To some degree, we always overinterpret elections. They can be decided by differences in proportion so small that, if the election had been held in a crowded barn and people had shouted out a voice vote, you would have had no idea who won, and yet even the tiniest margins become signals of historical inevitability. As with our most recent Presidential election, a small squeeze is amplified into an immense triumph. This is, of course, why we have elections not by voice vote but by voting booth—and, in Canada, by secure, old-fashioned paper ballots. In the Canadian federal election on Monday, the Liberal Party, led by the economist and banker Mark Carney—who had taken over the Prime Ministership in March, following the resignation, after a decade in power, of Justin Trudeau—won about forty-four per cent of the popular vote. The Conservatives, led by the right-wing populist Pierre Poilievre, came in second, with about forty-one per cent, and so Carney and his party will form a minority government in Canada’s British-style Parliament, needing help from the third and fourth parties—the Francophone nationalist Bloc Québécois and the social-democratic New Democratic Party—to pass legislation, but with a clear edge in seats.

It was a close election, but, for once, an uncomplicated result with real meaning. As recently as January, the Liberals trailed the Conservatives by almost twenty points in the polls, owing to a wave of severe, if sometimes incoherent, dissatisfaction with Trudeau. Carney, a ridiculously accomplished technocrat, who has been the head of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, turned this around, and he did it exclusively because Donald Trump had threatened Canada, and Carney seemed a better barrier—in plain English, a better general to rally the country—than the unduly Trumpite Poilievre.

Poilievre can point to a better result for the Conservatives than in the previous election, and might therefore keep his leadership; on the other hand, he lost his own seat in Parliament, in a usually reliably Conservative riding in Ottawa, a personal repudiation that suggests that he is simply not a seductive politician. Originally from Alberta, he has led the Party only since 2022, and his public support for the truckers’ occupation of Ottawa to protest COVID restrictions, though popular with a part of his base, frightened many Canadians with its implicit Trumpian extremism. As a Conservative political lieutenant in Quebec and ex-M.P. who recently quit the Party remarked, Poilievre, when it seemed advantageous, adopted a very Trumpy and, for Canada, very atypical brand. “The party uses the same recipes as Trump: The anger, the rage that people have against the system, it feeds it and uses intellectual shortcuts that, in my eyes, do no honor to the [political] profession. The attacks on social media, the half-truths,” he noted, “We’re looking at all costs for the 30-second extract that will go viral, to feed the base.”

One can look around and find Canadian peculiarities in the election results: the Western provinces are still hostile to the Liberal Party, but Quebec, its historic base, has, after some electoral flirtations elsewhere, once again embraced it. (The historic role of the Liberal Party, particularly under the Prime Ministership of Justin Trudeau’s imposing father, Pierre Trudeau, has been to keep Quebec within confederation—a role at which it has been astonishingly successful.) Meanwhile, the N.D.P., the social-democratic party, which has deep and distinguished roots in Western Canada, was almost extinguished, in part because the progressive vote migrated to the Liberals. Like Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh, the N.D.P.’s leader, was defeated in his own riding; he has since stepped down from his party’s leadership. And, of course, Canada being Canada, the CBC, in the midst of its election-night coverage, headlined the sad news that the curling team of Peterman and Gallant had been defeated, in the strangest of all national sports, in a bonspiel at the mixed-doubles world championships—right there, alongside the election.

But the election was won and lost on Trumpism and its perils. Many Americans don’t take Trump’s threats to Canada seriously—or seriously enough—and dismiss them with the same exhausted shrug that too many of Trump’s words inspire. We hear the repetitive ribbon of talk about annexation and the fifty-first state, and when we do we hear clownish trolling. In Canada, he doesn’t sound like a troll. He sounds like a threat. Trump’s interest in annexation, and his claim of some right to do it—the Canadian border is “just an artificial line”—is clear, and, though he does not (yet) use the language of military conquest, what other form could annexation of a neighboring country that doesn’t want to be annexed take? It is significant, as with Greenland, that, though the threat is only implicit, it is always implicit. In his rants about annexing Canada, Trump does not add “if they want it” or “if only they would hold a referendum on joining our union,” or use language showing respect for the country’s history and sovereignty, or say anything that would suggest, to not overly paranoid Canadian ears, that he intends a courtship, not a conflict. Instead he speaks the language of power and domination, the Putinist language directed at Ukraine before the war: your land should be ours and will be soon. It seems absurd to have to recall, but we should, that conducting aggressive warfare against unoffending states is what the United States, after the Second World War, defined as a crime during the Nuremberg Trials, stating that to initiate a war of aggression “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime.”

One also hardly needs to illustrate, as the last in a long line of more expert explainers, why the whole notion of Canada treating the U.S. “unfairly” in trade, the ostensible reason for the assaults on what used to be our beloved neighbor to the north, is also absurd. One can cite and correct particular details about this fiction: for instance, essentially the sole cause of the trade deficit is Canadian crude oil sent from Canada to fuel the United States, something that is clearly in America’s interest. But even to make this argument is to get trapped in the absurdity of the belief that trade deficits are noxious, when they are not—no more, to use a standard but helpful analogy, than the fact that I spend more at the supermarket across the street than it spends on me shows that the supermarket is exploiting my family. The deficit is in my interest: I give them money; they give me onions. We could grow our own onions, but it seems simpler to buy them across the street. And, in any case, Canada couldn’t become the “Fifty First State” even if it wanted to, because Canada isn’t one “state” but many provinces and regions and peoples, each with passionate histories and interests of their own.

Canada’s history is a beautiful one of decisive compromise and coalition building, those distinct if unglamorous liberal virtues. This is why Carney’s acceptance speech on Monday night—“victory speech” would be an inopportune phrase, as it didn’t have that tone—was in so many ways ominous and foreboding and unprecedented in Canadian history. One would have expected him to tiptoe around the issue of Trump’s aggression or, on a night of triumph, to paint a happier or conciliatory face on it. He didn’t. “As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” Carney said, bluntly. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. . . . That will never, ever happen.” Immediately, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, congratulated Carney and said, pointedly, that “the bond between Europe and Canada is strong—and growing stronger. . . . We’ll defend our shared democratic values.”

It would be one of the stranger, if in a way more inspiring, ironies of our time if what is happening in America ends by stiffening the sinews and strengthening the ties between the remaining liberal democracies. It feels absurd to have to write that sentence. But here we are. ♦