Canadian democracy faces a choice on April 28—and plenty of factors are at play.
With a federal election approaching, Canada’s future remains uncertain with both the Conservative and Liberal parties aiming at governmental control. Current Leader of the Opposition and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre will face off against Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal party Mark Carney in an election that has a couple defining themes.
According to Holly Garnett, professor of political science at the Royal Military College and cross-appointed to Queen’s Department of Political Studies and School of Policy Studies, one of the biggest players in this upcoming election in Canada isn’t even Canadian.
“[Donald] Trump’s policies and rhetoric towards Canada have influenced, to a large degree, how the leaders are talking about election issues, about some of the major things that are in Canadians’ minds, notably tariffs,” Garnett said in an interview with The Journal.
As Trump and the United States have become defining factors in this election, the question of who is better equipped to address these issues has been a source of contention in some voters.
Garnett explained there’s plausible arguments for both candidates’ abilities to handle Trump, saying Poilievre might be better embedded into the Conservative movement and therefore more aligned with Trump—making it easier “to speak the language that Trump might be able to understand.”
On the other hand, Carney’s experience in business and his lack of political baggage could help him meet Trump eye to eye, Garnett said. She referenced Trump recently speaking positively about Carney and poorly about Poilievre in the past, which could be indicative of their relationships if elected.
On other issues, Garnett detailed while both parties haven’t released their full platforms, it’s “not like the breadcrumbs [about their policies] that we’ve gotten so far are dramatically different.”
Both parties have promoted the idea of tax cuts and removing GST from home sales, with only smaller disagreements such as Carney’s proposition of only removing the GST off homes valued at less than $1 million whereas Poilievre’s policy would apply to homes under $1.3 million.
Aside from defining election issues, Garnett went over threats to Canadian democracy as an institution in general, explaining that “when we talk about cyber threats to democracy, there are the process-based threats and information-based threats.
Process-based threats relate to the technical backend administration of the election through voting, registration, and more. She explained in Canada’s federal election, we use paper ballots and hand count them which makes us relatively safe to these kinds of issues.
Despite our relative protection from process-based threats, Garnett said we’re still not immune, outlining one way we’re susceptible.
“We have online registration systems. People tend to look up where they’re going to vote online so some sort of a denial-of-service issue with the Election Canada website could wreak some havoc,” Garnett said.
Garnett sees information-based threats including ideas—like misinformation—as something Canada could be vulnerable to.
“This isn’t really anything new, but the reality is that it [misinformation] can spread so quickly, and it can spread in parts of the internet that not everyone is accessing, which causes, essentially, our deliberative aspects of the campaign to be really thwarted,” Garnett said.
Garnett explained one major downside of this was that conversations surrounding politics should be at the national level, but these subsections of groups fragment that national conversation and discourage a balanced position.
“We’re not all reading the same thing, we’re not all getting our information from similar sources, and we’re not talking about the same issues, and even political parties can target individuals based on what they think they’re going to most likely to respond to,” Garnett said.
Garnett also outlined the importance of Canadians checking their electoral districts as the boundaries were redrawn for this election, explaining they can be found easily through the Elections Canada website by inputting one’s postal code.
Tags
election 2025, Federal Election, Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, tariffs, Trump
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