Hanes: The takeaway from 2025? Don't take anything for granted

This time last year, Mayor Valérie Plante’s eventual replacement as leader of Projet Montréal looked poised to cruise to victory at city hall, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals seemed fated for a brutal electoral drubbing and Canada was bracing for the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president, assuming the rollback of rights he was portending could never reach us here.

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That’s not how things ultimately turned out.

Our expectations for 2025 were put to the test this past year. In hindsight, what once seemed a foregone conclusion proved to be far from inevitable, what was considered safe was suddenly in peril and what appeared to be set in stone was subject to dramatic change.

Every year has its lessons, some more obvious than others. If there is a common thread that ties together the takeaways from 2025, it should be: don’t take anything for granted. This includes high-minded principles like democracy and the rule of law, policies and political fortunes, not to mention basic services like public transit and health care.

Trump hadn’t even been sworn in yet when he started musing about turning Canada into the 51st state and brandishing tariffs to drive us into economic submission. The anger of ordinary Canadians to Trump’s escalating threats, as well as revulsion toward his administration’s draconian policies, became a potent force that reshaped politics in this country.

Trudeau, already on shaky ground in late 2024, announced his departure early in 2025. As a hasty race to replace him at the helm of the beleaguered federal Liberals got underway, responding to the new American belligerence on trade and geopolitics became the defining issue.

Former central banker Mark Carney swooped in and became the overwhelming choice of Liberal party members for his economic acumen. His skill set, “plan beats no plan” ethos, along with an almost unprecedented swell of Canadian pride that reverberated in his ‘elbows up’ hockey metaphors, propelled him to victory in the federal election that immediately followed.

Carney eked out a Liberal minority government with

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