Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to seek support of smaller party after falling three seats short of majority.Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party will form a minority government after an election race dominated by concerns over United States President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
With nearly all votes counted late on Tuesday, the Liberals had won 169 seats in the 343-member House of Commons, falling just short of a majority.
The main opposition Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, won 144 seats.
The Liberals’ victory gives them a fourth consecutive term, a stunning turnaround for a party that had been trailing the Conservatives by as much as 25 percentage points as recently as January.
After two years of poor polling for the Liberals, Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Canadian goods coupled with the Republican leader’s repeated threats to make Canada the 51st US state helped rally many Canadian voters behind the incumbent government.
The resignation of Carney’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, also helped the party regain support after Trudeau faced months of widespread criticism for his government’s handling of a housing crisis and other affordability issues.
Reporting from Canada’s capital, Ottawa, on Tuesday, Al Jazeera’s John Hendren said many voters had said they “wanted to make sure that they were picking a leader who could combat Trump, the one major threat facing the country”.
“Canadians looked at this election, and they saw an existential crisis – that crisis being the fact that 80 percent of their exports go to the United States, their biggest trading partner, and those tariffs were making it hard to do business,” Hendren said.
The top priority now for Carney, a former central banker, will be to address the Trump administration’s tariffs, he added.
“And if he can’t do that in short order, his honeymoon might be short-lived,” Hendren said.
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, Carney said he had spoken to Trump and that the US president congratulated him on his victory.
“The leaders agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment. To that end, the leaders agreed to meet in person in the near future,” the statement from Carney’s office read.
With a minority government, the Liberals will need the support of an opposition party to pass legislation and survive no-confidence votes in parliament.
The left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), which had until late last year been propping up the Trudeau government, appears poised to play that role.
The NDP won seven seats in Monday’s elections – enough to push the Liberals past the 172-seat threshold needed in the House of Commons.
During his victory speech after Monday’s vote, Carney urged Canadians to remain united in the face of Trump’s threats.
“America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” he said. “President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us; that will never … ever happen.”
Meanwhile, Poilievre congratulated Carney on his victory and said his party would “do our job to hold the government to account”.
Poilievre, who lost his seat in Ottawa, had been widely expected to be Canada’s next prime minister before Trump’s threats and the Liberal Party leadership shake-up upended the race.
