Stephen Marche: The woke will always break your heart

What buoyed Trudeau was an issue of rising importance globally and in Canada: climate change. Trudeau’s government took painful policy action on climate change, imposing a carbon tax. Conventional political wisdom might have predicted doom. Instead, even Conservative canvassers found as they knocked on doors that Canadians were willing to pay for environmental benefits. Trudeau’s pollsters must have heard the same message. The second substantive sentence out of Trudeau’s mouth on election night hailed the result as a vote for “strong action on climate change.”

Canadian Liberals are left to wonder whether their message would be served by a less scandal-tainted messenger. Canadian Conservatives must reckon with the power of the climate-change issue even in an energy-producing nation like Canada. All Canadians and all friends of Canada should worry whether the country will retain its enviable record as a bastion of democratic stability in a destabilizing world.

Trudeau will now try to strike a deal with the left-wing New Democratic Party to support his government, as a previous NDP supported his father’s government from 1972 to 1974. That last partnership ended badly for the NDP, and today’s New Democrats are likely to demand a high policy price in exchange for their votes. That price will drag the Trudeau government away from the policy center, opening even more room for the Conservatives under the careful leadership of Andrew Scheer. If the softening U.S. economy drags Canada down with it, Justin Trudeau may find his second government even bumpier and more contentious than his first.

Read: The man who could beat Justin Trudeau

Whatever their other differences, Canada’s Liberal and Conservative governments achieved a remarkable record of governing success from 1995 to 2015. They reduced the country’s once-terrifying budget deficits. They navigated deftly through the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. They held at bay Canada’s most dangerous internal threat: separatism and regional alienation.

Justin Trudeau’s first government has revived those dangerous threats—and the outcome of Monday’s Canadian election paints the map with the colors of their return.

One of the night’s biggest winners was the Bloc Quebecois party, the party of Quebec nationalism. The Bloc erupted into prominence in the early 1990s. In 1993, it won 54 of Quebec’s 75 seats and actually qualified as the second-largest party in Parliament. In the more stable 2000s, though, the Bloc suffered a long, slow fade. It lost official-party status in 2011 and dropped to its lowest-ever share of the Quebec vote in 2015. Quebec seemed at last to have fully committed itself to the Canadian national political system, dividing its votes—as other Canadians did—among Liberals, Conservatives, and the left-wing New Democrats.