The anti-Trump bump played a key role last week in federal elections of two of America’s closest English speaking allies, Australia and Canada. Both elections — just five days apart — held energy implications.
In both cases, the most conservative, Trumpish, party held huge polling leads when Trump won the U.S. elections last November. Both lost big as Trump reached his second first 100 days in office, with their own party leader losing his long-held seat in Parliament.
Let’s start with Australia’s May 3 election. Some nomenclature is in order. The conservatives are in the Liberal Party. The incumbent Labor Party is center-left. Labor is led by 62-year-old incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who became the first Australian prime minister to win reelection since Liberal John Howard in 2004.
Liberal standard bearer Peter Dutton held a 20-point lead in polling two months before the election. Dutton adopted Trumpian rhetoric during his campaign. After the election, the Washington Post commented on Dutton: “The former police officer had waged a Trump-like culture war against diversity programs and ‘woke’ school programing, even promising an Australian version of the U.S. DOGE Service.”
As Trump’s chaotic incumbency took form, particularly as his religious-like fealty to the gospel of on-again, off-again tariffs wore thin, Albanese soared. His steady, lower-key election style was a decided contrast to that of Dutton and his model, Trump. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Sean Kelly wrote that Trump’s volatility made “Albanese’s boringness quite an appealing commodity.”
Dutton’s defeat was decisive. Labor increased its margin in Parliament from 78 while the Liberals and their even farther right coalition partner National Party ended up with about 39, down from 58. Dutton lost his own seat, which he had held for 24 years, marking the first time that an Australian opposition party leader had lost a seat in a contested election.
Dutton, again echoing Trump, had campaigned on energy issues with a particular twist. The Liberals have long championed civilian nuclear power, which Australia has eschewed since the beginning of the nuclear age despite the continent’s substantial uranium reserves, the largest in the world.
The Liberal platform for the 2025 election linked an aggressive nuclear power development program to climate change and the need to replace coal, where Australia gets more than half of its electric power. The platform states, “By 2050, our plan will deliver up to 14 GW of nuclear energy, guaranteeing consistent and stable electricity for all Australians.” That’s about 14 new, 1,000-MW nuclear plants planned and constructed in 25 years, a preposterous pace.
Australia has mined uranium since 1954, according to the World Nuclear Association. Three mines now operate and Australia in 2022 exported 4820 tonnes of U3O8 making it the world’s fourth largest producer.
The Liberal Party has been promoting nuclear power in Australia since the 1950s, and the government began developing a 500-MW reactor project in 1969 in Jervis Bay near Sydney. The project was an initiative of Liberal Party Prime Minister John Gorton (1911-2002), who served one three-year term from 1968-1971. The plant would also have been designed to optimize plutonium production for a secret nuclear weapons program. Liberal politician Billy McMhon replaced Gorton in 1971 and abandoned Jervis Bay on economic grounds, including the discovery of massive new coal and natural gas reserves.
At the same time, a major anti-nuclear movement arose in Australia, focused both on weapons and civilian nuclear power. In the late 1990s, ironically under the government of Liberal John Howard, who served as prime minister from 1996 to 2007, Australia passed two laws banning nuclear power.
Starting in 2007 and picking up steam in around 2017, the Liberals again embraced nuclear energy plants. They then rolled out their ambitious 14-GW plan for the 2025 campaign.
Last June, when describing his party’s nuclear power platform, Dutton said, “I’m very happy for the election to be a referendum on energy, on nuclear.” The Labor victory has effectively scuttled the Liberal nuclear embrace. It’s doubtful that Dutton is happy and now unemployed.
In Canada, on April 28, one day before Trump’s 100 day milestone, where party names reflect party policies, the Liberals won the federal election after having been on death watch for more than a year. Incumbent Prime Minister Mark Carney, 60, former head of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, kept his party’s plurality and devastated Trumpian Conservative Party chief Pierre Poilievre.
Poilievre led his party to defeat by embracing Trump positions and populist style. The Washington Post reported, “Canada’s federal election was the first major test of Donald Trump’s influence on the affairs of a longtime U.S. ally since he returned to power 100 days ago. And he lost it badly .” Poilievre even lost his own riding, which he had held since 2004.
Canadians reacted against Trump’s on-off-on-off tariff threats, which potentially could have impacted heavy crude oil exports to U.S. refineries, cross-border electricity flows (Canada is integrated with the U.S. electric grid and sends considerable amounts of power across the border), and Trump’s ridiculous, probably semi-serious, threat to make Canada the 51st U.S. state. Trumps chaos and posturing, the Post noted, “reversed the fortunes of the Liberals, who had been expected to be shown the door by an electorate weary of their decade in power, but instead cast themselves as fighting for Canada’s very existence.”
The Liberals did not win enough seats in the ranked-choice voting to hold an absolute majority in the House of Commons, with 169 seats, three short of a majority in the 343-member body. Carney will have no problem getting enough votes from minor parties to seal his leadership.
The Conservatives won 144 seats, and the Bloc Québécois won 22, the New Democratic Party won seven (and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh lost his riding). The Green Party held onto one seat.
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