstrating this basic American-dominated reality, Herr Trump used the NATO 2% demand as a racketeering crusade in his first twisted term in office. With the Canadian war budget currently at $40 billion annually, Carney’s pledge to meet the Washington 2% dictate by March 2026 will result in at least $20 billion more in spending per year going forward. Most of this will be in corporate purchases of aircraft and naval vessels which at this point are procured predominantly from the USA, i.e., the only country with plans to annex Canada!

Now Trump 2.0 has maniacally raised the military extortion call to a lunatic 5%, endorsed on May 26th by NATO’s chief military bureaucrat, Mark Rutte. The next day, Carney proclaimed that Canada would jump onto the outlandish ReArm Europe scheme while his defence minister David McGuinty brought Christmas early that same week to a military industrial vampire conference, putting them on notice that an avalanche of public handouts was on the way.

Never to be outdone even by himself, Trump is scaling the most ludicrous heights in war procurement with his demented half trillion-plus US dollar mirage of a Reaganite Star Wars 2 ‘missile defence’ scheme dubbed as the “Golden Dome”. Giving up everything but the pretense of geopolitical independence, Carney immediately put his hands up for Canada to be included in this doomsday project. Trump relayed in May that Canada’s racketeering fee for the Golden Dome will be $61 billion American and in June raised the ante to $71b US, all while repeating US annexation designs on the country.

Even in the realm of trade—the one area which Carney claims to be holding the line against the American threat—the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta revealed that federal resolve against Trump is less solid than presented. In spite of the unprecedented world trade war declared by Trump, which includes steep tariffs against the other six apparent allies in the G7, the alliance’s finance ministers produced a Trump-pleasing statement which alludes to China as the prime trade trouble-maker in the world today. This is proof positive that the other G7 nations, like those in NATO, are pliant vassals of the evermore demanding US overlord.

While pursuing policy appeasement, Carney has also downplayed Trump’s annexation threats, starting with his first phone call encounter with the MAGA strongman on March 28th. At this time, Carney sought to reassure voters that Trump expressed ‘respect’ for Canadian sovereignty and was not shy about taking the credit for this apparent shift in attitude.

Carney’s soft-pedaling fable was revealed in the election campaign’s last week by an unhelpful media which reported that the actual conversation began with an opening Trump monologue about how great Canada will have things as the ‘51st state’. Even with this revelation, Carney glossed over the matter claiming “the president says lots of things”, that Trump (really deep down presumably) does in fact ‘respect’ Canadian sovereignty and that annexation is simply a non-starter.

The in-person follow-up at the Ogre Office on May 6th followed in the train of the initial phone call, with Trump waxing poetic about the geographic ‘beauty’ of an annexed Canada. Carney amiably responded that “the owners of Canada” have different ideas, downplaying the issue altogether in favour of the ‘artistic’ deal-making Trump is so famous for.

Carney’s appeasement orientation to Trump is matched by Premiers who have all embraced the current US-NATO 2% GDP dictate with no concern about how a jacked-up federal war budget will impact provincial public services. Nor is Trump the only malignant actor being appeased by the Canadian establishment. Provincial governments across the country are ramping up corporate welfare schemes under the cover of Trump’s tariff war as well as legislating autocratic power grabs to expedite the profit looting of the country’s natural resources.

The most outrageous examples of these cartel-appeasing autocratic power grabs are being undertaken in Ontario and BC. Ontario Premier Ford’s Bill 5 mandates the creation of ‘special economic zones’ where provincial and local laws do not apply. In BC, Premier Eby’s Bills 14 and 15 enable cabinet authority to also override provincial and local statutes for fast-track approval of infrastructure and resource plunder projects.

Prairie Annexation Operation

Things can always get worse politically and the stage is set for exactly that. Despite their setback on April 28th, the American-backed far-Right is again taking the political initiative to launch annexation ballots in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

During the election, Preston Manning (the founder of today’s virulent strain of regressive conservatism) weighed in via column pulpit to resurrect the flim-flam of Western alienation as cover for ending any limits on corporate resource looting. Making political disfranchisement strictly a regional as opposed to a class affair, Manning raised the threat of a constitutional crisis if the Cons did not get their electoral way. Concretely, the 1980s far-Right Reform Party founder pledged to organize rightwing political chaos through a Western constitutional conference. One does not have to be a genius to deduce that a push for regional separation based on far-Right premises is a thin cover for American annexation.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had already put herself forward to Trump as Canada’s chief Quisling in a Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage last November. Immediately after helping her Con party lose the election (by encouraging the Trump cabal in a Breitbart News interview to shamelessly intervene through a tariffs pause to help Poilievre win) Smith announced a major decrease in the number of electors required to trigger referendum campaigns. The National Post reported on April 30th that Smith’s planned rejig would cut a referendum-triggering threshold set at 20% of registered voters—around 600,000—to 10% of the last provincial election turnout numbers, dropping the voter bar to approximately 175,000.

Quisling Smith insists her move is all about direct democracy and has nothing to do with the separation question being prepped by far-Right astroturf fronts. Incredulously playing innocent under protestations for a ‘national unity settlement’, Smith issued during the election a six-month ultimatum of Ottawa to accede to 10 demands, all of which are directly dedicated to establishing in effect an American corporate petrochemical dictatorship.

Smith’s ultimatum includes more than merely junking practically every legal obligation on Canada’s top polluting corporate criminals. First off, the Quisling-in-Chief is pressing Ottawa to bulldoze both provincial and Aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution by killing BC’s oil tanker ban, ending equalization payments and punching pipelines in every direction through native territories.

In regards to the US, Trump’s loyal Albertan Governor is calling on the federal government to disavow in advance any restriction on fossil fuel exports to America while the Empire trashes Canada’s economy through a trade war explicitly aimed at annexation.

In short, Alberta’s maniacal Premier is engaging in a grotesque extortion campaign on behalf of the oil and gas conglomerates which have looted the province for decades while leaving an estimated quarter trillion dollar clean-up for the public to swallow. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has followed suit in issuing a de facto ultimatum for corporate concessions from Ottawa as well as in playing dumb while aiding separation ballot efforts.

The establishment response to the Smith gambit has been to give a sympathetic hearing to the supposed regional grievances of Alberta while urging appeasement, as with Trump. Carney has already signaled his eagerness to meet with Smith and address her outrageous ultimatum. CBC radio is following this far-Right enabling lead with regular normalizing coverage to this mendacious annexation campaign which began the day after the election under the dubious cover of regional separatism.

The establishment is also keen to make no effort to follow the money and influence behind shadowy fascist groups which are driving the annexation campaign like the subtly named Alberta-USA Foundation and the Republican Party of Alberta. This dutiful lack of vigilance is helping clear the way for Trump’s own version of a ‘color’ counter-revolution in Canada.

Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a leftwing writer and political organizer in BC.