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By Lisa Van Dusen

March 23, 2025

The campaign launched Sunday with Governor General Mary Simon’s proclamation — signed at the request of Prime Minister Mark Carney — of a federal election on April 28th isn’t just about Carney vs. Pierre Poilievre or Liberals vs. Conservatives.

The last time Canadians went to the polls in an existential election, it was 1988, Brian Mulroney was staking his second term on free trade with the United States, John Turner was waging the “fight of his life” to stop that bilateral agreement, and the country’s future was on the line. Mulroney won, the FTA and then NAFTA redefined the North American economy, and Canada became stronger, not weaker.

This time, the same superpower some feared would swallow Canada through trade integration nearly four decades ago but didn’t, is now threatening Canada through trade dis-integration. And while that threat is being rationalized by the tactically calibrated lunacy stylings of Donald Trump, it is just the latest narrative warfare assault in a global war on democracy that has defined this century. In other words, Toto, we’re not in 1988 anymore.

While ideology has been exploited in this war — in the guise of conservative populism, fiscal predilection and, in some jurisdictions and in key moments, white supremacy — to more easily rationalize outlandish outcomes, its goals are dictated by obsession with power, not by ideology. As Donald Trump has undeniably personified since January 6th, 2021, the core clash in this battle is autocracy vs. democracy, and the incremental, systematic shifting of power from one to the other.

Trump’s narrative warfare utility to that goal is based on the way in which his trademark combination of volatility, ignorance, performative disruption, and belligerence can render plausible seemingly self-destructive, gobsmackingly irrational choices that further consolidate power in the unelected and dubiously elected hands of an aspiring, post-democracy world order. And, replacing a post-war power arrangement that has served the interests of humanity for 80 years with one designed to enrich a much smaller cohort of corrupt, cynical, covertly empowered bad actors first requires the sacking of the status quo.

As Donald Trump has undeniably personified since January 6th, 2021, the core clash in this battle is autocracy vs. democracy, and the incremental, systematic shifting of power from one to the other.

In this election, Canada’s strategic profile as a democracy that could plausibly (by the standards of our ongoing orgy of industrialized BS) be subjugated to the power of a neighbouring autocracy is the defining context. That makes the ballot question about which leader and party are more likely to rationalize that outcome, or, in public positioning terms, “Which leader has the skill and character to repulse Donald Trump?”, which assigns a greater value than usual to personality, biography, credentials and temperament.

Canada now faces its fate under the leadership of a prime minister whose bona fides as a status-quo institutionalist and representative of the democracy-led world order are informed by time served: fixing an avoidable, corruption-fuelled global financial cataclysm; as a central banker for two G7 democracies; and as a vocal opponent of another economic and political dis-integration narrative whose impact as a self-inflicted economic wound against a tentpole democracy would have been labeled “The Brexit recession” had a global pandemic not been declared six weeks after its implementation.

Carney’s principal opponent has long represented the borderless political phenomenon fronted by Donald Trump, among other useful chaos clowns; branded by a hypertactical contempt for voters in which deception, misdirection and misrepresentation of motive, intent and affiliation are shamelessly deployed to secure power. Trump’s improbable return to the Oval Office is an object lesson in the grotesque effectiveness of that approach, and of its value to interests who have so little to sell to voters as a means of securing power in functioning, un-corrupted democracy that functioning, un-corrupted democracy has become their existential threat.

That Pierre Poilievre is suddenly claiming to deplore Trump as much as Canadians do with a helpful distance-delineation assist from a president who has lied tens of thousands of times only proves that while democracy is existentially imperilled, irony is not.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.