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Canadian Liberal Party leader Mark Carney faces Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in this composite, with Donald Trump hovering in the background.
Canada’s new PM is a technocratic banker who’s never been elected — and that might help him
Mark Carney was sworn in Friday as the prime minister of Canada.
AsCarney takes the helm from Justin Trudeau, the country is witnessing a stunning rebound for the Liberals. In January, the governing Liberal Party trailed the opposition Conservatives by 25 points. Now, the gap has closed to roughly 6 points, and some recent polls even have the Liberals ahead. And Carney’s previous, purported liabilities — being a staid, low-key, globalist technocrat who’s never been elected — may now be seen as strengths as he prepares to call a snap election in the coming days.
What changed between January and today? In short: Donald Trump andTrudeau. Once Trudeau signaled his intention to go, the polls started moving in the Liberals’ favor. Then, Trump threatened Canada with annexation, calling for it to become the “cherished” 51st state and ushered in a trade war with heavy tariffs. Canadians rallied around the flag — and the governing party. Now it seems those same Canadians may be looking for an unflashy, steady hand on the tiller — a leader who can calmly explain matters and strike a stable, reliable posture.
Carney flips the script
Twice serving as a central banker — head of the Bank of Canada and, later, the Bank of England — Carney held earlier positions as deputy minister and an investment banker. His time at the central banks coincided with two major crises: the global financial crisis and Brexit. He’s been criticized by many on the right and left — including me — as a boring technocrat who couldn’t rise to meet today’s populist anger. The Conservatives and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, attacked him as a globalist — a banker with multiple passports, a Davos man through and through. A European, even.
Now, as Canada stares down threats from Trump and begins to look at trade and defense diversification, Carney’s CV and aesthetic may be valuable assets for enough voters to save the Liberals — or, at least, to bring them back from the brink of a previously expected wipeout.
These circumstances give Carney the chance to present himself as the change candidate with enough insiders onside to get the job done. He’s not Trudeau, and he’s never been elected — yet he has the steady hand of continuity as a Liberal surrounded by members of Parliament who’ve been around the block. He’s calm, experienced in negotiation and economic management, and he can explain the crisis at hand and what needs to be done. Even conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford says Carney “understands finances like no other person.”
Still, Carney faces a big leadership test, and his party continues to trail in most polls. Graeme Thompson, a senior macro-geopolitics analyst at Eurasia Group, says Carney’s skills and temperament make him a kind of anti-Trump. But there may be a limit to how far that will take him in an election campaign, even if they serve him while governing.
What happens, asks Thompson, “when the technocratic economist skills and experience, and the kind of bland, boring, predictable, safe persona runs into the fact of a 40-day electoral sprint in front of the media, live crowds, and on debate stages with Pierre Poilievre?”
Carney versus Trump, Poilievre versus …Trudeau?
When Carney hits the debate stage, he’ll be running against Trump, and he’ll make the case that while he can’t manage the mercurial president — he says Trump can’t be controlled — he can effectively navigate the crises emanating from the White House.
In his victory speech in Ottawa last Sunday, Carney said as much, sending a message to Canadian voters — and Trump — and setting the tone and focus of his campaign for the federal election.
“Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape, or form,” said Carney. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.”
On Wednesday, Carney said he’ll only meet Trump if the president respects Canadian sovereignty, though he didn’t specify exactly what that would entail.
Poilievre and the Conservatives, meanwhile, have been left snakebitten by the quick turn of events. They say they’re not panicking at Carney’s rise, but they’re dropping in the polls, and they’ve lost the electoral focus — the carbon tax — they’ve worked on for over a year. Like the Conservatives, Carney says he will also scrap consumer carbon pricing. Poilievre has built his campaign around his character: combative, angry, unapologetically right-wing, and, above all, anti-Trudeau. He’s built his entire campaign around running against Trudeau.
Now, he’ll try to make the case that the new PM is Trudeau 2.0. Poilievre will question his opponent’s trustability, pointing to the fact that Carney has not disclosed his financial assets — even though he has now put those assets in a blind trust — and that Carney’s using Trump as a distraction.
Described as Trump-like or Trump-inspired in the past, Poilievre recently has been tougher on the president, attacking his tariffs, supporting counter-tariffs, and emphasizing that Canada will never become the 51st state. But it’s a fine line; he knows much of his base has been pro-Trump — and some still are. Poilievre can’t afford to alienate them, and the Liberals will be all too happy to try to tie the Canadian right to its US counterpart.
One way or another, the Canadian election will be about Trump, which could help the Liberals.
“If the election is about people wanting the opposite of whatever it is that Donald Trump is offering, then that works to the benefit of the Liberals,” Thompson says.
“In a way, you’re going to get a fight not between two relatively different policy visions, but two notions of what the ballot question is. A lot is going to be determined by the actual campaign, but the Liberals are definitely back in the game.”
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.
Leader of Canada's Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, speaks during a 'Spike the Hike - Axe the Tax' rally in Edmonton, on March 27, 2024, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Speaker ejects Poilievre from Parliament
Speaking of performative legislative moves, Canadian Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievrewas ejected from the House of Commons on Tuesday for calling Justin Trudeau a “wacko” and refusing to withdraw his remark when asked to do so by Speaker Greg Fergus.
The disruption left commentators shaking their heads at the poor state of decorum while partisans on both sides used the occasion to attack one another. Poilievre used the incident in a fundraising pitch.
He has been under unusually heavy fire from progressives the past few weeks. Just before he was ejected from the House, Trudeau had been pressing him to denounce extremists he visited at an anti-tax protest on April 24. This week, Poilievre told a police union that he would use “whatever tools the Constitution allows” to get tough on crime. The implication: That he would use the “notwithstanding clause” of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which allows governments to suspend constitutional protections – a move that would be strongly opposed by civil libertarians.
Centrist and progressive commentators tut-tut about Poilievre’s increasingly incendiary politics, but polling so far shows Canadians like what they see, the result of fatigue with Trudeau and a cost-of-living crunch. Unless the polls show that Canadians think he is going too far, he will likely stick with his take-no-prisoners approach.
On Wednesday, Poilievre’s Conservative buddies called on Speaker Fergus to step down for having ejected their leader.
Totality fails to eclipse politics
The moon blotted out the sun across much of North America on Monday, but it did not put politics entirely out of mind.
Conservatives on both sides of the border used the occasion to compare their champion to the moon, blotting out the incumbent sun, while incumbents merely marveled at the moment.
In the United States, Donald Trump released an odd ad on his Truth Social network in which his face blotted out the sun. In Canada, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre just posted a photo of the moment, but one of his MPs posted an image showing a smiling Poilievre eclipsing Trudeau.
Meanwhile, Fox News issued a warning that the eclipse might make it easier for migrants to cross into the United States.
Justin Trudeau posted a video of himself taking in the sight from the roof of his office while Joe Biden posted a safety warning, a subtle reminder, perhaps, of the time, in 2017, when Trump gazed directly into an eclipse, which is said to be unwise.In April, Hillary Clinton visited Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
A Clinton in Ottawa
Canadian Liberals gathered in Ottawa on Thursday for their annual political convention. This year’s event features a special guest appearance from Hillary Clinton, who will be chatting with Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland on Friday. Coincidence? Well, it’s hard to ignore the parallels.
The conference opened with a speech from Justin Trudeau, after which he flew to London for the coronation of King Charles III. In his absence, Clinton and Freeland will discuss the future of the US-Canada relationship.
As always, Canadian political watchers are looking at this as a leadership test. After all, Trudeau is eight years into his tenure, has accumulated more political baggage than a Samsonite factory, and suffers from poor approval numbers.
Freeland, by far the most powerful minister in Trudeau’s cabinet, is often touted as a possible successor to Trudeau. But Liberal strategists worry that pitting her against Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre – who detractors have likened to Donald Trump – could set up a replay of the 2016 US election, which Democrats lost. And Freeland faces some of the same issues as Clinton did: Trying to break the glass ceiling as the first Liberal female PM, she over-indexes on competence and underperforms on the stump.
In any case, Trudeau says he intends to stick around for the next election, likely in 2025, although he leads a minority government that could fall before then. Which is why the Clinton-Freeland exchange will be so closely parsed.