Mark Carney’s Liberals managed to form a minority government this election in part thanks to a surge of support from progressive voters.
The New Democratic Party won just seven seats, down from 24 at Parliament’s dissolution, and lost official party status. The party’s seven-year leader, Jagmeet Singh, failed to win his own seat and resigned on election night.
The NDP’s losses raise questions about the future of progressive politics in Canada, and whether the party will be able to extract significant policy concessions from this Liberal government.Â
To discuss these questions, Canadian Affairs reporter Sam Forster spoke with Matt McManus, a Canadian author and political scientist who lectures at the University of Michigan.
SF: What role do you think a distinctly progressive faction could play within the Liberal Party’s big-tent structure, and how might the party balance ideological purity with pragmatism?
MM: I think here it’s important to stress that Justin Trudeau, for all he campaigned on as a progressive political figure, by and large stuck to the centre-left playbook that Liberals will sometimes indulge in. So we got things like legalized marijuana, which is not inconsiderable. … But we didn’t get something like a revision of the first-past-the-post system … That’s something that progressives have been calling for for decades now.Â
So I think that the gap between someone like Carney and Trudeau can be easily overstated. It’s important to remember that a lot of the more progressive policies we got at the back end of the Trudeau administration were really pushed by the New Democratic Party, which [the Liberals] needed to rely upon for electoral support — things like the very generous benefits during the COVID pandemic, obviously the expansion of dental care.
But the Liberal Party is probably not going to be in a particularly ambitious mood in terms of advancing reformist, let alone radical kinds of policies when the country is facing an existential threat [from U.S. President Donald Trump]. If anything, the atmosphere right now seems to be to batten down the hatches, tighten your belt up and hope for the best. And that tends to usually induce a pretty conservative mood on the part of policymakers.
SF: The Liberals and Conservatives collectively captured roughly 80 per cent of the vote. Do you see this as evidence that Canada is moving toward an American-style, two-party system? And what do you think that would mean for left-wing politics in Canada?
MM: No, I don’t think so. I mean, look, there’s always a temptation after a pretty big election like this to say something really exciting and sexy like, ‘The New Democratic Party is dead.’ ‘The Green Party is dead.’ ‘The Bloc is essentially irrelevant.’
Well, I’m old enough to remember that people have said that in the 1990s, and then they said that again in the 2000s. And now here we are in 2025, and people are saying it again.
[Parties] are very capable of rejuvenating their fortunes under the right conditions. Think about the 2011 election. The Conservative Party of Canada won a considerable majority. The New Democratic Party was sitting pretty at over 100 seats [as] the Official Opposition. And many people were concerned that the Liberal Party was going to be relegated to irrelevance for the foreseeable future, something that I myself slightly hoped for. Well, they’ve now been in power for about 10 years, and it looks like they’re going to be around for at least another two, three, maybe even four years, depending on the circumstances.
SF: How do you think the left wing in Canada could capitalize on this moment to advance progressive policies in areas like economic inequality or climate policy without being overshadowed by considerations of economic nationalism or other crisis-driven narratives?
MM: It is beneficial that the Liberals didn’t win a majority, which means that they’re going to need to depend upon the New Democrats. They might turn to the [separatist] Bloc, but they’ll probably be a little bit more hesitant to do so given the connotations of that.
I can’t really foresee them working with Conservatives, unless it’s on something that’s of existential significance. That gives the New Democrats … a little bit of traction to try to shift the Liberals leftwards on policy considerations that are important to progressive Canadians.
SF: Do you think that the Liberal Party will struggle in the coming years to grow their support with people who are more focused on issues of social justice and labour given Mark Carney’s personal background?
MM: Carney is something of an enigma. If you read a lot of his work, he presents as pro-capitalist. But at the same time, [he is] somebody who draws very heavily on a figure like Adam Smith to point out that there are limitations to what markets can do.
That gives him a lot of ideological room to pivot, which of course is very in keeping with the attitude and the ideology of the Liberal Party of Canada, which has always prided itself on a certain level of pragmatism, realism and, of course, chasing power at all costs.Â
SF: Maintaining an ideologically diverse caucus is an act of achieving political middle grounds. Do you think there are certain files — whether those be energy policy, foreign policy or social welfare programs — that could be the undoing for the Liberal Party in this upcoming Parliament?
MM: Well, I wouldn’t normally say this, but I actually think it’s clear that foreign policy is very much on Canadians’ minds right now. And the electorate is going to be extremely judgmental about how well Mark Carney and the Liberal Party handle Donald Trump and our interactions with the United States … So far, I want to say, strategically, I think they’ve done a pretty good job for themselves. Carney has clearly rode a wave of Canadian nationalism far more effectively than his political opponents.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity and concision. The embedded video above shows the entire interview.
