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The Canadian flag flies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Who’s meddling in Canada’s election?
Canada’s foreign interference watchdog is warning that China, India, and Russia plan on meddling in the country’s federal election. The contest, which launched last weekend, has already been marked by a handful of stories about past covert foreign interventions and threats of new ones.
This week, the Globe and Mailreported allegations that India interfered in 2022 to help get Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre elected, though he was not aware of the efforts. They also broke news that former Liberal Party leadership candidate and member of Parliament Chandra Arya was banned from running for leader and reelection because of alleged interference tied, once again, to India.
Now, Canada’s election interference monitoring group is warning that China, India, and Russia will try to interfere in the current election.
Poilievre also accused Liberal leader Mark Carney of being cozy with Beijing due to a $276 million loan Brookfield Asset Management secured from the Bank of China when Carney was Chair of Brookfield’s board. Carney rejected those accusations and, on Wednesday, said that Canada should not pursue greater economic ties with China but should prioritize other Asian nations and Europe.
Other Canadian critics have complained that the US is interfering, citing Donald Trump consigliere Elon Musk’s public statements about the country. But officials say this doesn’t meet the bar for foreign interference. Neither, apparently, do the actions of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith,who recently admitted to Breitbartthat she pressed Trump administration officials to delay tariffs to help elect the Conservatives over the Liberals, since Poilievre would be “the best person” for the White House to deal with given that he would be “very much in sync with the new direction in America.”Canada’s Liberals and Conservatives are neck and neck as election begins, and running on similar promises
Canada’s federal election is on. The polls show a polarized contest between the Liberals and Conservatives, one dominated by Donald Trump and the question of who’s best-suited to deal with his tariff and annexation threats. Canadian nationalism has surged. The Liberal Party, recently down 25 points in the polls to the Conservatives, have seen their fortunes turn around under new leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney — a manwho’s been all too keen to, ahem, adapt ideas from his top rival.
Liberal, Tory, same old story?
A Trump-centric campaign risks obscuring other important policy issues. But how much does it matter when the two front-runners are so close together? So far, both parties — one of which is running on the slogan “Canada Strong” and the other on “Canada First” – have adopted similar proposals for a range of issues.
Both Liberal and Conservative campaigns launched with promises to cut personal income taxes. The Liberals are offering a 1% cut to the lowest bracket, and the Conservatives are putting forward a 2.25% cut. Both parties are also promising to cut federal sales taxes on new homes for first-time buyers, with Liberals including new builds worth as much as CA$1 million and the Conservatives ramping it all the way up to … $1.3 million, but they’ll expand eligibility to non-first-time buyers, including investors.
On defense, Carney is promising to spend 2% of GDP on the military by 2030 and expand Arctic security. Poilievre has promised more or less the same, with details to come. Both say they’ll speed up the building of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines, though Carney would keep a Trudeau-era emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, while Poilievre would not.
Affordability remains a major concern, even more so with tariffs threatening the economy. Poilievre even says he’d keep (though perhaps not expand) the Liberals’ public prescription drug, daycare, and dental care programs. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of Canadians can’t afford food. In 2024, the Liberals launched a food lunch program, which the Conservatives attacked as a headline grab but didn’t outright oppose. The parties haven’t released more on food security and affordability yet, but they almost certainly will.
Can the Liberals rewrite the past?
While the Liberals are now led by Carney, with former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gone, they’re still the same party that has governed for nearly a decade and earned ire from voters for policy shortcomings. With a policy agenda that, so far, looks similar to that of the Conservatives, the Liberals must persuade voters they’re not just better on policy, but that their guy is better on character and competence, and that his team is fit for purpose.
It’s a tricky task, and it’s fair to ask how much the Liberal Party has changed. Many top candidates and current Cabinet ministers are the same faces from Trudeau’s years, including Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, Bill Blair, and François-Philippe Champagne. The Liberal surge even persuaded a handful of candidates who’d served in the caucus to run again after saying they were out under Trudeau, including high-profile players Anita Anand, Sean Fraser, and Nate Erskine-Smith.
When Carney announced his Cabinet just before he triggered the election, Conservatives were quick to point out that the group contained 87% of the same faces from Trudeau’s table. Among the faces are those who supported, just weeks earlier, policies Carney is now reversing, including the Liberals’ signature consumer carbon price and its planned increase to the capital gains inclusion rate (reversals Conservatives were calling for).
Canada’s “presidentialized” election
A leader-focused campaign in the face of Trump’s threats will, perhaps ironically, be thoroughly American. Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice, notes that the tricky thing for the Liberals is this is a change campaign, with voters looking to reset after the Trudeau years. Carney will have to present himself as that change – which could mean an intense focus on him as leader.
Thompson calls it a “presidentialized” campaign, one that comes with a risk for the neophyte Liberal leader. “It opens the question of Carney’s political experience, or rather lack thereof – and the fact that he has never run an election campaign before, let alone a national general election campaign. It’s an open question whether his political inexperience comes out in a negative way.”
But a focus on character could also set Carney apart from Poilievre, even if the two don’t have much daylight between them on policy. Voters see Carney as the best person to be prime minister, and he enjoys high favorability ratings — over half the country likes him. The Conservative Party leader, on the other hand, isn’t particularly well-liked, with his unfavorables sitting at 59%.
Promise now, worry later?
For all the talk of character, Conservatives, including Poilievre himself, have accused the Liberals of stealing their ideas. That’s a fair criticism. As Thompson puts it, the Liberals have caught the Conservatives out and, indeed, have adopted their positions. But how far will that take the Liberals? And at what cost?
“These are all Conservative policies that were being wielded against Trudeau,” Thompson says, “which Carney has now adopted as his own. And it’s shrewd politicking.” But it’s also risky. “If the Liberals win, they need to deliver very quickly on showing that this is a new government and that they have new policies. The honeymoon period would be, I think, quite short.”
The Liberals will be happy to worry about all of this later. For now, they’re the beneficiaries of an election in which the very issues that were set to spell their doom have become temporarily incidental to Trump and to questions of character and competence – questions to which voters seem to think Carney is the answer.
The policy challenges that got Liberals into trouble in the first place are still lurking and waiting to reassert themselves in short order. But for the Liberals, those are problems for another day.
Pope Francis greets the crowd during a short appearance at Gemelli hospital, in Rome, on Sunday, March 23, 2025.
HARD NUMBERS: Pope returns to Vatican, Canadian PM calls snap election, Trump targets legal entry migrants, South Korean PM reinstated, US auto importers hit the gas, Orlando cops recover swallowed earrings
5: Pope Francis is back home at the Vatican. On Sunday, the 88-year-old pontiff was discharged from hospital, where he has been fighting double pneumonia for five weeks. The pope, who looked frail as he made his first public appearance since Valentine’s Day, has been advised by doctors that he will need to continue to convalesce for the next two months.
37: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, leader of the Liberal Party, called a snap federal election on Sunday in Ottawa. The move launched a swift, five-week campaign — it will last just 37 days, the minimum duration required by law — in a bid to keep up the Liberals’ current momentum. The party is ahead of the Conservatives in some polls, having come back from a steep deficit just two months ago, but behind by a few points in others.
530,000: Washington has pulled the welcome mat out from under 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Migrants who came to the US under President Joe Biden’s legal entry parole program over the past two years learned on Friday that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration will soon be retroactive. As of April 24, they will be stripped of legal status, and the administration is encouraging them to self-report – or face possible arrest and deportation.
7-1: South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo is no longer impeached. The country’s Constitutional Court overturned his impeachment on Monday, reinstating him in a 7-1 ruling. Observers do not see it as a sign that President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose brief imposition of martial law in December sparked these legal matters, will also see his impeachment overturned.
22: Carmakers have thrown their shipments of vehicles and automotive components into high gear in anticipation of the 25% tariffs to be imposed by the Trump administration on April 2 on imports from Mexico and Canada as well as reciprocal tariffs on other US trading partners. Many fear the tariff regime will upend auto supply chains, so manufacturers are sending more vehicles than normal, leading to a 22% year-on-year increase of such shipments from the EU to the US in February — and 14% and 15% increases from Japan and South Korea respectively.
769,500: We’ve all heard of swallowing one’s pride, but one’s crime? Jaythan Gilder, 32, allegedly swallowed two sets of Tiffany & Co. earrings worth $769,500 around the time of his arrest more than two weeks ago on robbery and grand theft charges. Gilder was monitored by detectives at an Orlando hospital until the jewels were, uh, expelled from his system. The earrings, which match the ones taken from an Orlando Tiffany store last month, have been returned to the retailer (and thoroughly cleaned).
So far, Carney’s ‘toughness’ doesn’t seem to bother Trump
Last Thursday, Justin Trudeau’s last full day as prime minister, Donald Trump was emphatic in his desire to force Canada to join the United States during a press event in the Oval Office.
“Canada only works as a state,” he said, referring to the border as “an artificial line” and suggesting that Canschluss — a play on the term Anschluss, denoting Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 — is just a matter of time.
“There will be a little disruption, but it won’t be very long. But they need us. We really don’t need them. And we have to do this. I’m sorry.”
On Friday, former central banker Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister. In his first news conference, he called Trump’s comments “crazy. That’s all you can say.”
For a few days, Trump didn't repeat his threats, which opened up the possibility that he merely enjoyed dunking onTrudeau, whom he seems to despise, and would now move on. But it was likely that the US president was just busy — carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, deporting migrants to El Salvador, and trying to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine.
On Tuesday night, in an interview with Fox News, Trump angrily denounced Canada again, said he doesn’t care if his comments cost the Conservatives the election, and said Canada is “meant to be our 51st state.”
Trump is so toxic in Canada that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievreseized on the comment as evidence that he, not Carney, is the champion the country needs.
Trump’s continued trash talk may show that his fixation is too deep to be deterred by the disinclination of Canadians to be annexed, which is setting him up for a showdown with the new prime minister.
People who know Carney think he may be better equipped to respond than Trudeau was.
Anthony Scaramucci, who became friends with Carney at Goldman Sachs many years ago, and who briefly worked for Trump in 2017, said on MSNBC that the president likely doesn’t want a fight with Carney, who he described as a “very, very tough guy.”
“I don’t think the administration really wants to fight with him,” said the Mooch. “He has energy on his side. He has electricity on his side.”
Trudeau looked weak
Trump and Carney have not yet had the traditional congratulatory call but, on the other hand, he is not yet calling Carney governor — which would be ironic, since he previously served as governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
It may be that Trump had a special desire to bully Trudeau, who was an unpopular lame duck when Trump was elected.
“Trump, as everybody knows, has an unerring instinct for the weakness of a counterparty, and he seeks to exploit that and control them for it,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group.
The White House will have noticed that Canadians now have their backs up, says Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, and are unified around the idea of “sticking it” to the Americans.
“It really has changed the way in which they will be able to negotiate with the United States in an upcoming [trade] renegotiation. It doesn’t matter who the leader of the Canadian government is. That person is going to have to represent the national mood, and the national mood is not conducive to cutting a deal with the United States.”
And Trump appreciates muscle. After blustery Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to impose a 25% tariff on electricity exports to the United States, Trump threatened him into backing down, and then praised him as “a very strong man.”
Thompson notes that Trump has been respectful to Ford, who just won a majority, and Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who enjoys overwhelming support among Mexicans.
“I think that whoever ends up on the other side of the Canadian election, if they get a majority, that would be the most powerful thing in Carney or Poilievre’s pocket, in terms of relations with the Trump administration.”
An election on tackling Trump
For Carney, everything depends on managing Trump, since he has the power to badly damage Canada’s economy with tariffs.
Carney is trying to show strength. After being sworn in, he flew to Europe to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to “strengthen ties with reliable allies,” which seemingly no longer includes the United States.
After flying back to the Canadian Arctic, Carney announced that Canada would buy a CA$6 billion radar system from Australia, getting it before the Americans. He also has asked for a review of the planned CA$19 billion purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets from the United States, “given the geopolitical environment,” although the Americans might be able to use technology-sharing agreements to block Canada from purchasing alternatives.
Last week, Portugal announced it would buy European jets rather than F-35s because of America’s new hostility toward traditional allies, so the Canadian announcement would seem like bad news for politically powerful American supplier Lockheed Martin. This would normally be the kind of thing to get a president’s attention.
Carney, who has met Trump at international conferences and been involved in business deals with Jared Kushner and Elon Musk, will highlight his economic and crisis-management experience in the upcoming Canadian election, which could start as soon as Sunday.
Polls show, in a dramatic reversal, that Canadians now favor Carney over his Conservative rival, who is promising to stand up to Trump but whom Carney has linked to the MAGA movement.
Carney is campaigning on taking a hard line. In London, he said he didn’t intend to negotiate with Trump until he stopped threatening to make Canada the 51st state.
“We’ve called out those comments,” he said. “They’re disrespectful, they’re not helpful, and they need to stop. They will have to stop before we sit down and have a conversation about our broader partnership with the United States.”
But Trump shows no sign of stopping, and if he doesn’t, it’s unclear what Carney — or Poilievre — can do. Both leaders talk about diversifying trade, but it would take years to build the transport infrastructure to make a major shift workable. In the short term, a showdown with a hostile neighbor looks inevitable.
President Donald Trump holds an executive order about tariffs increase, flanked by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 13, 2025.
The tariff waltz continues as everyone is set to lose
Economist Justin Wolfersjoked on social media on Tuesday that we had a “world first: An intra-day tariff chart.” Donald Trump launched a 25% tariff on Canadian aluminum and steel, raised it to 50%, and then lowered it again the same day after Ontario Premier Doug Ford backed off on a 25% energy export surcharge for electricity sent to parts of three northern US states.
In response to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, Canada nonetheless moved ahead with counter-tariffs worth more than $20 billion on US goods including steel, aluminum, and other products. If you’re keeping score at home, these duties are on top of previous $30 billion counter-tariffs levied by Canada from Trump’s first round of tariffs.
The tariffs and counter-tariffs threaten to disrupt supply chains, drive profits down for manufacturers, lead to job losses, and raise prices for consumers on both sides of the border. The Dow Jones dropped almost 500 points on Tuesday and slid again Wednesday as markets reacted to the news, which included European counter-tariffs against the US worth $28 billion.
The Bank of Canada on Wednesday announced a 25-basis point interest rate cut amid slowing market confidence and investment, warning the trade war would hike inflation and make for tough times ahead – including the risk of a recession. Tough times and recession are prospects the US also faces as the tariff wars drag on.Canada's Liberal Party leadership candidates, former House leader Karina Gould, far left, shakes hands with former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, far right, near former Liberal MP Frank Baylis, and former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, before their English language debate ahead of the March 9 vote to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Feb. 25, 2025.
Canadian Liberals to get new leader
Carney is favored to win, with a recent Ipsos poll giving him 68% support among Liberal members, ahead of Freeland at 14% and Gould and Baylis in single digits. While a recent poll showed Carney as the leader most trusted to take on Trump, another shows him dropping back behind Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in the popular vote.Poll aggregator 338Canada.com shows both the Liberals and Conservatives in a position to form a government, however, if an election were held today.
After leadership, an election? Canadians must go to the polls by Oct. 25, but the House of Commons is supposed to return on March 24, and opposition parties have threatened to bring down the Liberals’ minority government. Until this week, with the party rebounding in the polls, there was speculation the new leader might simply call a snap election, perhaps as early as the week of March 10.
But the winds may have shifted with the imposition of Trump’s tariffs. The head of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, wrote a letter Tuesday demanding an emergency session of Parliament to pass unemployment insurance relief measures, meaning his party does not immediately intend to bring down the government – giving the Liberals a lifeline to stick around a bit longer if they choose.Canada at risk: Janice Stein warns of erosion of sovereignty under Trump
Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, is one of Canada’s most important public intellectuals, with decades of experience working at the highest level with policymakers in Canada, the United States, and around the world.
GZERO’s Stephen Maher spoke to her on March 5, the morning after Donald Trump’s address to Congress, to discuss the president’s annexation threats and Canada’s economic, political, and military vulnerability. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Maher: It appears that Canada is in a position of great vulnerability because of the new relationship between Washington and Moscow. What do you think?
Stein: Canada faces a challenge of unprecedented proportions. The vulnerability comes because we share a continent with the United States and Mexico, and there are enormous disparities of power between the United States and its two neighbors. We live next door to the most powerful dynamic economy in the world and the strongest military in the world. Geography is not destiny, but it comes very, very close.
You look at the near neighbors of other great powers, and you get a sense of what it’s like to live next to one of these giants in a period where they are looking outward, acquisitively at their neighbors. That’s what we’re seeing now in the Trump administration, and that, more than anything else, is what makes it risky for us. If there were no softening of US attitudes toward Russia, but Trump still talked about Canada and about Mexico the way he does now, we would still be at enormous risk.
I have been talking to experts about Trump and the Canada relationship for a long time, and they have all been wrong, and for good reasons, but they have all been suffering from normalcy bias. Why?
All of us had some normalcy bias, including me. There were boundaries to how far I thought Donald Trump would go, and I was wrong. He’s gone much farther than I thought he would go. So it’s important to think about the worst case.
What would the worst case be for Canada? A version of these 25% tariffs would stay. There would be tariffs on top of the 25% on aluminum, steel, and lumber, and then layer on top of that, whatever this administration means by reciprocal tariffs, and the president was explicit in his address to Congress that that would include and account for non-tariff barriers, such as, for example, the Goods and Services Tax.
Well, if you do the math, you can get up to 50% or 60% without trying very hard. That would deliver a crushing blow to the Canadian economy. And that’s what the prime minister was warning about when he was talking about the use of economic force to make us weak and vulnerable.
I don’t think we can take that kind of catastrophic scenario off the table. We need to think about it, and we need to do our best to make ourselves as resilient as possible against it, although it’s a tough hill to climb.
Do you think we will be forced to accept new limits on our sovereignty in the next four years?
Sovereignty is an evolving concept. There’s mythical sovereignty, where the state has full control over its territory and the population that lives within its territory. But it’s never been absolute, and it waxes and wanes. We signed the auto pact long before we signed the free trade agreement. So sovereignty is always a question of degree. When we had the free trade debate in this country, we debated whether we would be able to retain cultural sovereignty and sovereignty over health care if we agreed to a much deeper trading regime. We’ve managed to do that. Are we as sovereign today as we were in 1980? No, but nor is anybody else. So yes, I can see where we are going to have to partner in different ways — and that word is well chosen on my part — we’re going to have to co-invest in different ways. We’re going to have to co-produce in different ways, because we live next to the most dynamic economy in the world that is led by a president who thinks in regional terms, who thinks big powers make the rules and their near neighbors take the rules.
I keep thinking about Thucydides, who wrote, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Is that Canada’s position now? Will we have to suffer what we must?
Yes, because we live next door to the United States, which has a president who talks like President McKinley at the end of the 19th century, who is openly aggressive toward near neighbors. I think the prime minister was right when he used the words trade war, and the president said it himself: I will not use military force, but I will use economic force to coerce you.
It is economic warfare. We have to understand that, and that’s what all of us got wrong, including me. We expected a version of this, but what we did not anticipate was that it would be framed within a broader context of economic war, and that became apparent during that first trip to Mar-a-Lago when Trump talked about Canada becoming the 51st state. And he understands it’s not coming through the use of military force and formal annexation. But, again, pay attention to what he said Tuesday night about the Panama Canal and Greenland: We’re going to do it one way or the other.
He is not quite saying that about Canada.
It is not in the same category. And that should be some small comfort to all of us. I listened very carefully to the speech. We are not in the category of Panama and Greenland.
I was impressed by Claudia Sheinbaum, who I thought, in contrast to Trudeau during the first tariff showdown, was able to keep her cool, and she didn’t have regional leaders undercutting her.
Let me talk about the challenges leaders face when they deal with Donald Trump because a courageous leader like Volodymyr Zelensky found himself in an absolutely unprecedented situation in the White House [last Friday]. So let’s talk about the difference between Zelensky and Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum has exercised iron self-discipline. She does not rise to the bait. She’s very deliberate. She makes it absolutely clear that Mexico is going to retaliate, but she always puts some time between when she says — in very deliberate, very controlled language — we are going to retaliate, and the date at which that retaliation is going to take place.
Zelensky was deliberately baited in that meeting, and he, tragically for him, took the bait and argued with the president and with the vice president. And very interestingly, there were two reactions in Canada to that. One was, “I’m really glad that somebody had the courage to stand up to that bully.” That is a very human reaction, and it actually channels the anger that Canadians are feeling toward Trump. The other was, “What a disaster. What a disaster.” He needed to sit there stone-faced and not rise to the bait because there’s a larger picture here.
That’s an object lesson for all Canadian leaders going forward, and it’s going to be very hard on the Canadian public. The outgoing prime minister did that for four years, with one exception, in Donald Trump’s first term. All of us are going to have to watch our leader, whoever it is, sit there stone-faced, not rise to the bait, and think about the longer term and what has to be done for this country, and not provide the emotional satisfaction of arguing back, even though it’s entirely justified.
So, in the election ahead, Canadians are going to have a choice between someone (Pierre Poilievre) who gets MAGA and might be better able to work with the Americans, and someone (Mark Carney) who will likely have more of a focus on maintaining sovereignty. Do you think that that’s the central question?
I think a ballot question is: How worried are you about Donald Trump? If you’re reasonably sanguine, and you have faith in American institutions, and you see this nightmare as a two-year thing, you’re in one world. And I would suspect then you’re going to consider Poilievre on the basis of the campaign on which he ran before Donald Trump. And you’re going to say, “Is this important to the Canadian future?”
But if you’re really worried about what Trump is going to do, if you’re scared, if you’re deeply worried about the future of the economy, you’re going to say, “Well, there’s a candidate who spent his life managing crises in the economy.” I think it’s going to come down to that. I think it’s all about the level of fear and anxiety.
Trump brings Canadian Liberals back from the dead
Mark Carney laid out his case for governing Canada on Saturday during a friendly interview with former Tony Blair spin doctor Alastair Campbell and short-lived Trump spokesman Anthony Scaramucci on "The Rest Is Politics" podcast.
Carney is likely to become leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on March 9 and then take over from Justin Trudeau for two weeks before calling an election in which he must convince Canadians that he, not Pierre Poilievre, is the right person to handle President Donald Trump.
He is taking a harder line than the Conservative leader.
“What had been our closest friend and ally now is just our neighbor,” he said. “The Americans are just our neighbor. It’s geography as opposed to kinship.”
In a flag-festooned rally in Ottawa on the same day, Poilievre struck a different tone. He said Canada “will bear any burden and pay any price to protect our sovereignty and independence” — while also extending an olive branch.
“We’ve always loved you as neighbors and friends. There is no country with whom we would rather share a border — the longest undefended border in the world.”
Not a professional politician
Poilievre is not free to take as hard a line as Carney because about half of his party’s supporters approve of Trump, and his approach to politics is influenced by the MAGA movement.
Carney attacked Poilievre for that in the podcast.
“Do you really believe in these elements of Canada, or have you been mouthing MAGA talking points with a Canadian twist for the past three years, and don’t buy into them and wouldn’t protect them?”
Campbell, a savvy political messenger, gave him some friendly advice.
“I think if you are a full-time experienced politician, you left that hanging, Mark,” he said. “I’d have gone straight for the jugular. You were setting it up and then you pulled your punch.”
“You’re right,” Carney said with a grimace and a smile. “Fair enough.”
Campbell, who wants Carney to win, is right. Carney is not a “full-time experienced politician.” He doesn’t know how to land a punch. Poilievre, in contrast, has an unerring instinct for his opponent’s weaknesses, and never misses an opening.
No longer a slam dunk
The election ahead was supposed to be a slam dunk. Poilievre has been leading in the polls for three years, usually by double digits. The 9-year-old Trudeau government had wandered to the left of the mainstream, leaving Canadians fed up with the cost of living, a housing crisis, mismanaged immigration, and an activist, woke approach to social issues.
All the pieces were lined up for a massive Conservative election victory until Trump started threatening to annex Canada. In the fallout, the unpopular Trudeau was forced to resign, and Carney — who had been biding his time on the sidelines — stepped forward.
The former governor of central banks in Canada and the UK, Carney has unparalleled economic and crisis-management credentials. Canadians have taken notice. He is raising money and filling halls. The one issue where the Liberals have a brand advantage — managing the relationship with the Americans — is now likely to dominate political debate.
New challenge for Poilievre
Poilievre is still ahead in the polls, but the Liberals have surged. A poll last week from Leger, Canada’s best-rated pollster, found that the electorate would be evenly divided when Carney is leader.
The result was not a complete shock to Leger because a poll the week before found Quebec’s leaderless provincial Liberals surging at the expense of nationalist Quebec parties, says Leger Vice President Sébastien Dallaire.
“There clearly is a generalized Donald Trump effect, so the voters are galvanizing, trying to show national unity against what’s happening in the United States, against Donald Trump more specifically, and parties whose brands are more aligned with defending national unity are certainly benefiting from this.”
Poilievre had planned for the election of 2025 to be a referendum against Trudeau and the carbon tax, but Trudeau is headed for the exit and Carney has promised to kill the consumer carbon tax.
The parties are converging on policies as Liberals discard unpopular Trudeau-era positions and wrap themselves in the flag after a decade in which they held more ambiguous feelings. Poilievrecan complain about their death-bed conversion, but voters are focused on the future, so he has to thread the needle, backing his country against American threats while also not sanctioning the Liberals’ response.
“You want to be heard, but you don’t want to be seen to be a bit tone-deaf or out of touch with what’s happening,” says Dallaire. “So that’s the big, big challenge for Pierre Poilievre right now. And it goes a little bit against his style of politics as well, to find that softer tone a little bit.”
Trump, who seems to despise Trudeau, has thrown the Liberal Party a lifeline — and increased the possibility that the United States will face an unfriendly new government on its northern border this spring.