LONDON, Canada — Canada’s Liberals just pulled off one of the greatest upsets in modern democratic history: going from a predicted wipeout in December to victory on Monday night. To understand why, you need to look at the signs on the sidewalk.

I don’t mean the ones advertising Prime Minister Mark Carney’s triumphant party, though there were plenty of those. Rather, I’m referring to the ones outside many businesses, containing long lists of the Canadian-made products on offer.

The signs are part of a grassroots boycott of American-made goods, a movement launched in direct response to President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs and threats of annexation. A recent poll found that 61 percent of Canadians are currently boycotting American-made goods.

Trump has single-handedly created the greatest surge of nationalist anti-Americanism in Canada’s history as an independent country. And the Liberal Party, which campaigned as the party best positioned to fight Trump, just rode it to victory.

Politically, this is a massive own-goal on Trump’s part. Carney’s rival, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, is a populist right-winger who attacked the media and embraced conspiracy theories — basically as close to MAGA as you can get in mainstream Canadian politics.

Had Trump never uttered the phrase “51st state,” he’d be getting a friend in Ottawa. Instead, he has Carney — a longtime critic of America’s global economic dominance who campaigned on the idea that “the old relationship we had with the United States…is over.”

Trump has, in short, not only caused trouble for himself — but for the US. By pointlessly antagonizing a critical ally, he is damaging the fundamental architecture of American hegemony. The United States does not set the terms of global politics alone; it created a system of global rule that depends critically on the enthusiastic support of democratic allies. If politicians in those allied states are winning elections by promising a break with the US, then the foundations of that system are starting to buckle.

“In the past, the popularity, or lack thereof, of the US president shaped how far countries would go to help the US — so the US won’t get much help in the near future,” says Steve Saideman, a professor of international relations at Carleton University in Ottawa. “How long this lasts is not clear, but this is cutting deeper than Bush in 2003 or Trump 1.0.”

How Trump changed the course of Canadian history

Canada’s Liberal party has been in power for 10 years. This is longer than a party typically holds power in Canada (or any other democratic country, for that matter); voters typically get frustrated with the inevitable shortcomings of an incumbent government before then and look........

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