At around 10:30 P.M. Eastern time on Monday, the past began to intrude heavily on Canada’s present. Television networks were declaring that the Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, had won a majority government, replacing Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who had led the country since 2006. The seat projections for the major parties had a classic shape, with the Liberals gaining nearly twice as many as the Conservatives and at least four times as many as the New Democratic Party. The electoral map looked familiar, too, with Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada mostly Liberal red, and a swath of Conservative blue across the West. “Welcome to the nineteen-eighties,” the commentator Andrew Coyne quipped on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, leading the network to cue a clip of Justin’s father, Pierre, uttering the same words in 1980, after winning a fourth term as Prime Minister.

A few hours later, Justin Trudeau opened his victory speech, in Montreal, with an even more vintage reference. “More than a hundred years ago, a great Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, talked about sunny ways. He knew that politics can be a positive force, and that is the message that Canadians sent today,” Trudeau said, in French. He switched to English: “Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways: this is what positive politics can do.” Laurier first employed the phrase in 1895, in response to the Manitoba Schools Question, a political crisis sparked when the premier of Manitoba withdrew public funding from Catholic schools, which were of great importance to the province’s French-speaking minority, and, by extension, to the province of Quebec. The next year, Laurier, the French-Catholic leader of the Liberal Party, won an election fought on the issue, ending the rule of the Conservative Party, which had led Canada almost continuously since its founding, in 1867. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes Laurier’s position on the crisis like so:

His approach, he said, would be to conduct an investigation, seek out the facts, and then use conciliation. He called it “sunny ways,” evoking the Aesop fable in which the sun and the wind compete to see which can force a man to take off his coat. The wind makes the man to cling more tightly to his garment, while the sun’s warmth induces him to take it off.

The sunny approach worked for Laurier, who served as Prime Minister until 1911. No doubt it also worked for Justin Trudeau. It was clear, early on, that it would be a good night for the Liberals. At 7:30, the first results started coming in from the Atlantic provinces, and the party soon appeared poised for a regional sweep that would leave it only a few seats shy of the thirty-six it held nationally at the outset of the campaign. When, two hours later, results from the rest of Canada flooded in, it was quickly confirmed that the Liberals had won, and that Trudeau, at the age of forty-three, would become the country’s second-youngest Prime Minister. The only drama that remained was whether the Liberals would lead a minority government or a majority, and whether, over on Sportsnet, the Toronto Blue Jays would hold on to beat the Kansas City Royals in the Major League Baseball playoffs.

By night’s end, the Jays had won, and the Liberals’ projected count stood at a hundred and eighty-four of three hundred and thirty-eight seats. The Conservatives had ninety-nine; the N.D.P., forty-four; the separatist Bloc Québécois, ten; and the Green Party, one. Nearly sixty-nine per cent of eligible voters had cast ballots, the highest share since 1993.

With their big win, the Liberals affirmed the durability of their claim to the unofficial tagline “Canada’s natural governing party,” after several years in which their survival was very much in doubt. Following the 2011 election, in which the Liberals dropped from seventy-seven to thirty-four seats, the Toronto Star asked, “Is the party over?” In 2013, after Trudeau was elected as the party’s leader, the National Post asked, “Can Justin Trudeau single-handedly rescue the Liberal Party of Canada?”

Trudeau’s charm was undoubtedly part of the Liberals’ rise, and he reportedly revitalized their fund-raising and volunteer operations, while attracting new talent, such as Andrew Leslie, a former commander of the Canadian Army; Jody Wilson-Raybould, a former regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations; and the journalist Chrystia Freeland (who has written for this magazine). But the Liberals’ reversal of fortune was also the product of an anti-Conservative voting bloc that seemed to have forged a subconscious pact to embrace whoever the front-runner was heading into the last week of the campaign. “Let’s get real: #elxn42 was way more about sober Harperphobia than giddy Trudeaumania,” the author and activist Naomi Klein tweeted.

Indeed, voters strongly rejected Harper, who governed for nine years without much panache, and with a vision born primarily of his background in economics. But the fatigue with the Conservatives was accentuated, too, by the fact that they won a parliamentary majority in 2011 with less than forty per cent of the vote—Canada’s awkward electoral system awards seats based on first-past-the-post contests in individual ridings. The Conservatives governed as though they had broader support, ramming through several omnibus Frankenbills (geared toward crime, security, and budgets) that critics argued were undemocratic in their conception and unwise in their particulars. The party also gave Canada’s oil economy pride of place in its foreign and environmental policy, to the dismay of those concerned about the country’s image abroad, and inspired little faith in its integrity after the Prime Minister’s office was implicated in a corruption scandal involving a sitting senator. On Monday, the Conservatives paid the price.

Harper’s critics have often seemed to suggest that his envisioned Canada was small-souled and excessively concerned with money. He did little to dispel that impression in his concession speech. Addressing his remarks to all Canadians, he said that he and his wife had gone into public life “because we believed that hard-working Canadians should keep more of the money they earn … because we believed that government should manage the people’s money the way people should manage their own.” He seemed almost chipper as he spoke, which wasn’t entirely surprising for someone who had just been relieved of a burdensome job for which he’d shown plenty of conviction but very little fondness. (Relieved of two jobs, it turned out—while Harper was speaking, his party released a statement saying that, although he had won his seat in Parliament, he would be stepping down as the Conservative leader.) He wound down with a paean to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the recently announced eleven-country trade deal that the Conservatives negotiated on Canadians’ behalf.

When Parliament resumes, Trudeau and his new cabinet will have a busy agenda that will no doubt seek to undo some of the excesses of Conservative rule. This may include unmuzzling the country’s scientists, who have been prevented for years from discussing their work with the media; restoring the mandatory long-form census, which the Conservatives abolished in an attempt to cripple the government’s data-gathering (and money-spending) capacity; and tempering the country’s new and uncomfortably Patriot Act-like security laws. Reforming Canada’s global image will be top of mind, too—as Elizabeth May, the Green Party’s leader, pointed out on CBC, a major climate conference begins in Paris in forty days. Foreign diplomats and activists will be looking for a more committed Canadian delegation than they’ve seen at recent climate events.

The challenge for the Liberals, as they work through their to-do list, will be to conduct themselves with an eye to the entire country. In his victory speech, Trudeau spoke extensively on the theme of unity, telling his audience, “Conservatives are not our enemies; they’re our neighbors,” and describing the three years he and his colleagues had spent travelling around the country, speaking with Canadians. “We won this election because we listened,” he said. Assuming that Trudeau is serious about bringing the country together, he might consider making one of the first major electoral promises that the Liberals fulfill one that they stand to gain the least from politically: insuring that this is Canada’s last election under its current system. If the party’s own platform isn’t reason enough, any number of statistics from last night argue for the need for democratic reform. The Greens, for example, earned more than four per cent of the vote, with only May’s seat to show for it. But one statistical comparison, in particular, ought to truly hit home: the Liberals won their majority with 39.5 per cent of the vote, a tenth of a percentage point less than the Conservatives won theirs with in 2011, when Trudeau’s own party, and the party of his father, was almost extinguished.

Of course, if that’s not enough to convince Trudeau to change Canada’s electoral system, he won’t be the first Liberal leader to disappoint some of his supporters. Laurier won in 1896 on the backs of voters in Quebec, then turned around and forged a compromise on the Manitoba Schools Question that diminished the status of the French language in the country as a whole. Sunny ways can win elections, but they don’t always lead to sunny days.