By Anna Mehler Paperny
TORONTO (Reuters) – Former central banker Mark Carney claimed a landslide victory on Sunday to lead Canada’s Liberal Party and to become the country’s next prime minister.
Now comes the hard part: taking on U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened annexation, tackling a trade war and punishing tariffs, and leading the party through what promises to be a bruising general election that is likely imminent.
Carney won with 86% of the votes cast by party members. In the coming days Canada’s Governor-General, the representative of Britain’s King Charles in Canada, will invite him to form a government and will position Carney to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister.
But this reconstituted Liberal government is likely to be short-lived. Two Liberal Party sources said Carney will call an election in coming weeks, banking on new momentum for the party in polls. If Carney does not call an election himself, his political opponents have said they would defeat the government at their first opportunity when Parliament reconvenes.
For months the opposition Conservatives led in the polls, often by double-digits ahead of the governing Liberals.
However, the political landscape shifted with the emergence of Trump, the prospect of tariffs and the threat of annexation. This coincided with a surge of support for the Liberals, who have ridden a wave of renewed national unity to come neck-and-neck with the opposition party, according to the latest polls.
Now the challenge will be to maintain that momentum and convince Canadians to give a party that spent a decade in power under Trudeau another go – while fighting a trade war on multiple fronts that seems to shapeshift by the hour.
“Without overstating it, the challenges are almost unique in Canadian history, if not unique in the post-war period,” said Cameron Anderson, a politics professor at Western University.
“We have big challenges domestically in terms of cost of living and housing and health care and managing immigration. … And then I think when we look at Canada as a country in the world, we’re probably threatened and have the sense of being threatened in a way we haven’t in many generations.”
Carney will be the first person to become Canada’s Prime Minister with no prior experience in electoral politics. The former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England shot to the front of the Liberal leadership race, ahead of two women who held seats in Trudeau’s Cabinet.
Carney promised on Sunday evening to scrap the consumer price on carbon and stop a planned increase in the capital gains tax. He says he supports dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s tariffs.
Like others, Carney pledged to remove barriers to trade within Canada. He vowed to double the pace of new housing construction over 10 years and cap immigration, a shift in policy Trudeau had started.
Liberals sought to compare Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to Trump in a recent advertisement. Poilievre in turn ramped up attacks on Carney on Sunday.
Carney “will emphasize the policy departures that were kind of necessary conditions for countering Poilievre,” said University of British Columbia politics professor Richard Johnston.
“Whether these reversals are good policy is a whole other matter.”
But a major emphasis, Johnston said, will be “keeping his cool in the face of Donald Trump.”
(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Diane Craft)
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