LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
Canadians head to the polls tomorrow to elect a new government. The federal elections will almost certainly come down to a choice between two parties, the Liberals, who have been in power for almost 10 years and are led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, and their main opposition, the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre. There are scores of domestic issues, but it's a foreign leader - President Trump and his immigration and trade policies - that are dominating this campaign. Andrew Coyne is a staff columnist at The Globe and Mail, and he joins us now from Toronto. Thanks for joining us.
ANDREW COYNE: Good morning.
FRAYER: Andrew, I'm just going to start with condolences for the people who died overnight in Vancouver after an SUV drove into a Filipino cultural celebration. Both of the leading party candidates that we're about to talk about have offered their condolences to the victims and to the Filipino community. Police say this was not an act of terrorism.
To politics, Canada has a parliamentary system, so it does things a little bit differently than in the U.S. Remind us, voters will be casting ballots for their local representatives to parliament and not for the prime minister, right?
COYNE: That's right. I mean, it's become presidentialized in a lot of ways. There's a lot of focus on the leaders, and a lot of people base their vote on what they think about the leaders. But the local candidate is important, and ultimately, we elect parliaments rather than prime ministers or governments. It's Parliament's job to decide who governs.
FRAYER: Let's focus on the two main contenders, the Liberal and Conservative parties. How have they positioned themselves?
COYNE: Well, the Conservatives thought they were positioning themselves as the party that would fix the damage that the Liberals had done over the last 10 years. They talk about the lost Liberal decade. And going into this election, they were 25 points ahead. It looked like they were going to - a huge majority.
But along comes several things in succession. First, Justin Trudeau resigns as prime minister, who had become very unpopular. Secondly, Mr. Trump starts talking about annexing the country and imposing these thumping tariffs. Third, the Liberals recruit a new leader in the form of Mark Carney, former Central Bank governor. And suddenly, the race has turned topsy-turvy, and it's all about, at least from the Liberals' perspective, it's all about who can stand up to Donald Trump, who can protect our sovereignty, et cetera.
And they've been wrestling ever since. The Conservatives have been trying to focus the issues back on affordability, housing, the state of the economy, immigration. And the Liberals have just been saying, you know, it's all about who has the best leader, who can stand up to Donald Trump. I would say the Liberals had the best of that in the first half of the campaign, but because Mr. Trump's been a little quieter in recent times about this, the Conservatives have been able to claw back a bit of ground in the more recent times by focusing back on affordability, et cetera.
FRAYER: And that's what's changed in the opinion polls. President Trump has called Canada the 51st state. He referred to your previous Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a governor of Canada. As you mentioned, he imposed deep tariffs on some Canadian goods. So how is the American president impacting all of this?
COYNE: Well, it ignited an explosion of fury, frankly, and Canadian patriotism and pride. Even some Quebec separatists put aside their beefs with the rest of the country for a while because they could realize that whatever their complaints about Canada, they'd be in a lot worse state if they were forced into the arms of the United States. No offense.
And so, it really did cause an enormous movement in the polls, for example. A lot of people who would have voted for the third party, the New Democratic Party, a left-leaning party, looked at all this and said, we can't afford this. We've got to rally around the Liberals 'cause they're our best hope of stopping Donald Trump.
It's really hurt the Conservative leader who is nothing like Mr. Trump in many ways, but atmospherically, some of his rhetoric is similar. He kind of winks at some of the same constituencies and I think was too slow to realize that he needed to put as much distance as he possibly could between himself and Donald Trump. So as I say, particularly in the first half of the campaign, it really hurt him.
FRAYER: And what do the latest polls say about who will win?
COYNE: Well, it's tightened a bit. At one point, the Liberals were 8 or 10 points ahead. They're now maybe only 3 to 5 points ahead. With the way the vote is distributed - and I won't get into the weeds of that - it probably will still deliver the Liberals a majority, but it's tight. And if the polls are off by even a couple of percentage points, we could wind up with what we call a minority government, where the government has the most seats in the House but not enough to form a majority and has to rely on the support of one of the other parties.
FRAYER: We will be following that in the coming days. That's Andrew Coyne of The Globe and Mail. Thank you so much.
COYNE: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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