Former central bank governor Mark Carney has been selected as the successor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the Liberal Party leader. He’s now slated to become the next prime minister—and likely preparing to launch an early general election campaign as Canada faces an onslaught of threats and tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump.
After winning an overwhelming victory with support from more than 130,000 members of the Liberal Party, Carney is set to become prime minister at a time when Ottawa says the White House is violating its free trade agreement with Ottawa, threatening to redraw the border, and demanding that Canada give up its sovereignty and become the United States’ 51st state.
Former central bank governor Mark Carney has been selected as the successor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the Liberal Party leader. He’s now slated to become the next prime minister—and likely preparing to launch an early general election campaign as Canada faces an onslaught of threats and tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump.
After winning an overwhelming victory with support from more than 130,000 members of the Liberal Party, Carney is set to become prime minister at a time when Ottawa says the White House is violating its free trade agreement with Ottawa, threatening to redraw the border, and demanding that Canada give up its sovereignty and become the United States’ 51st state.
Amid these threats, Carney has positioned himself as the captain of “Team Canada,” an emerging movement of Canadians who are boycotting U.S. goods, forgoing vacations in the United States, and donning increasingly popular “Canada is not for sale” hats.
While his predecessor once proclaimed that Canada was the world’s “first post-national state,” Carney is leaning heavily into nationalism as he readies to seek a fresh mandate. And his supporters, many of whom convened in Ottawa on Sunday afternoon to learn the results of the party election, seemed eager for it.
“The Americans, they should make no mistake,” Carney told hundreds of supporters after the results were released. “In trade, as in hockey, Canada will win,” he said. That line earned some of the most enthusiastic cheers of the day.
Canadians, Carney said, would be “maîtres chez nous”—literally “masters in our own home,” a phrase associated with Quebec’s so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when the francophone province broke definitively from the stranglehold of the Catholic Church.
But Trump has also delivered a possible turnaround in Liberal fortunes. When Trudeau announced his intent to resign in a statement made in early January, his party was on the brink of electoral oblivion. Polls showed the Canadian public souring on Trudeau in a massive way: Had an election been held early this year, his party risked becoming the third-largest—perhaps even the fourth-largest—party in the House of Commons. Just 1 in 5 Canadians said they would vote Liberal, according to poll averages published by CBC on Jan. 6, and even fewer said they wanted Trudeau to remain as prime minister.
Trudeau resisted calls to resign for nearly a year before he finally announced his plans to quit. Privately, he insisted that only he had the experience necessary to beat the rival Conservative Party—and, following Trump’s victory in November, that he was the only person capable of navigating the mercurial president. As discontent grew and poll numbers sagged to new lows, though, Trudeau finally announced his exit.
The four candidates who joined the competition to replace him were, initially, running just to salvage the furniture. But in the weeks after Trudeau’s exit, as the truncated race to replace him got going, Trump accidentally gave the party a shot in the arm. His continued talk of making Canada the 51st state, plus the very real imposition of import tariffs, gave both Trudeau and his likely successors a new purpose.
By the time that hundreds of Liberals shuffled into a convention center in downtown Ottawa on March 9 to unveil Trudeau’s successor, the party’s polling numbers had shot up by double digits.
Carney had three competitors in his quest to lead Canada’s oldest active political party.
There was Frank Baylis, a former politician and the head of a successful medical supply company, who ran by positioning himself as a fellow multimillionaire capable of going toe-to-toe with Trump across the negotiating table. Karina Gould, a former cabinet minister and the youngest person in the race by a decade, pitched herself as a radical alternative to the usual political class—promising at the event on Sunday to challenge Trump as a “bully.”
Chrystia Freeland, who had been Trudeau’s right-hand woman and finance minister for years before abruptly resigning late last year, carried the distinction of being personally reviled by Trump himself. Freeland sat across the negotiating table from Trump’s officials during his first term in office as both sides negotiated a new continental free trade deal—and Trump never forgot it. After her resignation as finance minister, Trump posted on Truth Social that Freeland was “totally toxic.”
But it was Carney who really captured the moment. While he was always the odds-on favorite to win the party leadership contest, few expected the degree of his victory—winning more than 85 percent of the votes cast. Carney, staffed by many of the strategists who helped craft Trudeau’s landmark 2015 victory, managed to convey a fusion of competence, change, and vision.
Now, as leader, Carney finds himself in an awkward position. While he has held a series of high-profile posts—including as the governor of the Bank of Canada and, later, the Bank of England—he has never held elected office. Even before his victory, Carney faced barbed attacks from the opposition Conservative Party, which has accused him of carrying numerous conflicts of interest from his time as the chairman of investment firm Brookfield Asset Management.
The main issue for Carney is that he has no real mandate from the public.
As he resigned, Trudeau visited the governor general to seek prorogation of the House of Commons—that is to say, suspending its work until after his successor was named—until March 24. Whoever took over from Trudeau was always going to be tasked with the tricky feat of managing a fractious minority parliament. But Carney is particularly challenged, as he doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons.
While there is a precedent for Canadian prime ministers governing despite not having a seat in Parliament, it is far from ideal. That’s why it is widely expected that Carney will call a snap election in a matter of weeks, if not days.
That means that Canada is set to head into a general election in the midst of an “existential threat” to the country from its closest neighbor and ally, as Trudeau phrased it during his farewell speech on Sunday. Trump’s jingoism is sure to be the sword of Damocles hanging over the election.
And Carney has already started accusing his main competitor, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, of being Trump-lite. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him,” Carney told his supporters, “not stand up to him.”
While the wind is at his sails now, the key question is how Carney intends to win this trade war without driving inflation, cutting growth, and increasing unemployment. In his speech on Sunday, Carney vowed that his government will keep in place reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods “until the Americans show us respect,” and that he would use the revenue generated to bail out workers and consumers. Beyond that, he has promised “big changes” and a quest to find new “reliable” trading partners, but he has offered little detail about these plans.
Carney is not the first Canadian prime minister to face the prospect of U.S. conquest. His many predecessors have fought wars against the Americans, received entreaties to fuse Canada into the union, and fought trade skirmishes.
But this era may be one of the most fraught, complicated, and confusing times in U.S.-Canada relations—and Carney is, at least for now, the man tasked with managing it. If he wants to keep doing it, he’ll need to convince Canadians he has the chutzpah to take on Trump.
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