By Lisa Van Dusen

September 1, 2026

As classic by-election stories go, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party sweep on Monday night in Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia was the democratic antithesis of the recent performative-populist Nigel Farage by-election farce in the UK riding of Clacton (with apologies to Count Binface).

The Canadian by-elections were not just a clean sweep, they were a veritable stampede toward the one leader of a Trump-targeted democracy who has defied the volatile president.

All three provinces have been hard-hit by Trump’s tariff war — notably the legacy sectors of Ontario’s auto industry, Quebec’s aluminum industry, and B.C.’s forestry industry — and the ridings at stake were urban (Toronto’s Beaches-East York, won by political aide Tanveer Shahnawaz), semi-urban (Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, won by dairy farmer Daniel Gobeil) and suburban (North Vancouver-Capilano, won by Carney advisor Braeden Caley).

At this writing, the CBC News is projecting wins of more than 50 per cent in all three.

Unlike the democracy-trolling cynicism of Farage’s re-legitimization exercise of resigning his own seat then winning it back from himself, Monday night’s by-elections felt like democracy roaring back; against Trump, against its myriad other predators — from rampant propaganda to Big Tech to authoritarian creep to authoritarian creeps — and an expression of Canadian unity that was less partisan than personal.

Ten days after Carney pulled the Canadian negotiating team out of what was — by all credible accounts — a coercive tariff shakedown that imperilled not only Canada’s French language rights but the auto industry on both sides of the border, Monday’s results were interpreted as an endorsement of Carney’s defiance and a repudiation of Trump’s rampaging belligerence.

As a geopolitical statement, Carney’s clean sweep is a reminder that, in any bilateral conflict — whether it’s a territorial dispute, a trade war, or a war of words — domestic political capital matters.

Carney’s parliamentary majority was solidified Monday night, after being cobbled together with previous by-elections and floor-crossings from the Tories and New Democrats after the former central banker won a surprise minority victory in the April 2025 election that was supposed to send the Liberals into the political tundra for at least a cycle.

What was at stake was a vision of Canada at a time of existential peril from both the Canadian version of Trump’s global tariff assault — bespoke via relentless, ridiculous annexation threats — and politically torqued secession narratives in the provinces of Alberta and Quebec.

Which is why the result Monday night in the Quebec riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord was especially noteworthy.

Landing as it did in the first week of a provincial election campaign in which separatist leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has promised not to hold an independence referendum as long as Trump is representing a bigger threat to Canada and his main rival, incumbent Coalition avenir Québec premier Christine Fréchette, has labelled Trump her “principal adversary” in the campaign, Monday night’s Liberal win in Québec by Gobeil was a political statement.

As a geopolitical statement, Carney’s clean sweep is a reminder that, in any bilateral conflict — whether it’s a territorial dispute, a trade war, or a war of words — domestic political capital matters.

Donald Trump will pretend it doesn’t matter to him, because he has so little of it. But in a battle of values, it matters to Canadians.

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