Yesterday’s election unfolded the way it always does in a decaying settler state: desperate, fragmented, unmoored from any real possibility of change.
Mark Carney won a minority government.
Not because he inspired anyone.
Not because he offered a vision of something better.
But because fear of collapse keeps people clinging to the wreckage.
Carney’s victory is a victory for capital, for managed decline. He will govern not with transformation, but with technocratic violence, offering competence while administering crisis. He represents an empire trying to manage its own decay without ever questioning the structures that brought it to this point.
The NDP, meanwhile, collapsed into near-irrelevance.
Not by accident.
They spent years softening their demands, trimming the edges off movements that once demanded real justice, chasing approval from the very systems that were built to contain and destroy them.
By the time they realized who they had abandoned, it was too late.
The base that built the NDP—racialized, working-class, Indigenous, disabled, queer communities—has already moved on.
Many of us have stopped looking to electoral politics for salvation.
We learned long ago that there is no ballot box for liberation.
And then there’s Poilievre.
His personal defeat is not a victory.
He lost his seat but grew the Conservative base.
He played with the fire of white rage, conspiracy, and open fascism, and those flames are not going out.
They will find new leaders, more dangerous ones.
The centre did not hold. It barely even tried.
What we are seeing is not a reversal of right-wing momentum. It is its acceleration, even in the absence of the man who helped bring it to this point.
Taken together, tonight’s results confirm what many of us already knew.
Canada, as a project, is dying.
Not with a rupture that could birth something new, but through a long, grinding erosion that tightens its violence while pretending to offer stability.
There is no vision here. No future being built.
Only a managed decline, administered by people too invested in the structures of extraction, policing, and dispossession to imagine anything different.
For Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, and trans communities, this election does not change the terrain.
The state was never our protector.
It was never ours to reclaim.
There was never a version of this country where we were meant to survive with dignity.
That’s not pessimism. It’s clarity.
The task ahead is the same as it has always been.
To build outside of the crumbling systems.
To invest in abolitionist infrastructures: mutual aid, communal care, survival networks that are not dependent on the permission of the state.
To protect each other when the safety nets fail, because they were never designed to catch us in the first place.
To refuse despair, not because we are hopeful about the system, but because we are committed to each other beyond it.
Carney’s victory is hollow.
Poilievre’s downfall is dangerous in disguise.
The NDP’s disappearance is a cautionary tale about what happens when you sell your soul for electoral respectability.
But our survival has never depended on who wins elections.
It has always depended on how fiercely we remember who we are to each other.
How fiercely we build in the cracks they cannot seal.
How boldly we refuse to accept the limits they place on what we can imagine.
No ballot was going to save us last night.
No parliament will save us today.
Our future will not be built in the halls of power.
It will be built in kitchens, basements, parks, community centres.
It will be built in memory, in movement, in revolt, in care.
No victory.
No salvation.
Only us.
Only everything we still have to build, together.
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