What a Thought Experiment Showed Me
What would Canada look like if Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, had won the 2024 American election? Sitting on this reaffirmed how thin the margin was between the Canada we have now and a very different Canada, led by Pierre Poilievre, where the tariffs and the annexation threats never happened, and one where none of us realized what American decline was. Working through this is about noticing how much recent events have ridden on an American election, and what that dependence should teach us about the choices we make.
The Liberal Doom of Late 2024
As a recap, after Trump’s win in November 2024, the Liberal Party of Canada was on life support. Justin Trudeau had been prime minister for almost a decade, the Liberal poll numbers had been steadily declining, and the Tories under Pierre Poilievre held a commanding lead. Trudeau was fighting off a caucus revolt, with enough MPs calling for him to resign. By December, Chrystia Freeland, his longtime deputy prime minister and finance minister, resigned and released a scathing public letter that helped bring an end to Trudeau’s leadership. In January 2025, Trudeau announced he would resign as both Liberal leader and prime minister once the Liberals chose his replacement.
What changed Canadian politics was Trump, not Trudeau. After his inauguration, Trump began threatening steep tariffs against Canadian goods and started talking about Canada becoming the fifty-first state. Those rants read as a threat to Canadian sovereignty, and Canadians responded to it by rallying behind competence. By early February 2025, the Liberals led national polling and rallied behind the government.
Mark Carney entered the Liberal leadership race in January and campaigned as the candidate best equipped to stand up to Trump. Carney had spent his career as a central banker, running both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and he carried no political baggage from the Trudeau era. Poilievre criticized some of Trump’s rants but was weak when compared to how Carney condemned it, choosing instead to keep talking about the cost of living, an approach that stopped working once Trump became a campaign issue. In March 2025, Carney won the Liberal leadership, was sworn in as prime minister and called a federal election shortly.
Who Kamala Harris is to Canada
Kamala Harris has a connection to Canada. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, took a position at McGill University in Montreal in 1976, and Harris moved there with her. She attended Westmount High School from grade seven through grade eleven and graduated in 1981, spending five years in the city. Former classmates remember her as easy to get along with, but homesick for California. She has said that returning to Montreal feels like coming home. That fact is why it is reasonable to think a Harris administration would have approached Canada with familiarity and goodwill that Trump never had.
If Harris had won, the most likely result is a continuation of the relationship Canada has with the United States. Agreements would have been honoured while disputes would have been handled through the normal channels. The same would have applied to other close American allies, from the United Kingdom to Denmark to Mexico.
That being said, Canada’s economy, defence, and even its sovereignty are deeply dependent on the United States, and that has made us too complacent. A sane president does not change the fact that Canada has spent decades building an economy, a supply chain, and a security arrangement almost entirely around the United States. Trump exposed that vulnerability and made it clear that American decline has been underway for decades regardless of who occupies the White House.
Whether the President of the United States is sane or not, Canada built its entire economic and defence on the assumption that the United States remains a stable partner. That assumption survived for so long that most of us stopped caring. Trump revealed it in a way that a Harris presidency would not have. That is the danger, given a saner American president would have let Canada keep believing that our overdependence on the United States was how things worked rather than a major weakness we never seriously addressed.
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The Leadership Race That Might Have Been
A Harris win would not only change Canada-U.S. relations but changes who leads Canada. Without Trump generating Liberal support, they would have gone into a 2025 election remaining deeply unpopular, due to Trudeau, and the Conservatives under Poilievre would have been a government in waiting. Under those conditions, it becomes hard to imagine Mark Carney joining the leadership race, as bankers do not get into races they lose, and without Trump, there is no reason for Liberals to go with an outsider over the party’s successor.
That heir apparent was Chrystia Freeland. In this reality with President Harris, she would have entered the leadership race as the frontrunner, running against others who did not bother when Carney joined the leadership race. Freeland would also have carried a symbolic advantage since she would have been contesting the Liberal leadership after Harris made history as the first female President. It is reasonable to expect she would have won the race.
However, that is not the same as winning an election. Freeland would have carried massive baggage from her years in the Trudeau government, and major unpopularity would probably have been too much to overcome. Instead, Poilievre’s Conservatives would have won a majority government.
It is worth being honest about what that outcome would have meant. Ontario and Alberta would have felt the effects of a Poilievre-led agenda, based on Tory positions on energy, industry, and provincial transfers. It is also worth noting that Poilievre came close to winning the actual 2025 election despite widespread criticism that he was too slow to understand how seriously Canadians were taking Trump’s fifty-first state comments. Carney won by moving forcefully against Trump, but by most accounts the final margin was still tight.
What This Thought Experiment Asks Us
I do not think the lesson here is that any single election result would have spared us from what has been decades in the making. Each of us who cares about Canada has a role in pushing our governments to diversify our trade relationships, invest seriously in our own defence, and stop treating the American market and its security umbrella as a birthright. That also means paying attention to provincial energy and industrial policy, supporting domestic trade diversification efforts, and holding provincial governments accountable for building resilience. Trump gave Canada an uncomfortable wake-up call, and the most useful thing we can do is keep working towards change even if the media moves on.
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