My Thoughts on the 2025 Federal Election

 

 The results of the 2025 Canadian federal election are very disappointing to me. It is typical in Canadian politics to replace a governing party once they have been in power for around ten years. It is an interesting phenomenon in Canada that we tend to vote out an old government rather than vote in a new one. Since the Liberal Party has lead the government for the last ten years and had recently seen unheard of low polling numbers before the resignation of Justin Trudeau as the Prime Minister, it was a safe bet for quite some time that the Liberal Party was going to be soundly defeated at the next federal election by the Conservative Party.

Justin Trudeau won the position of Prime Minister in 2015 after running on a platform of honesty and transparency, but his legacy is one of having lead the most corrupt and scandal ridden government in the history of Canada. Trudeau himself had several ethics violations of his own plus those of his cabinet ministers, as well as several government committees investigating numerous single-bidder government contracts awarded contrary to government rules, botched roll-outs of far over budget government programs and overall mismanagement of people, monies and policies. By the spring of 2022, Canadians had had enough of the Justin Trudeau Liberal government.

The burr in the saddle of Canadians getting what they wanted, which was an election, was, again and again, Jagmeet Singh and his NDP Party. It was the official coalition between the Liberals and the NDP that kept Trudeau in power for the last three years of his tenure, yet Trudeau still did nothing to try to gain back the trust of the Canadian people; his government still became embroiled in scandal after scandal. Regardless of, and maybe because of the coalition, when it came to December of 2024, the Liberals were polling lower than they may have ever polled in the history of their party and the pressure on Justin Trudeau to leave was mounting from within the party.

To be honest, I thought that the arrogant narcissism of Trudeau would not allow him to leave the party before the next election, which was slated to take place in October of 2025, but it seems that the pressures within the party got to him and he decided that he should step down. I suspect that he did so more to protect his own legacy than to benefit the party - he did not want to wear the implosion of the Liberal party around his own neck. His vanity did finally win out, just in the opposite way of that which I expected and hoped for.

Then Mark Carney enters the stage in shining armour and riding a white horse (of the Canadian economic apocalypse). Carney gained the support of the party elite and the Chinese People's Party and easily won the leadership of the Liberal Party. There were some shady shenanigans in the Liberal party leadership race, not the least of which included the disqualification of two candidates for unspecified reasons including one that could have legitimately challenged Carney's ideas, as well as the disqualification of 250,000 of the 400,000 registered Liberal party members who were not allowed to vote for their own leader; again without a satisfactory explanation. The result is that Mark Carney became the Prime Minister of Canada having attained that position with the votes of only about 0.375% of the Canadian electorate.

Since Mark Carney was not a sitting Member of Parliament (MP), he would be unable to enter Parliament, even though he was the leader of the government. So he did the only thing that he could do, and that was to dissolve Parliament and go to a federal election.

I have previously written a couple of articles (here and here) laying out many concerns, irregularities and potential conflicts of interest surrounding Mark Carney, but these articles remained completely unread prior to the election. There has now been some interest in them, but it is now too late. I do not have the readership wherein it would have made any difference in the outcome of the election, but it is my understanding that most Canadians who voted for Mark Carney are entirely unaware of these issues, due mainly to the fact that the legacy media in Canada either under reported on these issues or outright obfuscated them. It will eventually come out that Mark Carney has vested financial interests in numerous companies that will realize increases in value and profits as a result of his proposed plans as presented in the Liberal party platform, but now it is too late. I suspect that the boomer generation that made up the vast majority of Mark Carney's support will suffer from buyer's remorse before too long.

The federal election has ended with the Liberal party winning 169 seats (+15 seats), the Conservatives winning 144 seats (+16 seats), the Bloc Quebecois winning 22 seats (-13 seats), the NDP getting decimated, winning only 7 seats (-17 seats) and the Green Party winning only one seat (-1 seat).

The Green Party is always inconsequential, so I will ignore them as they should always be ignored.

The NDP were plagued by the decisions that Jagmeet Singh has made over the last three years. His coalition based support of the Liberal government cost him dearly. If he had broken his agreement with Trudeau in the spring of 2024 and forced an election at that time, the Conservatives would have won power with the NDP gaining the position of being the official opposition and Jagmeet would have looked like a savvy hero politician. The Liberals would have been relegated to third party status again, as what happened immediately before Justin Trudeau came in as their white horse riding saviour. But Jagmeet squandered the opportunity to have had an honourable place in political history due to his lack of political savvy and also potentially because he was eyeing his own personal prize of his pension, which he secured a mere two days before stating that his party would vote to bring down the Liberals at the next opportunity. That is too coincidental to ignore. 

If this is the case, Jagmeet placed his own personal gains above the good of his party and his country, and in that case he absolutely deserves to wear the decimation of his party around his neck and to have also lost his own seat and the leadership of the party. The NDP results are so bad that they have actually lost official party status, which means that they will receive no federal money to cover their operating expenses, they will not have any scheduled time in Question Period in Parliament, and they will no longer have any seats at any Parliamentary committees. This is a significant blow, but they may negotiate themselves out of it; more on that in a little bit. The results of the election are that the NDP lost 7 seats to the Liberals and 10 to the Conservatives, which in itself is interesting since a move from the NDP to the Conservatives is actually a switch from one side of the political spectrum to the other and is significant for the Conservatives.

The Bloc Quebecois (the Bloc) actually lost seats in this election, and they lost all but one of them to the Liberals. The Conservatives gained one seat from the Bloc and I think a new riding may have been formed for this election, which it appears that the Bloc failed to capture, accounting for the gains/losses differential. The Conservatives traditionally have a hard time winning seats in Quebec. This may be due to the fact that the Liberal Party historically tends to give more money to the province of Quebec in order to secure their support than Conservatives do. This amounts to vote buying, but it is completely legal and is an unfortunate part of Canadian politics that needs to die a sudden and traumatic death - but it likely never will. I am somewhat surprised that the Bloc lost 13 seats. Yves-François Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc, is actually an accomplished and skilled politician. I am surprised at the losses that he sustained. 

I believe I read that this is the best showing that the Conservatives have had since the 1980's. The Conservatives gained 16 seats, having stolen 17 seats from the Liberals and 10 from the NDP, as well as one each from the Bloc and the Greens, and I think that they must have also gained two seats in brand new ridings.  But they somehow also lost a separate 11 seats to the Liberals, including the seat of their leader Pierre Poilievre, which is something that I need to dive into because there are some questions that I have about that result.

The riding of Carleton has been held by Pierre for nearly 21 years and he has been a leader in the Conservative Party for most of his career. This is not the type of politician that tends to lose his seat, but his seat is the only incumbent seat that the Conservatives lost in the entire country. Just like Jagmeet's pension and his change in position regarding the Liberals, this seems too coincidental to ignore. First, it is highly unlikely that the leader of a party loses his seat even if he loses the election; but it is even more unlikely when the party makes significant gains across the country at the same time. Second, it was just four months ago that the Conservatives were polling at 50% approval across the entire country, with Pierre as their leader. Pierre made very few errors in this election campaign, and the attendance numbers of his rallies were HUGE! While Mark Carney managed to gather somewhere around 2000-2500 people at his biggest rally near Toronto (a typical Liberal stronghold), Pierre was pulling numbers as high as 3000, 4000, 5000 and up and up all across the country, including around Toronto. Pierre's popularity is very high across the country, so how is it that the riding that has elected him for 21 years has suddenly turned their backs on him? And he was defeated by a no name new comer. It makes no sense.

Then there is the issue of the Longest Ballot initiative which targeted only Pierre's riding. The Longest Ballot Committee is a movement by a group of people who want to see electoral change; namely they want to abolish the "first past the post" system that we have in Canada. I am not familiar enough with the details of the system or the goals of this group to go into more detail here, but I am sure that you can find out more information quickly online. This group entered so many individual candidates in the Carleton riding that the ballot was three feet long and had 91 names on it! Any voter in Carleton had to be very careful that they marked the correct circle after searching the ballot for the name that they wanted to mark. 

What really doesn't make sense to me is why Pierre's riding was the target of this action. They didn't go after all of the party leaders, only Pierre. But it was Justin Trudeau who ran on the promise to reform our elections away from the first past the post system all the way back in 2015, and he failed to even try to deliver on that promise in the decade that he held power. There is a good reason for this; the Liberals have the most to gain under this system, since the bulk of their support comes from the east side of the country where the counting starts. This means that the Conservatives have the most to gain from electoral reforms, yet it was the Conservatives that were targeted for this action?! There is no logic to this, unless they expected Pierre to form government and they thought they might sway him to their side by this action. As a result of this action 4,158 votes were placed with people who had no legitimate party and who had no chance of gaining the seat. IF all of these votes had gone to Pierre, he would have received 42,743, which would not be enough to win the riding according to the final count, and it is not likely that all of those votes would have gone to him had the other names not been there, but there is the possibility that voters in that riding were overwhelmed by the size of the ballot, and it is not inconceivable that many ballots got marked wrong by mistake. This would not favour any particular candidate, but the lack of simplicity and clarity on the ballot potentially affected the voting in some way or another.

I also won't put it past the Liberals to have engaged in some nefarious and potentially fraudulent activity to try to keep Pierre out of Parliament to their own gain. By losing his own seat, Pierre cannot enter Parliament in the same way that Carney couldn't without having been elected. Pierre plans to stay on as the party leader, which I support, but in order for him to be able to enter Parliament he will have to win a by-election in some riding somewhere. There have already been several winning Conservative MP's who have stated that they are willing to step away to allow Pierre to run in their riding, but the timing of the by-election is up to Mark Carney. He can wait up to six months to call that by-election, with a run-out period for the election at over 50 days, which will give him up to 230 days (7.5 months) of not having to face who is arguably the toughest opposition leader that the Parliament has seen in a long time. I fully expect Carney to wait that clock out because he is a coward who cannot defend his own policies outside of pure ideology. Pierre will chew him up when he regains a seat in Parliament. In the meantime, I expect Melissa Lantsman will do just fine in Pierre's absence.

Finally, we have the Liberal party, which I thank God was held to a minority government. For those of you who may not understand this, it means that the Liberals do not have enough seats in Parliament to push through whatever they want without having some support from the other parties. There has to be some cooperation in Parliament to pass anything.

The Liberals gained 15 seats in this election, gaining 11 each from the Conservatives and the Bloc and another 7 from the NDP., while losing the 17 previously mentioned seats to the Conservatives. They lost several seats in the Toronto area, which all went to the Conservatives, and which is, again, a complete shift to the opposite side of the political spectrum. I expected the Atlantic provinces to have a stronger showing for the Liberals as the polls seemed to indicate, but I am glad that they elected as many Conservatives as they did.

This has been a very interesting election to watch, that's for sure. The media and the pollsters were predicting a Liberal majority, and they did get close. I think what really shifted the trajectory of this election, and what the Conservatives failed to take into consideration (and I don't know how they could have), was the collapse of the Bloc. The collapse of the NDP was expected and the polls showed it. What is surprising is that most of those seats went Conservative. But the collapse of the Bloc may have had the most effect on how Parliament will work. 

Consider this, right now, the most likely division in Parliament will be the Liberals' 169 seats plus the NDP's 7 for a total of 176 seats, with the likelihood of the Green support as well bringing it to 177 seats on the left of the political spectrum. The Bloc will side with the Conservatives on almost everything, not because they are inherently conservative, but because they are inherently against the Liberals. So the Conservative and Bloc seat count is a combined 166 seats on the right side of the political spectrum.

While the NDP and the Liberal parties share certain ideological views, I doubt that the NDP will enter into another official coalition with the Liberals due to the fact that the result of the last coalition was their decimation in this election. They will most likely parlay their balance of power to acquire concessions from the Liberals in their presented bills, which is how Parliament is ideally supposed to work, but they have a very weak bench of potential leaders, so I don't hold out a lot of hope for strong negotiations from the NDP. That being said, the NDP is still more likely to side with the Liberals than the Conservatives, so we will be in a very similar situation as we were in the last Parliament, which is not good for Canadians.

The collapse of the Bloc will have the most effect on Parliament as follows. If the Bloc had not lost 11 seats to the Liberals but had retained those seats for themselves, that would have given the Liberals 158 seats, plus the NDP and Green for a total of 166 seats, but the Conservatives and the Bloc would have held 177 seats and would have had the balance of power against the left wing of Parliament. This would have resulted in the need for the Liberals to appease the NDP and the Bloc in order to accomplish anything, and contrarily, the Conservatives and the Bloc could have stopped all legislation that did not suit their goals in any way whatsoever. As it stands now, the Conservatives and the Bloc will be unable to stop the Liberals without the help of the NDP and the Liberals need only the NDP to pass legislation. The NDP again holds the balance of power.

What complicates things even further is the fact that the NDP have lost official party status. They are already saying that they will ask Parliament, that is all of the other parties, to change the rules to allow them to hold official party status. The only thing they can offer to the other parties is their support either with or against the government. 

I think it is very likely that Mark Carney will negotiate a type of coalition agreement with the NDP in exchange for official party status. This will guarantee some level of stability for Carney's government, but it could torpedo the last hopes of the NDP to even survive the next election. The plus for the Liberals is that if the NDP completely collapse, it is most likely that more of those seats will go to them than will go to the Conservatives, so the Liberals have the cards in that negotiation. But if the Liberals want to play hard ball with the NDP, there is the option of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Bloc with the NDP, which will likely be almost as fatal for the NDP, but will give the opposition control over the government and will leave the Liberals on very shaky ground indeed. On the plus side for the Liberals, the NDP cannot afford another election any time soon. They always take out a loan against the one building that they own when there is an election, but without official party status and the funds that come with it, I doubt they will pay that loan off very quickly if at all. They may have to claim bankruptcy; we'll have to wait and see.

In my opinion, the only way the NDP survives is to forego the petition for party status, or at least to not negotiate support for either side in order to get it, which will result in no change in their status. But, this may draw some otherwise die-hard NDP supporters to return to them in the next election, and they may eventually be able to rebuild the party from the ashes that Jagmeet left in the pursuit of his own happiness. I think for the NDP to collude with anyone is suicide, but they've shown little political savvy for many years already; whose to say that they will find some with Jagmeet gone.

One more note on this election. While I typically claim that it is very hard to affect the outcome of Canadian elections through fraudulent activities at the polling stations, there have been some anomalies in this election that I have been hearing of that have undermined my confidences in our system. I am a huge proponent of paper lists and paper ballots that are hand counted by individuals representing all parties. I can't picture a better system for security against electoral fraud than that, but there are weaknesses in the system that may have been exploited this time.

For example, I have heard third person accounts of people who went to the polls to vote only to be told that they had already been marked off the list of registered voters. In other words, their vote has already been claimed. One has to ask how this can happen if the poll workers are doing their jobs and verifying ID's prior to handing over a ballot. Along with this, there have been many reports of people receiving multiple voter ID cards for themselves or their family members; one of my own family members received two cards, one of which we destroyed. In hindsight, I wish we had brought it along to check if there were two entries on the register for that party member so that we could have dealt with that properly. If you show up with two cards you will not be able to vote twice, but if there are multiple cards then logic dictates that there is the possibility that there are multiple entries on the register for that voter; one per card sent out. IF a poll worker is not informed of multiple cards or IF they fail to strike out names and addresses that appear on their list multiple times, maybe with slight variations in the name or address, this leaves room for fraud to be committed at the polling stations with little opportunity to catch it. The fraudster would simply need to look at the list of registered voters, find any un-struck names that appear to belong to someone who has (or has not) noted already, and a ballot can be claimed for those individuals without their knowledge and without informing anybody else, filled out for the preferred candidate and put in the voting box to be counted as a legitimate ballot.

There have also been reports of people taking the voting boxes from the advance polls home with them, where it is not impossible for fraud to be committed in the safety and comfort of their own home; this is in violation of the rules, but it appears to have happened anyway. Because our system is truly secret, there is no way to for an individual to know if their name and address were used fraudulently to sway the outcome in any given riding, and no way to prove it if they do suspect it when they find that their vote has already been claimed.

I am not saying that this has happened, but the possibility is there. We need people of integrity running and manning our polling stations, but as our Canadian political system gets more divisive as we have been seeing over the last few elections, who is to say that there won't be some people who see an opportunity to help their preferred candidate and who take it. There is little chance of legal charges being laid and even less of a chance of conviction if someone gets caught. The perpetrator can simply claim that they made a mistake and that it only affected one or two ballots, and there is no way to prove otherwise. This is why it is important for all citizens to pay attention when they go to vote. If they see anything that is not normal, or if they have any problems with voting, especially that their vote has already been claimed, speak up. I have heard that this year Elections Canada was not available to respond to the complaints; that may be part of the problem, but I am trying not to become conspiratorial here.

All in all, I still tend to trust our electoral system overall. One huge issue that likely swayed this election in particular, and which will likely be a problem in the future as well, is the problem of uninformed, or misinformed voters, and I will state plainly that this is due to a populace that is first, too lazy to learn what the platforms and who the candidates are and second, puts too much trust in a compromised media. The media tells us what they want us to think, not what we need to know, and since the Liberals are subsidizing the media with tax payer dollars, do you really think that the media will do anything to jeopardize that cash cow by calling the Liberals out on anything? People need to learn to look to other sources for their information. 

But even more so, I think that we get the government that we deserve. God is ultimately in charge of who governs a country. I have prayed a fair bit about this election result, even as I watched it unfold on election night, and I repeatedly got the sense that God has a plan. That plan may be the fall of this country, and can we really say that we don't deserve that? We support gay marriage and sex changes for adults and for minors. We kill our old, our sick and our unborn for convenience. Our government not only condones drug use but also provides the drugs for free to our addicts, leading to 50,000 deaths due to overdose in the last ten years. We send our money overseas to developing nations advance the ideologies of feminism, climate policy, 'social justice', abortion, euthanasia and DEI among so many other ungodly ideologies, and this is done while our own people are suffering and our finances are being destroyed. We are not managing our own home well and we are influencing others to do the same. Until Canadians turn back to God, we can expect to have to live under corrupt leaders who will lead us to our own destruction while they profit off of their own policies. This is a call to all Canadians to turn back to God, and He will deliver us from our troubles and will give us the opportunities to elect honourable men to lead us and this country back from the brink.

I just pray that this election was not our last opportunity to turn this country around.

As always, the comments section is available below for anybody who would like to share their thoughts. Also visit my home page to see if there are any other articles that might interest you.