Mark Carney, candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, speaks during a news conference in Vancouver on Feb. 13.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
Former central banker Mark Carney opened the door to an early election call if he is elected by Liberal members to replace Justin Trudeau as party leader and prime minister in a March 9 leadership vote.
Mr. Carney, the perceived front-runner, has been crisscrossing the country to introduce himself to rank-and-file party members and announcing some policy initiatives.
At a news conference in Vancouver on Thursday, Mr. Carney said the country is preoccupied with U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat of hefty tariffs against all Canadian goods, including aluminum and steel. Canada must respond to the economic challenges posed by Mr. Trump’s America-first agenda, he said.
If elected to succeed Mr. Trudeau, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England said he would have to decide whether to recall Parliament to pass an emergency relief package in the event U.S. tariffs are imposed in March, or seek a fresh mandate from Canadians to negotiate with the Trump administration.
Parliament is scheduled to return on March 24, but many Liberals are urging Mr. Carney to call a snap election to avoid having the Conservatives try to define him with negative advertising.
“If Parliament needs to be recalled for certain reasons, it will be,” he told reporters. “If it makes sense to get a strong mandate at that point, that view we will follow.”
Mr. Carney, who has claimed the mantle of an outsider, has won over the majority of the federal cabinet and Liberal MPs to his leadership campaign, promising to move the party back to the political centre.
He has vowed to scrap the consumer carbon levy while maintaining the tax on industrial polluters. He has also promised to cut taxes for the middle class, balance the spending budget, build more energy projects and boost defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP.
“A strong Canadian economy is in our interests. It is in all Canadians’ interest,” he told reporters. ‘It is time to build, and we should do that now to strengthen our negotiating position as well.”
Mr. Carney also presented a new plan, without details, to help lower building costs and get new homes built for Canadians – including the removal of barriers that slow construction of new homes.
“This is a time to build, and we will catalyze enormous private investment to build millions of new homes for younger Canadians,” he said.
Mr. Carney appears to be taking similar pages out of the campaign platform of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. In recent months, Mr. Poilievre has already promised to get rid of red tape to boost home construction, hike defence spending and eliminate the consumer carbon levy.
Recent public opinion polls show a narrowing of the race between the Liberals and Conservatives, with at least two polls showing the Liberals ahead of Mr. Poilievre’s party, which had led by double digit numbers for more than year.
A poll conducted for The Globe and Mail and CTV News by Nanos Research between Jan. 31 and Feb. 3 found that 39.6 per cent of Canadians surveyed consider Mr. Carney as the most qualified leader to negotiate with Mr. Trump and his administration. Twenty-six per cent of Canadians consider Mr. Poilievre as best qualified.
The Nanos poll found that 12.5 per cent of those surveyed believe that Mr. Carney’s closest Liberal leadership rival, Chrystia Freeland, was best able to handle Mr. Trump. Nanos Research surveyed 1,077 Canadians through landline, cellphone and online interviews. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
On Thursday, the Conservatives targeted Mr. Carney after he appeared to play down the fentanyl crisis in Canada during an event in Kelowna, B.C., the day before. He said “fentanyl is an absolute crisis in the United States. It’s a challenge here, but it’s a crisis there.”
In a news release, the Conservatives said nearly 50,000 Canadians have died of opioid overdoses since the Liberals came to power in 2015.
“Our once-safe towns and cities have been overwhelmed with drugs, death and disorder. Police continue to discover ‘superlabs,’ capable of making enough fentanyl to kill every Canadian twice over,” the statement said. “But according to Mark Carney, this 200-per-cent increase in annual opioid overdose deaths is not a crisis.”
Mr. Trump threatened to impose tariffs unless Canada and Mexico stopped the flow of opioids to the U.S., even though, according to U.S. government figures, the 19.5 kilograms of fentanyl intercepted along the Canadian border last year is 0.2 per cent of the nearly 11 tonnes intercepted in the United States. Canada responded by appointing a fentanyl czar and announcing spending of $1.3-billion to boost border security.
Ms. Freeland, a former finance minister and deputy prime minister, has also been putting out detailed policy statements to turn Canada into an energy superpower and reduce the cost of living for Canadians.
On Thursday, she wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times, taking Mr. Trump to task over the possible imposition of 25-per-cent tariffs, including on steel and aluminum.
“The problem is that it will hurt America’s economy too. Higher cost supplies of steel and aluminum will hurt the very manufacturers and consumers President Trump claims to support,” Ms. Freeland wrote, while making the case that Canada will respond with dollar-for-dollar retaliation. She noted that Mr. Trump hit Canadian steel and aluminum imports in 2018 and the U.S. later backed off when Ottawa imposed $16.6-billion of tariffs on U.S. steel, aluminum and other products.
“Such pushback led to the lifting of tariffs on Canada in 2019 and it will work again,” Ms. Freeland said, going so far as to include Elon Musk’s Tesla cars as a possible target. “One hundred per cent tariffs on Teslas, imposed by every country in the world, would be a good place to start.”