How Canada’s Next Prime Minister Will Deal With Trump

All of a sudden, Canadian politics is anything but boring. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is stepping down after nearly a decade on the job after seeing his support dwindle among the public and his own party. But he’s not going down quietly, clashing with President Donald Trump over tariffs and repeated musings of annexing Canada.

The episode has not only given Trudeau a bump in support, but it’s delivered a potential lifeline to his flailing Liberal Party ahead of the expected election. It’s also a boon for his successor, Mark Carney, who was elected Liberal leader on Sunday and will soon take the prime minister’s office, at least briefly.

Canada must have a national election by October, but the Liberals are widely expected to call for an election within weeks to capitalize on the Trump bump in the polls. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre looked to be on a glide path to victory — up until the new U.S. president barreled onto the scene — but polls show he still has a fair shot of winning.

So, what’s next for Carney, Poilievre, as well as Trudeau? Nick Taylor-Vaisey, POLITICO Ottawa bureau chief, has some answers.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me why the Liberals have picked Mark Carney as their leader?

There are a few reasons. Chiefly, Mark Carney is not Justin Trudeau, and Trudeau was just deeply unpopular throughout much of last year. But it reached a fever pitch when his No. 2, Chrystia Freeland, resigned to the shock of many, and it just became kind of a ticking down until Trudeau’s final days.

Mark Carney is also not a member of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, and Chrystia Freeland was before she resigned. She ran for leader, and one of the knocks against her is that she represents very limited change, given that she was the finance minister for several years and ran, at least in part, in concert with the prime minister’s fiscal policy through the pandemic and afterwards.

Carney also has an economic track record that I think a lot of Liberals respect and see as credible coming out of the pandemic and coming into a trade war. He's kind of a boring guy, and I think a lot of Liberals like that about him and see him as a guy who can actually win the next election.

Liberals have been down in the dumps for way more than a year, assuming, in many cases, that they would lose the next election soundly or get trounced historically. And they see Carney as a guy who can actually, maybe, turn them into a winner.

You said Trudeau was deeply unpopular. Can you explain why you said it in the past tense?

Well, I think he continues to be unpopular. The country has moved on from him. But it's fair to say that Trudeau's last several weeks as the foil to Trump have been some of his best in years. People are giving him rave reviews when he walks up to a mic and talks about Canada and how to effectively counter the president and his administration's economic attacks on Canada.

People have kind of hated the sound of Trudeau's voice for quite a while, and now that's turned a little bit. It doesn't mean he's going to come back or have a second act immediately in politics. He's on his way out, but it is notable that his disapproval ratings have gone down and his approval has gone up. It speaks a lot to Donald Trump's effect on Canadian politics.

Talk to me about that. How big a factor is Trump in the upcoming election?

Donald Trump is somewhere between ubiquitous and omnipresent in Canadian politics at the moment. He has an impact every time he posts on Truth Social or speaks off the cuff in the Oval Office about Canada. It's this old thing where the United States is an elephant and Canada is a mouse. It was Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, who made that kind of metaphor. Any time this president says anything antagonizing, it gets a whole host of people talking. In this case, it's been a Liberal leadership race, and the people vying to be the next prime minister of Canada. It's the sitting prime minister, who still has to govern in the meantime, and it's Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative rival, who will have his chance, at some point soon, to fight an election to become Canada's next prime minister.

They all react. Donald Trump has said he's the most important person in Canadian politics right now. I think everybody in Canada would acknowledge that.

But Canada’s seen Trump in office before, from 2017 to 2021. What makes this time different?

The first administration was obviously unpredictable in many ways, but the structures that existed for the Canadian interaction with that administration were, in a sense, more predictable. The renegotiation of NAFTA, as much as it was fractious and tough and everybody was angry with each other from time to time, was still a full negotiation that produced a trade deal the president loved at the time.

And domestically, Justin Trudeau was, at least when Trump came into office, still relatively popular and at the tail end of his first-term honeymoon. By 2019, when Trudeau has an election and is returned with only minority power and not a majority of seats in the House, that started to shift. But for those first two or three years, there was this stability north of the border and preparedness to throw everything they had at maintaining the U.S. relationship. Then Covid blew up everything. That was just the X factor no one saw coming.

This is just a very different kind of relationship that senior Trudeau officials have, both at the elected level and senior staff level, with any counterparts who exist on the other side. It's clearly a different version of Trump. He has decided to complain about every irritant between Canada and the U.S. all at once.

So, did Trump basically hand a flailing Liberal Party a big political lifeline here? Does Trudeau, in a weird way, owe Trump a little thank you?

There's a really good argument that that is the case, yes. A lot of the Liberal popularity in most polling now is attributed in large part to Trudeau deciding to leave politics and people looking at the Liberal Party as a brand, not as a man, because the Liberal Party has been the Trudeau party for more than a decade.

Mark Carney’s emergence as a credible contender to be the next prime minister has also seemed to play well. Pollsters poll both the Liberal Party and Mark Carney against the Conservative Party, and, separately, Pierre Poilievre. And whenever Mark Carney’s name is mentioned in the poll, the Liberal numbers go up. So, that also has something to do with this resurgence.

This kind of surge in patriotism but also anxiety has, I think, driven people more to the devil they know, and Pierre Poilievre is still a bit of a political unknown. As much as people have heard him and know what he stands for now, he hasn't been in power. And Mark Carney is a guy who has been on the global stage before, and the Liberal Party, as much as its voters have left it over the last couple of years, whenever a pollster called, they seem to be coming home, at least for now. We don't know, of course, how much the polling surge is real. And once Mark Carney is sworn in as prime minister and whatever happens next with the trade war and whenever the next election is fought, we don't know really what's going to happen because this is actually a pretty unpredictable moment in politics. The [Liberal] rise, such as it is, has been kind of a combination of those three things: Trudeau, Carney, Trump and how they all interact with each other.

So, if Carney wins power in the upcoming election, how do you think he'll approach Trump? And what about if Poilievre wins?

They’ll have to do something, either guy, with this anxiety and patriotism that I alluded to. And a lot of it will mean looking inward. Dealing with Trump, of course, means getting on the phone with him when he makes a threat and try to talk him off the ledge.

But a lot of it also means boring things that Canadians haven't done for a long, long time, problems we haven't actually faced head on, like reducing dependence on the United States. It's a mammoth task and seems almost inconceivable after decades or centuries of reliance on the U.S., that Canada could diversify its trade in any substantial way. But Canadian politicians at every level of government are now talking about knocking down inter-provincial trade barriers, like harmonizing trucking and labor mobility regulations. Even alcohol export across provincial boundaries.

Both Poilievre and Carney have said that they're going to prioritize that and make Canada, essentially, a nation that trades better with itself, so it doesn't have to rely on so much trade with the United States. And they both also want to build more. They've both alluded to things like pipelines, big nation-building projects that, again, help connect Canada to Canada and rely more on east-west than north-south.

Trudeau has been a big public supporter of Ukraine, a foil to Trump on this. But Canada's defense spending really lags in NATO, a point that Americans love to bring up. Does Trudeau exiting mean a big shift in Canada's foreign policy, especially its approach to Ukraine? And is that approach different if Poilievre wins instead of Carney?

There is actually very little daylight at the high level between what Liberals, Conservatives and progressive New Democrats believe. This is a very pro-Ukraine country. It is sort of in Canadians’ blood because there's such a large Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. But having said that, whenever Pierre Poilievre supports Ukraine, there are people in his broad base of support who kind of give him a funny look and come out against him because they're tired of supporting Ukraine and don't mind the MAGA view of the Russia-Ukraine war. He could end up pleasing nobody if he tries to moderate on Ukraine as a bit of a sop to that MAGA voter wing. Nobody knows exactly how big that wing is in his base of support, but it is there, and that'll pose a challenge for him.

Having said that, his natural order of things is to sort of second-nature support Ukraine. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s one of Poilievre’s mentors and dictated Conservative policy for more than 10 years in Canada, was a huge supporter of Ukraine. There’s really no debate about that in Canada’s parliament, or any of the official rooms. So, I think that part of the foreign policy will remain relatively the same.

You talked about this before, but Trudeau's not going out quietly in his sparring with Trump. If he's stepping down, what's next? Could he have a future in Canadian politics?

Justin Trudeau turned 53 last December, and that's pretty young even in Canadian politics. He's an unpopular guy now. Nobody's really talking about a comeback for him. Everyone is still kind of figuring out how he's going to leave the stage, but his dad famously came back and did some of his most important legacy work in a second term that he didn't anticipate. He lost the 1979 election, and the Conservative prime minister who beat him lasted less than a year. Trudeau ended up coming back and winning another majority government. And only then did he fundamentally change Canada’s Constitution and do some really big work in the first part of the 1980s that essentially reshaped the Canadian identity. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is kind of a core piece of how Canadians view their personal rights in this country and that was because of Pierre Trudeau. It was after he left politics the first time. So, you have to think, at some point, it might be on Justin Trudeau's mind to come back.

What's immediately next for him is a huge question. It gets people talking if you bring it up. Before politics, he was a public speaker. He made a lot of money on the speaking circuit. He may not take money anymore, he may speak to nonprofits. He may launch something like a foundation that allows him to focus on one or two or a cluster of causes, like youth-focused causes.

I imagine him still speaking a lot. I can't imagine him not doing that. It's just in his blood. I don't think he'll end up on boards. A lot of politicians in Canada will leave office, and then a few months later, they'll show up on the board of directors of an energy company or some sort of corporation, or they end up as a senior adviser at some sort of consultancy. I don't think that's in Trudeau’s immediate future. I imagine he’ll be quiet for a while and just spend time with his kids.

Trump has talked a lot about Canada becoming the 51st state, referring to Justin Trudeau as governor. If you became the 51st state, would you want a maple leaf on our flag instead of a star?

I think this is an interesting question because it's impossible for this to actually happen.

But if it did get to the point where Canada is at the table with United States negotiating terms of something, I would love to see the look on every Americans’ face when the Quebecer in the room puts up their hand and the Albertans in the room put up their hand. And then the British Columbian puts up their hand and has something slightly different to say, and then the Maritimers have something to say, and then the Newfoundland guys, who are distinctly not Maritimers — they are Atlantic Canadians but they are not part of the Maritimes because the Maritimes are only three provinces, the Newfoundlanders the fourth, and they only joined the Confederation in 1949, so they still got a bit of a chip on their shoulder.

The only people, who, I think in that room, will have kind of a boring conversation would be the Ontarians because Ontario has no real regional identity. But even still, the Ontarians would be such fierce Canadians that they would probably just egg on every other regional voice that's raising a stink. And I just think, at that point, the Americans will walk away from the table and say, forget about it.

So, endless Canadian bickering is actually a good deterrent to the United States annexing Canada.

Endless Canadian bickering could save Canada from the United States.