脡ric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing in Toronto, a marketing communications firm helping clients build their brands in Qu茅bec.
A near-death experience often leaves survivors permanently changed. They emerge more grateful, more focused, and, crucially, more humble. The brush with mortality strips away illusions of control. Survivors stop taking life for granted. They shift their priorities. They understand that survival is not a reward. It’s a reprieve.
Politics isn鈥檛 so different. Just a few months ago, the Liberal Party of Canada was facing its own near-death experience. Polls showed them collapsing. Even insiders were bracing for the worst 鈥 a party reduced to third place, possibly without official opposition status.
This week, that same party received 43.7 per cent of the popular vote, winning enough seats to form a minority government.
Mark Carney, a man with no political experience but with an impressive career in political circles, will lead Canada鈥檚 next government. It鈥檚 an astonishing political comeback 鈥 from presumed extinction to renewed power in a matter of months.
But as any survivor of a near-death experience will tell you, surviving isn鈥檛 the end of the story. It鈥檚 the beginning of a very different one.
The Liberal party now finds itself in that uncertain space between survival and transformation. And what it chooses to do next will define whether this moment becomes a renaissance, or just a brief return before the next collapse 鈥 something its opponents, the bitterly disappointed and finger-pointing Conservatives, will want to precipitate.
First, there鈥檚 the uncomfortable truth about why they survived.
This was not a redemption arc. It was not a groundswell of grassroots re-engagement. It was, in large part, the result of an external force: the re-emergence of Donald Trump.
Trump鈥檚 looming return to power, combined with threats of economic coercion and political chaos, changed the stakes for many Canadian voters. The ballot question shifted 鈥 from domestic dissatisfaction to global stability.
Faced with risk and uncertainty, Canadians paused. And in that pause, the Liberals found oxygen.
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Second, a near-death experience doesn鈥檛 offer immunity. It offers time. If the Liberals believe this win signals a restoration of their 鈥渘atural governing party鈥 status, they will have misunderstood the moment entirely.
History is full of near-death survivors who squandered their second chance.
Take former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May. In 2017, she called a snap election expecting to solidify her power ahead of Brexit negotiations. Instead, she lost her majority and was forced to govern with a weakened mandate. That moment 鈥 politically humbling and wholly avoidable 鈥 could have been her near-death experience.
She had a choice: adapt her approach, reach across divides, and govern with greater humility and consensus. Instead, she doubled down on as though nothing had changed.
By 2019, she was gone. She had failed to learn from the moment she almost lost everything.
Mark Carney had a front-row seat to that failure. As Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, he watched as political denial, not just economic instability, triggered a collapse in confidence. He knows exactly what it looks like when a leader survives 鈥 and then squanders their second chance.
That makes the lesson for the Liberals all the more urgent: survival buys time, not immunity.
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Unlike many of the returning Liberal MPs, Carney didn鈥檛 live through the full extent of the party鈥檚 recent trauma. He didn鈥檛 experience the long, grinding descent in the polls or the wave of internal doubt that swept the party just months ago.
That makes his role even more critical. He inherits a party that was humbled by the electorate 鈥 and rescued, in part, by circumstance. His job now is to ensure the party doesn鈥檛 forget how close it came to losing everything.
Because if the Liberals forget what it felt like to be on the edge, they鈥檒l start acting like they鈥檙e entitled to the centre. And that鈥檚 how near-death experiences become just preludes to the real thing.
Opinion articles are based on the author鈥檚 interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
脡ric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing in Toronto, a
marketing communications firm helping clients build their brands in
Qu茅bec.
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