Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney/PMO X

By Geoff Norquay

December 4, 2025

On the day last May when Mark Carney and his newly elected cabinet were sworn in, the Prime Minister promised, “Our government will deliver its mandate for change with urgency and determination. We’ve been elected to do a job. We intend to do it quickly and forcefully.”

At the time, that sounded like a solid recipe for governing, but it’s become clear that Carney’s change agenda also includes his own Liberal party and the broader political system.

In the intervening months, Carney’s policy rollbacks and repudiations of the Trudeau agenda of the past 10 years have come thick and fast. Taken together, they have touched off a far-reaching political realignment in Canada.

First-up was an end to the troubled consumer price on carbon, the centrepiece of Justin Trudeau’s climate agenda. Second was Bill C-5, the Building Canada Act, designed to eliminate the longstanding federal regulatory paralysis against building anything of consequence in Canada.

Then came the creation of the Major Projects Office, as the implementation mechanism of the infrastructure agenda with a mandate to disarm the thicket of regulatory agencies and policies whose only purpose, as the new PM put it, “is to say ‘no’ instead of asking ‘how’?”

In early September, the demonstrably unworkable electric vehicle mandate was pulled back for further study. Next, for the third time in six years, a Liberal minister of justice tabled yet another set of reforms to Canada’s troubled bail system, this time reflecting the failure of Trudeau’s two previous attempts.

More recently, Budget 2025 was tabled absent the usual, exhaustive Statement and Impacts Report on Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion, another feature of Trudeau’s mandate. The final nail in the coffin of Trudeau political correctness and virtue signaling was recently delivered by Mark Carney in South Africa when he said, “I wouldn’t describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy.”

As Stephen Brown of the Centre for International Policy Studies wrote, “The feminist substance of Canada’s foreign policy – as opposed to symbolic statements and actions – was never easy to see… It had become a zombie policy, raised from the dead in international declarations and then laid back to rest.”

Carney’s foreign policy comment obviously hit a nerve with some Liberals. Supriya Dwivedi, a former Trudeau advisor, immediately wrote a sharply dissenting column in the Toronto Star, arguing that “When Canada appears to bow to bro-signalling (as I call the attempt to distance oneself from feminism) it means Canada has joined the league of polite misogyny.”

By far the sharpest and most dramatic break with signature Trudeau-era climate policies was delivered by this Prime Minister in last week’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Ottawa and Alberta.

The proposed oil and gas emissions cap is now off the table, and the federal Clean Electricity Regulations are being lifted for Alberta, pending negotiation of a new carbon pricing agreement, opening the door to a similar break for other provinces. The regulated 75% cut to methane emissions will be delayed for five years until 2035. Finally, if an oil pipeline to British Columbia tidewater is ultimately approved, the federal government will make “appropriate adjustments” to the longstanding west coast tanker ban.

These policy changes are all signs of a government intent on fundamentally transforming Canada. This is a government in a hurry — indeed, moving “quickly and forcefully” — and a Prime Minister who is quite prepared to break things along the way, including perhaps even his own party.

But the political realignment process really started with last spring’s federal election. Faced with the need to prove to voters that he was not just another Trudeau Liberal so that those who wanted change did not have to eschew the incumbent party, Carney made clear that he would reverse many aspects of the former leader’s policy directions and style of governing.

He then set out to broaden the Liberal Party’s electoral base, offering a moderate right turn to diversify and revitalize the country’s economic architecture in the face of Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Carney was attempting not only to reconnect with the “business Liberal” constituency that had drifted away from the party on Trudeau’s watch, but also to provide a home for economically focused progressive conservatives who’d long recoiled at the populist leadership of Pierre Poilievre.

Carney’s policy rollbacks and repudiations of the Trudeau agenda of the past 10 years have come thick and fast. Taken together, they have touched off a far-reaching political realignment in Canada.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives under Poilievre were fishing successfully for new working class and unionized supporters to expand their base in the run- up to the election. Under the mantra of “more boots, less suits”, their platform featured a pledge to train 350,000 tradespeople and promised support for organized labor training and apprenticeship programs under the Union Training and Innovation Program. During the election campaign in Halifax, the Conservatives welcomed the public endorsement of no less than nine labour unions for their plan to fix Canada’s ports.

Poilievre has also worked to build a broader voter coalition on another key front. Faced with the ongoing aging-out of the Conservatives’ traditional baby boomer supporters, he prospected successfully for votes among millennials, especially young men, who are alienated by the loss of economic opportunity.

As his former staffer Ben Woodfinden recently pointed out, many in this cohort resent the “unacknowledged sense of entitlement among older Boomer conservatives that goes beyond cost-of-living challenges…These younger ‘new’ conservatives look around and see a country that no longer works for them.”  Poilievre has been particularly successful in speaking directly to these concerns and in harnessing the collective anger of this group of voters.

When the votes were counted on election night, the initial results of Carney and Poilievre’s realignment efforts became apparent. Carney’s Liberals gained 11% in the popular vote and 17 new seats, three short of a majority. But another thing happened that ultimately determined the outcome of the election. After years of Canada having a three-party system among the top national contenders, the collapse of the NDP vote produced a two-party squeaker result.

Gone was that party’s ability to split progressive votes from the Liberals on the centre-left to throw seats to the Conservatives. So, while Poilievre’s Conservatives took three million additional votes nationally (41.3% of the popular vote) for a net gain of 23 seats, it was still not enough to supplant the Liberals.

Mark Carney’s efforts to remake the Liberals’ voter coalition all but guarantee that the realignment among the parties will continue. In the wake of the Ottawa-Alberta MOU, Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s long-serving environment and climate change minister, resigned from cabinet, expressing strong disagreement with the deal and calling parts of it a “serious mistake”. But while Guilbeault was a lightning rod in Alberta, he was an environmental icon in Quebec, where support for Trudeau’s climate change policies remains strong.

A national poll by the Angus Reid Institute conducted after the announcement of the MOU reveals some interesting fault lines in Liberal Party support. While 60% of Canadians support a pipeline from Alberta to the northern coast of British Columbia, “More than one-third who voted for the Liberals in April are either strongly opposed (17%) or opposed (18%), though most support it.” In addition, opposition to lifting the tanker ban on the B.C. north coast “is highest in B.C. (38%) and Quebec (35%)” and Liberals are more than four-times as likely than Conservatives to want the ban to stay in place with no adjustments (8% to 36%).

Clearly, there are many Liberal supporters in Quebec and the lower mainland of B.C. who may feel challenged by the rollback of Trudeau legacy climate change policies and regulations. And admiration for Guilbeault remains strong in the Liberal caucus. Post resignation, Liberal MP Patrick Weiler wrote, “I admire [Guilbeault’s] strong conviction and look forward to working with him in caucus.”

Carney’s political realignment initiatives fit just fine with the NDP’s current predicament and preoccupations. In the spring election, the NDP received no credit from voters from its two-year support for the Trudeau government’s centre-left agenda through the Supply andConfidence Agreement. They simply didn’t see the party as a credible option to defend the country against Trump.

As a result, the party had its caucus reduced by 17 seats, leaving them with a corporal’s guard of seven MPs and without either a leader or official party status. In the wake of this disaster, the party’s leadership contenders are working to redefine what the party stands for and win back its status and influence as the third national party.

While it is still early days, Carney’s retreat from Trudeau-era climate policies appears to be a gift-wrapped present for the NDP in southern British Columbia and in other urban areas across the country with orange-red voters. On Vancouver Island and in the Lower Mainland, the NDP lost eight seats in the April election, five to the Liberals and three to the Conservatives by way of three-way voting splits, in areas where voters’ environment and climate change concerns remain strong. The latest Angus Reid Institute poll, released on December 1, showed that Liberal support in Vancouver has dropped by a significant 15 points since early November.

For Pierre Poilievre, his reaction to the Carney-Smith MOU has been scathing: “The deal does not bring a new pipeline to the Pacific; it brings higher taxes, long delays and more dependence on the U.S.” While the party’s latest talking points note that, “We’re happy to see Alberta’s premier forced the Prime Minister to flip-flop on some of his other costly environmental policies”.

But with Danielle Smith claiming victory for what she gained for Alberta through the MOU, Poilievre will need to be careful not to cross-thread himself with the premier and the positive public support in Alberta for the agreement.

Mark Carney’s realignment of the Liberal Party and its electoral base and his remake of the federal government are clearly underway. Already, speculation in Ottawa is leaning towards another federal election sometime in 2026. If that happens, it may be a referendum on the Carney realignment.

Geoff Norquay is a principal with Earnscliffe Strategies in Ottawa. He was a senior social policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office from 1984 to 1988 and director of communications to Stephen Harper when he was leader of the Official Opposition.