Trade A Top Issue In Canadian Elections

President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements, implementation, and abrupt pauses are causing markets to gyrate, threatening recession.  In Canada, along with the loss of a reliable North American trading agenda, Donald Trump has now also hijacked a normal election agenda.

Canadian political candidates are facing an overarching issue on the campaign trail - Trump’s trade actions.  So, as election day approaches on April 28^th, the big question on voters’ minds is what political party can best represent Canada, and which party leader is best qualified to face-off with the Trump administration to regain a reliable and operational free trade agreement.

There are several political parties in the race, but there are only two real contenders, the Liberal Party led by Mark Carney, and the Conservative Party led by Pierre Poilievre.  Carney’s Liberals continue to lead in polls over the Conservatives in eastern Canada, and especially in heavily populated Ontario, which is the epicenter of Canada’s automotive manufacturing economy.

While recent polls show the Conservatives narrowing the gap as the campaign moves into the Conservative-leaning provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, a political analyst who is also the former New Democrat Party leader, Tom Mulcair, says that even if the Conservatives retain most of the western Canada seats, it won’t be nearly enough for an election win.  The Liberal’s strength and number of parliamentary seats in Toronto, in Quebec’s Montreal, along with Atlantic Canada, overwhelms the numbers of voters and seats in central-western Canada.

“In provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Conservatives, they’ll be winning seats by 15,000-20,000 votes, but that’s still just one seat," Mulcair noted.  "The Liberal vote, for example, in the greater Toronto area, has more seats than Alberta and Saskatchewan together.  So, the Liberals are still looking at a massive haul in Ontario because they see Trump as the overarching threat.  And in Atlantic Canada, and in the province of Quebec.”

British Columbia has historically leaned to the left, with NDP and Green Party candidates typically leading the field. But Mulcair says with a global trade war threatening to slow down Canada’s largest shipping port at Vancouver, many typically left-leaning BC voters are considering throwing their support to the Carney Liberals this time around.

“Even in B.C., we’re seeing that the Liberals are tapping into a large pool of votes," Mulcair said.  "The Green Party has always had favor with a fair number of voters out there, and the NDP. But those votes, many of them anyway, are drifting over to the Liberal side, something that the Poilievre Conservatives just can’t do. They don’t have access to that pool of other voters from other parties.”

In rural Canada, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture is pressing all political parties to make agriculture and agrifood a national priority when negotiators return to the USMCA trade talks table.

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