Mr Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, was named as Liberal leader in a desperate attempt to preserve what was left of his party’s political base — for a local comparison, think Labour dumping Geoffrey Palmer just before the 1990 election, or Andrew Little stepping down in favour of Jacinda Ardern as the 2017 election loomed.
Except Mr Carney was not a charismatic, popular or populist politician — in fact, at the time he was not even a politician at all. He was a central banker, with all the dynamism that job entails.
What Mr Carney did have going for him though, was Donald Trump.
Having launched a tariff war against Canada in the dog days of the Trudeau premiership, Mr Trump continued to taunt his country’s northern neighbour with repeated statements that the United States should annex Canada, an independent sovereign nation he regularly termed the 51st state of America.
If this was meant to help Mr Poilievre, whose campaign rhetoric and policy platform owed more than a little to that of Mr Trump, it could not have been less rewarding. Thanks largely to the hindrance coming from below the border Mr Poilievre’s campaign began to stall.
Mr Carney, meanwhile showed considerable political nouse as he turned the campaign into a referendum on Canadian independence rather than a weighing into account of the Liberal’s decidedly mixed achievements in government in recent years.
Riding a wave of nationalist righteousness Mr Carney won this week’s election handsomely. Mr Poilievre, meanwhile, is looking for a new job, having not even been able to retain the seat in Parliament he had held since 2004.
The voice of the Canadian people has delivered a stunning rebuke to the President of the United States, although that will likely bother him not one jot.
Those of the left side of the political spectrum will no doubt take heart from this result, and also from what seems likely will be the re-election of a Labor government in the Australian elections this weekend.
However, this would be premature, and would place too much weight on the unique local factors which have influenced each election.
As noted, Mr Carney’s win was almost entirely due to the repudiation by Canadian voters of the preposterous verbiage of Mr Trump. The Conservatives were riding high in the mid-40s before the president inserted himself into the debate, and even though a decent percentage of that polling was driven by dissatisfaction with Mr Trudeau, it also constituted a rejection of Liberal policies.
Some of those votes will have been swayed by events of the past few weeks, but the underlying dissatisfaction will not have gone away. When Mr Carney turns his attention back to domestic affairs he will have many issues to work through.
And across the Tasman there appears to be a dearth of "Albo-mania" clamouring for the return of Anthony Albanese to power, Rather, there seems to be a dislike of the pedestrian campaigning and poorly-promoted policies of coalition leader Peter Dutton.
Polls released this week in the US demonstrated a dramatic reversal of approval of Mr Trump’s performance, from +11 at the start of the year to -9 now. That is a clear reflection of a tumultuous first 100 days in office, but it would be wildly premature to suggest the factors which convinced 77 million Americans to vote for Trump seven month ago have entirely dissipated.
There are likely lessons for New Zealand politicians in the elections this week, but they may not be obvious ones.
