Geography Isn't a State of Mind: The Question Canadians Were Never Asked

The 2025 federal election should have come down to one question. It wasn't asked, and we're all living with the answer anyway.

The question was this: do you see the future of Canada as part of the European Union, or as part of North America?

That's it. That's the whole election. Mark Carney represents one answer. Pierre Poilievre represents the other. And because nobody framed the choice that way, Canadians went to the polls thinking they were voting on Trump tariffs and housing affordability. They weren't. They were voting on which continent we belong to.

The geography problem

It should be a no-brainer. We can never be part of Europe because Europe is on the other side of the world. Being part of a continent isn't a state of mind. It isn't somewhere over the rainbow. It's literally and physically where you are.

You can hate Donald Trump. Half of America hates Donald Trump. That doesn't change the fact that Canada is attached to the United States and always will be. Trudeau will be gone. Trump will be gone. The 49th parallel will still be there.

On a cultural level, the relationship is even tighter. Canada is overwhelmingly influenced by American culture. We take our social cues from them. When Americans said Black Lives Matter, we said it. When Americans said No Kings, we said it too — and that one is genuinely impossible to reckon with, given that we have an actual king. The slogans don't even need to make sense for us to import them. That's how deep it runs.

American culture is Canadian culture. We've contributed to it, we've shaped parts of it, and we've absorbed it. Pretending otherwise is fan fiction.

Carney is not from here

Mark Carney loves Europe. He wants to be European. He spent years running the Bank of England. He has a UN climate envoy role that's coordinated out of European capitals. His worldview is Davos, Brussels, London — not Calgary, not Halifax, not St. John's.

The day may come when Mark Carney does what Conrad Black did and renounces his Canadian citizenship for a British peerage. I'm not saying it will happen. I'm saying it would not be out of character. The man's centre of gravity has been on the other side of the Atlantic for two decades.

He doesn't understand American culture. What he does understand, he resents. And in 2025, that resentment got dressed up as patriotism — standing up to Trump — and Canadians bought it.

The unearned majority

Here's where it gets worse, and here's the part most Canadians haven't fully clocked yet.

Carney didn't win a majority on April 28, 2025. He won a minority. The Liberals took 169 seats, three short of the 172 needed to govern alone. That's the verdict the voters delivered.

The majority came later. By April 2026, three by-election wins and a series of floor-crossings — four Conservative MPs and one New Democrat jumping ship to the Liberals — pushed the government past the threshold. Carney now governs with a majority that no Canadian ever voted for. The seat count changed. The election didn't.

Think about what that means. The country said "minority government." The political class said "actually, majority." The mandate was rewritten between elections by people whose names most Canadians can't recite.

This is the guy now setting Canada's direction for the next four years. A man no one had heard of eighteen months ago, governing with a majority he didn't earn, on a continent he doesn't belong to.

Globalism is over

The deeper issue is that the era that made Mark Carney possible is ending.

For thirty years, the Davos worldview ran the show. You could be a "citizen of the world." You could untether yourself from geography. You could imagine that nation-states were obsolete and that global institutions — the IMF, the WEF, the EU — were the future. Mark Carney is the avatar of that worldview. He's the platonic ideal of the technocratic globalist.

But globalism is over for the time being. Trump's election in 2016 was the first warning. Brexit was the second. The 2024 American election was the confirmation. Across the West, voters are saying the same thing in different accents: we want our countries back. We want our borders to mean something. We want to be governed by people who live where we live.

Canada heard that signal and voted for the opposite. We elected the most internationally-coded prime minister in our history at the exact moment the rest of the West rejected internationalism. And then we let him have a majority he didn't win.

What comes next

I don't know how this plays out, but I know what to watch for. Watch where Carney spends his political capital. Watch which trade deals he prioritizes. Watch how often he travels to European capitals versus American ones. Watch how he handles the next round of tariff negotiations — does he position Canada as a North American partner, or as a junior member of a transatlantic bloc?

The answers will tell you whether the 2025 election was a temporary detour or a long-term reorientation. My bet is the latter. Carney isn't a politician who stumbled into the job. He spent twenty years building a career that prepared him for exactly this moment. He has a vision, and the vision is not North American.

We are physically, culturally, and economically tied to the country south of us. That's not a political position. That's a map. You can run from it for one election cycle. You can't run from it forever.

Geography always wins.