By Lisa Van Dusen

November 4, 2026

In the end, Canada didn’t have to interfere in the 2026 midterms to register our preference for an outcome. Americans did it for us.

To compare the reasons for Tuesday’s midterm election result to any previous midterm election result is as pointless as comparing Donald Trump’s presidency to any previous presidency.

Yes, there are statistics and charts and local issues and inflation and the price of gas and the war in Iran — all the variables that are understandably mustered to explain to election-night viewers what they’re watching.

This time, it’s likely safe to say that most election-night viewers didn’t really need to be told why this blowout of historic proportions, this ass whuppin’, per one CNN GOP pundit, has unfolded.

The overarching, unprecedented ballot question was this: “Are you tired of having a lunatic for a president?”

Which is why it wasn’t just a drubbing, or even a shellacking. It was a stupendous rebuke to a weaponized, walking insult to truth, to democracy, to America, to its allies, and to humanity.

And while there will be voices who discourage the takeaway that this midterm election had anything to do with Canada, let’s just state for the record that this had something to do with Canada.

Canada has been tired of having a lunatic for a neighbour for some time now, and the example of Canadian resistance to that misfortune may have just helped put the overarching, unprecedented ballot question into perspective.

When Donald Trump started haranguing Canada, he made us a foil. Which turned all the national characteristics that have fuelled Canadian stereotypes forever suddenly less quaint by contrast. Our calm, our politeness, our penchant for apologizing…in the context of a war we didn’t ask for waged by a belligerent chaos actor threatening to make us the 51^st state became superpowers.

To the extent that those attributes are personified by Mark Carney, they’ve made him the global anti-Trump — both temperamentally and strategically.

Obama’s reappearance in the timelines of American voters, like Carney’s trend-breaking defiance of Trump’s tariff intimidation and interpretive trade stylings in August, served as a reminder that sane political reality, populated by credible people, still exists.

This dynamic — the elevation of Canada of all countries to the status of “superpower of sanity” based on the reflexive, inescapable comparisons to the maniac next door relentlessly, nonsensically harassing, trolling, disparaging and degrading us, registered as a trope in this midterms campaign.

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul Al-Sayed turned “If you’re in a trade war with Canada, it’s because you’re the a**hole” into a stump-speech crowd-pleaser weeks ago. People in Detroit, people in the Upper Peninsula, people in Kalamazoo — home of the annual Can-Am Peace Jam — already knew this. But sometimes, it takes a well-turned applause line to crystallize an issue.

In the homestretch of the campaign, former President Barack Obama deftly revived what Seth Meyers called “stand-up comedy Obama” and turned Trump’s obsession with Canada into a bit. “These are the people who gave us Martin Short … and maple syrup,” Obama said in arena after arena, mocking Trump’s targeting of Canada by calling us “that well-known evil empire”.

Obama’s reappearance in the timelines of American voters, like Carney’s trend-breaking defiance of Trump’s tariff intimidation and interpretive trade stylings in August, served as a reminder that sane political reality, populated by credible people, still exists.

On Tuesday night, the results were a victory not just for beleaguered American democracy but for that sane reality. To the extent that anyone would like to blame Canada for that, by all means, please do.

Republican tactical redistricting failed in Florida: Jared Moskowitz, Kathy Castor and Pia Dandiya won. Vivek Ramaswamy’s horrifying attack ad in Ohio failed: Amy Acton won. Racism failed across America: Georgia’s Keisha Lance Bottoms won as the first Black female governor in history; Gina Honojosa won as first Latina governor of Texas; Deb Haaland won in New Mexico as America’s first Native American governor; and Al-Sayed won as America’s first Muslim senator.

Donald Trump’s tactical, treasonous debasing of America and its democracy — so elaborate and baroque in all of its daily manifestations they couldn’t possibly be enumerated in 100 columns — including his 11^th hour email warning that “dangerous socialists and communists are preparing to destroy our Republican Majorities in the House and the Senate,” failed.

America won. Both houses of Congress. By eloquent margins across the map.

And Donald Trump’s demonization of Canada not only failed, it became a barometer for the cavalcade of madness — rhetorical, economic, geopolitical, behavioural — that has plagued America and the world for the last decade, from Trump’s tariff terrorism to his unjustified invasions and wars to his systematic assault on the rules-based international order to his violent attack on the US Capitol to his autocratic brutality against his own citizens.

On this morning in America, the people haven’t just spoken. They’ve defied a tyrant.

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.