On Oct. 19, the Liberal Party of Canada won 184 seats to take the majority in the 338-seat Canadian Parliament. The victory is impressive for a number of reasons; the Liberals had a net gain of 148 seats — the largest gain in Canadian history as no party has won as many seats since 1984 — and this election was the first time that a party that was neither the official government nor the opposition will form the new majority government.

But what makes the Liberal Party’s victory most impressive is its leader, the Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau, son of the famous Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal leader who successfully handled the Quebec separatist crisis and is credited with developing the bilingual pan-Canadian state of today. However, Trudeau was not guaranteed a spot in Canadian politics just based on who his father was; he worked as a French and math teacher and a snowboarding instructor for several years after graduating college and later studied environmentalism and engineering. He did not win his first election until 2008, when he beat a Bloc Québécois incumbent in the heart of Montreal. In 2013, when he was elected to lead the Liberal Party, it was in shambles and had grown so weak that it was no longer invited to be part of the government with the Conservative Party or the opposition with the New Democratic Party.

So what made the Liberal Party, and, more importantly, Justin Trudeau, so successful in 2015? After all, in 2013, Trudeau, and the Liberal Party as a whole, was widely criticized for not taking strong policy stances on contentious issues, be it fiscal or foreign policy. There are three reasons that the Liberal Party ascended in 2015, and other parties, especially left-leaning parties that have been floundering since 2008 in America and Europe, should take note.

Justin Trudeau was not afraid to run away from his party’s — and his father’s — past. Rather, he proudly owns up to being the first prime minister to have had a parent who also held the office. They share a sense of outspokenness that is both a strength and a weakness. However, there is distance between Justin and Pierre; Trudeau was only 13 when his father left politics and first ran for office nearly a decade after his father’s death. While it is obviously easier to run for an office your family member popularly held several decades ago than one that family member unpopularly left only eight years earlier, Trudeau successfully managed to portray himself as a strong, independent leader who still was proud of his family and party legacy. 

Canada is still not completely out of the 2008 global recession and has actually had an economic downturn in the last two quarters, while America’s economy has continued to grow, albeit slowly. Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, similar to right-leaning parties in Europe, instituted harsh austerity measures, including major cuts to public universities and public pensions in order to limit deficit spending. One of Trudeau’s most popular campaign promises was to deficit spend in order to invest in government spending and boost spending in all of Canada’s provinces — not just Alberta, a claim made against Harper. Rather than running from liberal policies and ideals like many other liberal leaders, be they Barack Obama or Francois Hollande, have done since the Recession, Trudeau is proudly owning up to his ideology, be it supporting marijuana legalization or ending Canada’s involvement in the United States’ bombing campaign against the United States.

However, what was most striking about Trudeau’s campaign was the tone and attitude he took. Harper and his government had serious problems with marginalizing various communities during his tenure, most famously sending body bags to First Nations populations and reservations in Manitoba when they requested medication during the Swine Flu epidemic. But what made Harper truly stand out during the campaign was the incredibly negative, even offensive, statements he made about Canadian Muslims and immigrants in the last few weeks of the campaign in what was probably an effort to win socially conservative Québécois voters who otherwise may have supported the New Democratic Party. Before his comment, voters in Quebec were evenly split between the Liberals and the NDP, but after, they split between the Conservatives and the Liberals. Harper’s strategy not only didn’t work, but it back failed spectacularly. Vox., in their explainer of the Canadian elections for clueless Americans, pointed out that the media and everyday Canadians accused him of throwing Canada’s religious minorities under the bus in the name of satisfying extremists, and claimed that such rhetoric was inherently at odds with the stereotypically polite Canadian attitude. Trudeau stayed above the fray and remained generally positive and professional during the campaign, careful to not marginalize or offend minority groups whose needs are often overlooked.

Clearly, Canada is not the United States, and what works in Canada might not necessarily work in the U.S. or even in other parliamentary states in Western Europe. However, the tri-pronged approach of taking ownership in one’s identity, not backing away from possibly unpopular policy positions and remaining positive and not targeting minority groups could be a winning combination for all political parties in the future.