The only reason most Americans care about Canada these days is that Donald Trump keeps joking that the nation to our north could avoid massive tariffs by becoming the 51st state. Ironically enough, that could explain why Canada’s Conservative Party blew a 20-point lead to lose yesterday’s national election.

As we entered 2025, the Canadian Liberal Party was on its heels. Justin Trudeau, the party’s leader and the nation’s prime minister since 2015, resigned in January amidst intense dissatisfaction with his policies. At the time, our Thomas Gallatin wrote, “Thanks in part to Trudeau’s climate alarmist policies, Canada’s fiscal deficit has ballooned to $61.9 billion — almost $22 billion more than the projected deficit of $40 billion in April. Given this situation, Donald Trump’s threat of raising a 25% tariff against Canadian goods effectively broke Trudeau’s government.”

Roughly 80% of Canadian exports go to the U.S. Tariffs hurt — a lot.

As Rupa Subramanya reports for The Free Press, “The Liberals have run Canada since Justin Trudeau became prime minister a decade ago, but their time in power has been beset by soaring inflation during Covid, an affordability crisis, stagnating income, and high unemployment. Over that 10-year span, the Canadian economy has grown by just 1.4 percent.”

Trudeau’s approval rating bottomed out at a little over 20%, and his party was staring down a wipeout in national elections. As has happened here, however, the “red wave,” so to speak, never materialized.

Not only did Conservatives fail to capitalize on Liberal malaise, but party leader Pierre Poilievre even lost his own seat that he’d held since 2004.

Trump’s trolling of “Governor Trudeau” and making Canada the 51st state was pretty funny at the time, mostly because it so thoroughly exposed Trudeau’s weakness. But then Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who had never been elected to office before, took over as Liberal leader and prime minister. Meanwhile, Trump wouldn’t quit repeating the joke (even doing so again Monday morning as voters went to the polls), and Canadians clearly became more than a little annoyed, rallying to the Liberals as the best way to stand up to the American bully.

(As a side note, annexing Canada is a terrible idea unless you want Democrats to win every national election for years to come.)

One voter observed, “Canadians saw Poilievre as Trump-like,” which they saw as a bad thing. Another voter said, “Trump’s interference took the spotlight off the Liberals’ record. A lot of Canadians forgot what happened before Trump turned the election into a circus.” Still another lamented, “I honestly can’t believe how some people can just forget about the complete disaster the last 10 years have been, all because of some dumb comments from Trump. We are in for a very rough few years.”

Carney certainly gave Trump some attention in his victory remarks. “Americans want our land, our resources, our water, our country,” he told supporters in Ottawa. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we shall never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and, above all, we have to take care of each other.”

It was hardly all Trump’s fault, of course. Canada’s Conservatives could have run a better campaign to maintain their lead. Poilievre never quite seemed to pivot from running against Trudeau, even after Carney ditched Trudeau’s much-hated carbon tax. That’s great for Canada, but it deprived Conservatives of a key line of attack. Many Canadians think having a banker at the helm will also stabilize the nation’s finances.

Even in what amounted to a seismic defeat because of the change in momentum, the Conservatives outperformed past results. They won more seats than in 2021 and got more of the vote than when they last held power after the 2011 election. Minor parties lost votes to the Liberals, though it’s not clear that the Liberals will hold a true majority.

The true test will come in the next few months. How will Carney and the Liberals approach Canada’s relationship with the U.S.? If Carney keeps his promise to rework a deal, it may lead to speculation that this is the result Trump and his team preferred all along.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.