Tag: Canada

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Sunday called early elections for April 28, pledging to defeat Donald Trump’s drive to annex the United States’ huge northern neighbor.

Carney, a former central banker, was chosen by Canada’s centrist Liberal Party to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister, but he has never faced the country’s broader electorate.

That will now change as Carney brought parliamentary elections forward several months from October. He made it clear that the barrage of trade and sovereignty threats coming from the US president will be the focus of his campaign.

“I’ve just requested that the governor general dissolve parliament and call an election for April 28. She has agreed,” Carney said in a speech to the nation, referring to King Charles III’s representative in Canada, a member of the British Commonwealth.

In power for a decade, the Liberal government had slid into deep unpopularity, but Carney will be hoping to ride a wave of Canadian patriotism to a new majority.

“I’m asking Canadians for a strong, positive mandate to deal with President Trump,” Carney said, adding that the Republican “wants to break us, so America can own us. We will not let that happen.”

“We are facing the most significant crisis of our lifetimes because of President Trump’s unjustified trade actions and his threats to our sovereignty,” Carney said.

“Our response must be to build a strong economy and a more secure Canada,” he added, pledging not to meet Trump until he recognizes Canadian sovereignty.

Trump has riled his northern neighbor by repeatedly dismissing its borders as artificial, and urging it to join the United States as the 51st state.

The ominous remarks have been accompanied by Trump’s trade war, with the imposition of tariffs on imports from Canada threatening to severely damage its economy.

Poll favorites

Domestic issues, such as the cost of living and immigration usually dominate Canadian elections but, this time around, one key topic tops the list in this country of 41 million people: who can best handle Trump.

The president’s open hostility toward his northern neighbor — a NATO ally and historically one of his country’s closest partners — has upended the Canadian political landscape.

Trudeau was deeply unpopular when he announced he was stepping down, with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives seen as election favorites just weeks ago.

But since Trump’s threats, the polls have spectacularly narrowed in favor of Carney’s Liberals, who hold a minority in parliament, and analysts are now describing the race as too close to call.

“Many consider this to be an existential election, unprecedented,” Felix Mathieu, a political scientist at the University of Winnipeg, told AFP.

Poilievre, 45, is a career politician, first elected when he was only 25. A veteran tough-talking campaigner, he has sometimes been tagged as a libertarian and a populist.

On Sunday, Poilievre — seen by some as too similar to Trump in style and substance — set the tone.

“I want the opposite of what Donald Trump wants,” the Conservative leader said in Toronto, promising to base his campaign on bread-and-butter economic issues and the worries of “regular people.”

Kicking off his campaign in Labrador and Newfoundland, Carney told supporters on Canada’s Atlantic coast that the country needed “big change” to turn its economy around and “fight Donald Trump’s tariffs.”

‘Don’t care’

Carney, 60, has spent his career outside of electoral politics. He spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs and went on to lead Canada’s central bank, and then the Bank of England.

Smaller opposition parties could suffer if Canadians seek to give a large mandate to one of the big two, to strengthen their hand against Trump.

The US leader professes not to care who wins the Canadian election, while pushing ahead with plans to further strengthen tariffs against Ottawa and other major trading partners on April 2.

“I don’t care who wins up there,” Trump said this week.

“But just a little while ago, before I got involved and totally changed the election, which I don’t care about … the Conservative was leading by 35 points.”

He was born near the Arctic, led the central banks of two major economies, and is about to become Canada’s next prime minister despite never having served in parliament.

Mark Carney’s path to the top job in Canadian politics has been unusual but, as he said when he launched his campaign to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so are the circumstances.

“Our times are anything but ordinary,” Carney told supporters in the Western city of Edmonton in January. 

Carney has called the threats posed by President Donald Trump “the most serious crisis of our lifetime” and said Sunday that the United States wants “our resources, our water, our land, our country.”

He says his experience leading the Bank of Canada through the 2008-2009 financial crisis and then heading the Bank of England after the Brexit vote there has equipped him for the moment.

Carney won 85.9 percent of the ballots cast in the Liberal Party leadership vote and will become prime minister over the coming days.

Unique Background

Carney may not be prime minister for long, with a general election due soon that the opposition Conservatives are slight favorites to win, according to polls. 

No matter how long he serves, his tenure will be unique.

Carney will be the first Canadian prime minister with no political experience. He has never held an elected public office or served in a government cabinet. 

He was born in Fort Smith, a small town in the Northwest Territories, where his parents were teachers, but he was raised in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital. 

Like many Canadians, he played hockey in his youth. He studied at Harvard in the United States and Oxford in England, and the initial part of his career saw him make a fortune as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, working in New York, London, Tokyo and Toronto. 

Carney then joined the Canadian civil service, eventually being appointed governor of the Bank of Canada by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2008.

In 2013, the government of then-British prime minister David Cameron tapped him to lead the Bank of England, making Carney the first non-Briton to lead the bank in its more than 300-year history. 

‘Boring’ But ‘Reassuring’

Daniel Beland, director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University, described Carney as a “technocrat.”

“He’s a boring guy who in general doesn’t have a lot of charisma,” Beland said. 

But he noted that with Canada rattled by Trump’s trade chaos and attacks on its sovereignty, rigorous competence with no flash may be appealing. 

Carney presents “the image of a reassuring guy who knows what he is talking about,” Beland said. 

Lori Turnbull of Dalhousie University cautioned that Carney’s potential struggles to connect with the public could prove a liability. 

“He’s not a particularly great communicator when it comes to the public,” she said. 

“He is unusually well-equipped to deal with economic crises” but “it’s very hard to see how anybody would be successful in politics if you can’t bring people on board with you,” she told AFP.

The Conservatives are running attack ads branding Carney as “sneaky” — an early look at how they might plan to wage the campaign against him. 

Carney is personally wealthy, spent significant parts of his career outside of Canada, worked for US-based Goldman Sachs and was chairman at one of Canada’s largest corporations, Brookfield. 

“The Conservatives are trying to cast him as an elite who doesn’t understand what regular people go through. And I think if he can’t communicate well, then he runs the risk of being typecast in that way,” Turnbull said. 

Climate change, and Carney’s plans to address it, are also certain to play a key role in the campaign.

“Carbon Tax Carney” has emerged as a favorite Tory attack line, seeking to tie Carney to a deeply unpopular Trudeau policy that saw some homes face a marginal tax to offset emissions.

Climate has been central to the latter part of Carney’s career, but he says his focus is on investment-led solutions, like green technology, that create profit and jobs. 

“Very much we are emphasizing the commercial aspect of it, the competitiveness aspect,” he said recently in an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast. 

“This is where the world is going.”