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But the last thing Carney should do is treat his win as something tentative or unsure. He needs to act as if he had a majority. He and his government will never be as popular or powerful as it is now. It’s great to act with “humility,” as Carney promised to do in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, but the times call for quick, decisive action no matter the seat count in the Commons.

through final counting, the Liberals will have 169 seats and what’s left of the New Democrats will have seven. That’s enough for a bare majority but there’s no need for any Trudeau-style ongoing arrangement with the NDP or anyone else. The times call for something completely different – a bold program to counter the Trump threat.

The good news is that this is what voters clearly want, and in this case good policy will make for good politics. The best way the Liberals can position themselves for the next election is to actually carry out what they said they would do – speed up resource development, wean the country off its dependence on the United States, work out a new arrangement with Trump, launch a massive program to tackle the housing shortage. Or as Carney put it: “Build, baby, build.”

The equally good news is that there’s a lot of overlap between what Carney and the Conservatives promised, at least in direction. There’s lots of room for cooperation, if both parties are willing to do the right thing for the sake of the country, at least for a while. In these circumstances, voters will punish pointless obstruction more harshly than usual.

Turning a minority into a functional majority won’t be easy, but Carney will have some big advantages as he tries to pull it off. The opposition parties are all humbled. The NDP is smashed and the Bloc Québécois lost a third of its seats. The Bloc, in fact, is already promising collaboration to keep Parliament going “for at least a year” while the government negotiates with Trump.

As for the Conservatives, they increased their seat count and popular vote, but let’s face it – compared to where they thought they’d be as recently as the beginning of the year this is a bitter disappointment. To rub it in, Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat. His party is bound to go through a period of internal finger-pointing about why they’re still on the outside looking in.

The flip-side of that benefits the Liberals. They don’t have a majority but they pulled off the biggest turnaround in Canadian political history. Given up for dead in January, they’re back in power just three months later. Those who wrote them off (and here I sheepishly put up my hand) badly underestimated the survival instinct and sheer wiliness of the “natural governing party.”

Just as important, this is a personal victory for Carney much more than a win for the Liberal party. Carney put the bleeding Liberals on his back and carried them to the finish line. The election turned into a referendum on leadership – who was the best person to stand up to Trump. Carney resoundingly won that vote; as much as he outpaced his party in popularity, Poilievre dragged down the Conservatives.

As a result Carney has an even more “presidential” mandate than Canadian prime ministers usually have. He’s been confirmed in office because of his own qualities and talents, not the institutional power of the Liberal party, and everyone knows it.

That gives Carney, for a while at least, more power than the election numbers would suggest. He should use it with humility, yes, but also with confidence and determination.