Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney secured a stronger hold on power – and bigger mandate to push back against US President Donald Trump – after a series of historic floor crossings and two special election wins supercharged his Liberal Party to a majority government.
Liberals were set to win two additional seats in parliament Monday, CNN-affiliate CBC News projected, bringing the party to 173 seats in the House of Commons – just one above the threshold needed to claim a majority government. A third race, a knife-edge contest in Quebec which the Liberal candidate previously won by just one vote, has yet to be called.
Monday’s victories for the Liberals follow five defections by opposition politicians in the past five months.
Carney’s newfound majority will solidify his grip on power and allow him to push through his agenda, which has largely focused on rebuffing Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats and reducing Canada’s dependency on its southern neighbor.
Since Carney’s rise to power last March following the resignation of increasingly unpopular former leader Justin Trudeau, he has emerged as one of the loudest global voices against Trump’s “America First” nationalism and economic intimidation.
He warned of the end of the international rules-based order and called for middle powers to band together in a World Economic Forum speech that was heard around the world.
Carney’s swift ascent, which represented a remarkable rebound for the then-flailing Liberals, was partly credited to Trump, and the perception by many Canadians that Carney, a former central banker, was the best person to counter him.
Speaking in Sydney, Australia last month, Carney said his strategy on dealing with Trump is “respect but not obsequiousness.”
“He is more interested in your viewpoint on various things in private and that creates an ability to work through things,’ Carney said of the US leader, according to CBC News.
“But it’s not easy, to be clear.”
US President Donald Trump (R) and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speak to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on October 7, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images North America/Getty Images
Trump threats foster Canadian unity
Trump’s hostility toward Canada has sparked a new sense of patriotism among Canadians, many of whom still refuse to travel to the US or buy American-made products as a sign of resistance against what has been widely viewed as a betrayal by their longtime ally and neighbor.
Carney has both benefited from and fostered this newfound sense of unity.
In his remarks at the Liberal Party convention last week, he alluded to Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state.
“United, we will build Canada strong, a Canada for all, a Canada strong that no one can ever take away,” Carney said.
However, Carney’s quest for a majority has prompted backlash among some Liberals who feel his open-arms policy toward defectors risks comprising the party’s values.
Long-time Conservative Member of Parliament Marilyn Gladu, who crossed the aisle to the Liberals earlier this month, has spoken outwardly against abortion – the right to choose in Canada is a core tenet of the Liberal Party’s ethos.
However, she said she is committed to voting with the Liberals on issues regarding a woman’s right to choose, CBC reported.
No, Trump can’t cancel the midterms. He’s doing this instead
Worried about losing unified Republican power in Washington and mystified at his lack of support among the public, President Donald Trump keeps talking about not holding the November midterm elections, when Republicans could lose control of the House, Senate or both.
Trump doesn’t understand why his approval rating is underwater (and it is, on every issue, in a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS and released Friday).
“I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,” he told House Republicans in a speech earlier this month.
Later, he added: “Now, I won’t say, ‘Cancel the election. They should cancel the election,’ because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’”
But Trump did talk about canceling the election in an interview with Reuters this week. He said Republicans have been so successful that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was “joking” and “being facetious” about canceling the election.
If it’s a joke, it’s material he’s been working on for months. Told during an appearance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last September that Ukraine won’t hold an election during a period of martial law during its war with Russia, Trump expressed some envy.
“So you say during the war, you can’t have elections,” Trump said. “So let me just say, three and a half years from now – so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
People laughed.
Sometimes they’re jokes, sometimes not
Trump routinely says things that seem like trolls until they don’t. Owning Greenland? Not a joke. However, he seems to have retreated from the oft-repeated idea of an unconstitutional third term.
And for the record, unlike Ukraine, the US has held elections in the midst of multiple wars, when the British had invaded in 1812 and when it was at war with itself in 1864. It held elections during world wars when millions of Americans fought overseas in the 20th century as well.
It makes sense that Trump would dread the November midterms
Trump knows that presidents rarely pick up seats in a midterm. His administration has been moving at breakneck speed to change the government because, as his chief of staff famously said, they know that presidents expect to lose power after their first two years. A net loss of just a handful of seats would give control of the House to Democrats, for instance, requiring their buy-in for spending and giving them power to investigate his administration.
Presidents do not have the power to delay or cancel elections
The Constitution requires that a new Congress be sworn in on January 3, 2027. Election Day is set in law, so it is theoretically feasible for Congress to move it, but not to cancel the election. Elections are supposed to be administered by each state, so state governors and legislatures could, in theory, move their own elections to deal with a major disaster, but there’s no precedent for it. To get into the weeds of all of this, read a report from the Congressional Research Service.
The president’s distrust of US elections is legendary
Trump has also mused about using emergency powers to meddle with elections. He told the New York Times recently that he regrets not directing National Guards to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.
Even the elections he has won, he has said were rigged. There’s still no evidence of any widespread voter fraud, even after all these years of the Trump era.
People are talking about doomsday election scenarios
Election officials say they are thinking very carefully about all of this. Asked about Trump’s musings at an event sponsored by The Atlantic this week, Arizona’s top election official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said this:
“Look, you can’t cancel the election… We’ve got a whole bunch of scenarios that we’re playing through to make sure that we’re prepared for the types of processes that might be necessary to preserve our democracy so that if somebody tries to cancel something, if somebody tries to take some stuff they’re not entitled to, we can go to the courts, get the orders, and hopefully have the backup of law enforcement to make sure that we can move forward through this.”
“The fact that we’re running through these scenarios in the first place should tell you something about the health of our democracy,” Fontes added.
To that end, he would not elaborate on what scenarios they’re preparing for.
“I don’t want to give the bad guys any ideas,” Fontes said.