Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP
Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, speaks with reporters during a news conference, January 9, 2025, in Ottawa.
Smart money was on Kendrick Lamar owning Drake during his halftime Super Bowl performance. But setting up similar diss tracks wasn’t on the minds of the producers of the Government of Ontario’s sly ad that aired just hours after President Trump resumed his trade war with Canada. Lavishly praised on both sides of the border (“Smart move Ontario! Well played”), the commercial featured beauty shots, attractive workers, and trade stat after trade stat reminding Americans about their symbiotic relationship with their “ally to the north.”
That soft power play helped raise awareness of Trump’s bizarre North American crisis that benefits no one, and set the stage for this week’s smart power gambit. All 13 of Canada’s provincial and territorial premiers traveled to Washington this week to meet with administration officials on the tariff crisis. Although the group also delivered the message that the president’s insistence on Canadian statehood was a nonstarter, they departed without with any reassurances that Trump plans to moderate his stance on trade or sovereignty issues. Instead, the president has doubled down and signaled Thursday that he plans to proceed with new rounds of reciprocal tariffs.
Tampering with “one of the most productive and peaceful relationships in human history,” as one Canadian analyst recently summed up those ties, comes with a cost, and dismantling those economic and diplomatic bonds may not play out as the president intends. Trump’s tariff war has done what many Canadians thought would be impossible: It united the country, erased support for the Trumpian Conservative Party, and turned Canada’s impending federal elections from a romp into a real contest.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be out the door, but he seems to be intent on slamming it in Trump’s face. The American president’s machinations have managed to outrage Canadians of most every political persuasion and breathe new life into a comatose Liberal Party. In less than a month, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, has gone from the prospect of gliding into Ottawa unimpeded by Trudeau, or any other leader the Liberal Party could trot out, to having to revamp an election strategy tethered to relentless attacks on Trudeau.
Canadians believed that the United States was more friend than mere ally, based on decades of partnership in two world wars, regional conflicts, and episodes like the Iranian hostage crisis—when Canada’s ambassador to Iran rescued American embassy employees in Tehran. Today, they realize that those bonds mean nothing when confronted with Trump’s grievances. The CBC described the situation this way: “Now that our BFF has threatened us with economic ruin, Canada is sitting alone at the lunch table, wondering who else can it hang with.”
Canadians believed that the United States was more friend than mere ally, based on decades of partnership.
Even before the so-called 30-day tariff pause collapsed into a 25 percent steel and aluminum tariff less than one week into that pause, Canadians began sweeping American alcohol off the shelves from coast to coast and canceling vacations right and left. To drive home his point about buying Canadian, Trudeau suggested that his fellow citizens might take domestic vacations this summer. Canada is the number one source of international visitors to the U.S., and with them comes $20.5 billion worth of spending, supporting some 140,000 jobs. The U.S. Travel Association warns that the five top destinations for Canadian visitors—Florida, California, Nevada, New York, and Texas—could feel serious effects with as little as a 10 percent drop in visitors. A Great Falls, Montana, radio personality observed that in that state’s third-largest city “a good chunk of our out-of-town visitors are our friends from the north.”
As for the upcoming elections, Poilievre’s populist campaign and MAGA sympathies have now crashed into the shoals of America’s neo-Manifest Destiny crusade. Prior to Trudeau’s early-January exit, one poll had the Conservatives up by 25 points; that gap has narrowed to about eight points and probably even less when a new Liberal standard-bearer is chosen on March 9 in a nationwide vote of the 400,000 Liberal Party members. The Conservative leader hasn’t come up with a substantive retort to the verbal assault on Canadian sovereignty unleashed by Trump’s 51st statehood obsession. Poilievre’s own “Canada First” platform has its own echoes of Trump’s “America First” polemics rooted in inglorious chapters of American history.
The Liberal Party front-runner is Mark Carney, a former Bank of Canada governor. Appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative, Carney has been credited with helping steer the country successfully through the Great Recession. Canada emerged from that period in better economic shape than the U.S. and its global peers: A stronger regulator of banks, it was the only G7 country that did not use tax dollars to save financial institutions.
Carney has also served as governor of the Bank of England, the first non-British head of an institution founded in the late 17th century. He argued against Brexit and has advised both Conservative and Labour politicians from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Labour’s Rachel Reeves, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Absent Trump’s trade war and threats, Carney may not have appealed to voters, burdened as he’d be as Trudeau’s successor. But in Canadian political circles today, he ranks as a veritable Anglo-American rock star and a man meeting the moment. His Harvard-Oxford-Goldman Sachs-central banker credentials have actually strengthened his appeal to many Canadians apprehensive about the no-win scenario of a trade war against a man they were not prepared to see ascend to the presidency next door.
But Carney has no retail politicking experience, and skeletons, if any, have yet to be unearthed: He never served in Parliament or hit the campaign trail for any political office, though he has managed to hold his own against one of America’s more formidable political minds, Jon Stewart. His French is a work in progress, a not insignificant concern since Liberals need to make a healthy showing in Quebec, where residents expect native-English-speaking politicians for higher office to have a command of the language. He’ll have his work cut out for him—first, against Chrystia Freeland, the multilingual former deputy prime minister, finance minister, and journalist, whom he’ll face in the Liberal Party contest. Should he clear that hurdle, he’ll be up against Poilievre, an aggressive populist.
Presented with a demotion by Trudeau after his meeting with Trump, Freeland decided to resign instead and threw her hat in the Liberals’ leadership ring. She is currently polling well behind Carney. She does lug the baggage of her close association with the unpopular prime minister, so much so that many of her colleagues in the Trudeau cabinet have thrown their support to Carney (who has also served as a Trudeau economic adviser, but outside the cabinet on a Liberal Party task force). It’s also well known that Trump dislikes her: She tangled with his team on NAFTA issues during his first administration, which is seen as a sign of strength for many Canadians.
A Leger online poll conducted in early February found that if Carney wins the leadership race, his Liberals and Poilievre’s Conservatives would be virtually tied. Leger also has Carney far out in front of Freeland in the Liberal Party leadership contest. A late-January/early-February Nanos Research poll conducted for CTV News found that 40 percent of respondents believed that Carney would do a better job of negotiating with Trump; 26 percent believe Poilievre would; 13 percent selected Freeland.
All told, it’s still the Conservative Party’s contest to lose; the election may be called in the early spring. The winning party needs to take more than half the seats in the House of Commons to secure a majority in Parliament—170 out of 338 seats. Failing that, the victors would need the support of the other opposition parties to form a government. That would be a victory of sorts for the Liberals.
