By Daniel Béland

April 29, 2025

After a short yet intense campaign focused on how to protect Canada’s economy and sovereignty in a newly threatening continental and global context, Canadians have voted and the results are in. The Liberals have done what many thought impossible barely a few months ago: they won the most seats and found a way to remain in power.

Mark Carney’s government has won 169 seats in the House of Commons (three short of a majority), the Conservatives hold 144 (minus leader Pierre Poilievre’s seat of Carleton, now in the Liberal column), the NDP seven (minus Jagmeet Singh’s Burnaby Central seat, now in the Liberal column), the Bloc Québécois 22 and the Greens 1, that of Elizabeth May.

It also seems that the Liberals won the popular vote for the first time since 2015. Considering that the Liberals stood at around 20% in the polls when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on January 6, for them to win significantly more than 40 percent of the votes less than four months later is impressive and unexpected to say the least. Clearly, Trudeau’s resignation, coupled with the “Trump effect” and the advent of Mark Carney as Liberal leader, helped the party turn things around electorally.

Yet, the news for the Liberals is not unequivocally positive. It will likely be much harder for Carney and his cabinet to govern from a minority position in this new reality, although BQ Leader Yves-François Blanchet said on Tuesday that he will support the government for the foreseeable future.

While Conservatives may be consoled by their improved standing compared to the 2019 and the 2021 federal elections in winning at least 20 more seats and a substantially higher percentage of the popular vote, considering the “usure du pouvoir” the Liberals faced, the fact that the Conservatives did not win at least a plurality of seats is disheartening for them. Poilievre’s loss of his own seat, which he had held since 2004, adds insult to injury.

This development could feed the sense among more centrist Conservatives that, under a different and more moderate leader, their party might have won in the end. While Poilievre says he is staying on as leader, talk about both Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston as potential successors has begun.

While Donald Trump and his policies are a clear threat to Canada, regional challenges remain within our country.

The biggest losers of this election are clearly the NDP and Jagmeet Singh, who announced his resignation after early results Monday night, with his party winning barely six percent of the popular vote and five seats short of the 12 needed for official party status in the House of Commons. The party will now only have one MP, Alexandre Boulerice, east of Manitoba. In the aftermath of these disastrous results, the NDP needs more than to simply elect a new leader: it must rethink its identity and approach in the hope of getting a new lease on life.

The only silver lining for the party: it might hold once again the balance of power in this minority Parliament. If this happens, electorally speaking it might be a poisoned chalice for the NDP, as their extensive collaboration with the Liberals in the last Parliament likely contributed to its current predicament.

Compared to the NDP, in an inauspicious international and political context that complicated the task of third parties, the Bloc Québécois was able to “save the furniture” (sauver les meubles) by losing only about 25 percent of its seats compared to the 2021 federal elections. This might be enough for Blanchet to be able to keep his job in a minority parliament, as this is something that he openly wished for during the campaign. This is the case because minority parliaments make the Bloc look more relevant in the eyes of many francophone Quebec voters.

In this context, the Bloc is in a much better position now than it was in the aftermath of the 2011 federal elections, in which the Orange Wave had decimated the Bloc’s caucus, which shrank overnight from 47 to four MPs, a dire situation that left the Bloc without official party status and forced Gilles Duceppe, who was defeated in his own riding, to resign.

The bad news for the Bloc, and the good news for the Liberals, is that, based on available results, the former does not exclusively hold the balance of power (i.e., the Liberals could win confidence votes just by securing NDP support), a situation that would have caused tremendous headaches to Prime Minister Carney.

This leads us to a key point, which is hardly original but that the Liberals must keep in mind moving forward: while Donald Trump and his policies are a clear threat to Canada, regional challenges remain within our country. First, the Parti Québécois is ahead in the polls in Quebec and provincial elections will take place there next fall.

Although support for sovereignty remains limited in the province, the PQ still vows to organize a third referendum and make Quebec an independent country. While there are clear tensions between Ottawa and the Legault government, a victory for the PQ in October 2026 could potentially lead to a deterioration of intergovernmental relations while exacerbating threats to national unity.

Second, a more pressing issue is the political situation in Western Canada, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Alberta, although they received about 28 percent of the votes, the Liberals only won one seat and are currently ahead in another. As for Saskatchewan, the province remains essentially blue, except for the northern riding of Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River, where Liberal Buckley Belanger took the seat away from the Conservatives, becoming the first federal Liberal MP in Saskatchewan since Ralph Goodale lost his Regina-Wascana seat back in 2019.

Still, with only (potentially) two seats in Alberta and one in Saskatchewan, the Liberals have very few options available to fill cabinet posts with people from these two provinces, whose premiers, Danielle Smith and Scott Moe, respectively, have been extremely critical of the federal government in recent years.

In this context, Prime Minister Carney and his government must take seriously and address ongoing economic and political grievances stemming from Western alienation and its persistence over time. This is something that might be particularly difficult for a minority government.

If we add Canada-U.S. relations and profound economic challenges facing the country to the mix, governing Canada might prove especially challenging for a still political-rookie Prime Minister.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.