TORONTO (AP) — New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Conservative opponent said U.S. President Donald Trump must respect Canada’s sovereignty as they kicked off their election campaigns Sunday against the backdrop of a trade war and Trump’s annexation threats.
Carney announced a five-week election campaign before the vote on April 28.
“We are facing the most significant crisis of our lifetimes because of President Trump’s unjustified trade actions and his threats to our sovereignty,” Carney said.
“President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen,” he added.
The governing Liberals appeared poised for a historic election defeat this year until Trump declared a trade war. He has repeatedly said Canada should become the 51st U.S. state and has acknowledged he’s upended Canadian politics.
Trump’s almost daily attacks on Canada’s sovereignty have infuriated Canadians and led to a surge in Canadian nationalism that has bolstered Liberal poll numbers.
“They want our resources. They want our water. They want our land. They want our country. Never,” Carney said at a rally in Newfoundland.
The election campaign for 343 seats or districts in the House of Commons will last 37 days. Although other parties are running, the Liberals and the Conservatives are the only two that have a chance to form a government. The party that commands a majority in Parliament, either alone or with the support of another party, will form the next government and its leader will be prime minister.
Carney replaced Justin Trudeau, who announced his resignation in January but remained in power until the Liberal Party elected a new leader following a leadership race.
The opposition Conservatives hoped to make the election about Trudeau, whose popularity declined as food and housing prices rose and immigration surged. But after decades of bilateral stability, the vote is now expected to focus on who is best equipped to deal with Trump.
Carney said the choice for Canadians is a “Canadian Trump or a government that unites.”
“Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” Carney said in a hockey reference. “In this trade war, just like in hockey, we will win.”
Trump put 25% tariffs on Canada’s steel and aluminum and is threatening sweeping tariffs on all Canadian products — as well as all of America’s trading partners — on April 2.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is Carney’s main challenger. The party and Poilievre were heading for a huge victory in Canada’s election until Trump’s near-daily trade and annexation threats derailed them.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a conservative ally, said Poilievre would be “very much in sync” with the “new direction in America.”
“The content of this interview is very bad news for the Conservatives because it reinforces the Liberals’ narrative about Pierre Poilievre and his perceived ideological proximity with Donald Trump,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal.
Poilievre said he will stand up to Trump.
“I will insist the president recognizes the independence and sovereignty of Canada. I will insist he stops tariffing our nation,” he said as he launched his campaign.
“I know a lot of people are worried, angry and anxious. And with good reason as a result of the president’s unacceptable threats against our country,” Poilievre said.
Carney still hasn’t had a phone call with Trump and that might not happen now until after the election. Trump mocked Trudeau by calling him governor, but he has not yet mentioned Carney’s name.
“Trump must recognize that Canada is a sovereign country,” Carney said. “He has to say that, he has to accept that, before we can have a discussion about a trade agreement. … Let’s just say there is no meeting that has been planned.”
Carney, 60, was the head of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2013, he became the first noncitizen of the United Kingdom to run the Bank of England, helping to manage the impact of Brexit.
Carney, a political novice, said Canadians want change and he’s moved the Liberal Party to the right, announcing a middle-class tax cut Sunday and scrapping Trudeau’s signature carbon tax and reversing a capital gains tax increase.
Poilievre, 45, for years the party’s go-to attack dog, is a career politician and firebrand populist who says he will put “Canada first.” Elon Musk, who is playing an integral role in the Trump administration, has endorsed and praised him.
Trump looms over Canada’s election as campaign begins
Canada’s newly appointed Prime Minister Mark Carney has called a snap election, sending the country to the polls on 28 April.
The election comes as Canada faces a trade war with the US and calls from President Donald Trump for it to become the 51st American state, issues which are expected to be top of mind for voters.
It also comes nine days after Carney, a Liberal, was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister following Justin Trudeau’s resignation.
Carney must now face Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party had been leading in national polls since mid-2023, though recent polls suggest the race is now neck-and-neck.
Speaking in Ottawa on Sunday, Carney said he needed a clear, positive mandate to deal with Trump.
“We are facing the most significant crisis of our lifetimes because of President Trump’s unjustified trade actions and his threats to our sovereignty,” he said.
The Liberals – once written off for this election – now have a chance of forming a government for the fourth consecutive time under Carney.
Carney, 60, the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, has never served as an MP and is untested politically.
Carney made the most of his short days in office, meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron and stopping in Canada’s Arctic to announce a partnership with Australia to develop a new northern radar system.
He also ended Trudeau’s signature carbon tax climate policy, which had faced heavy criticism by the Conservatives.
Now he will face the general electorate, which is concerned about Canada’s rapidly shifting relationship with the US, its historically close ally, as well as the country’s high cost of living.
In a campaign launch shortly before the election call, Conservative leader Poilievre, 45, sought to link Carney to the Liberals under Trudeau, who left office as a deeply unpopular leader.
He called Trudeau’s time in office a “lost Liberal decade”.
He accused the party of weakening the country by blocking resource development, failing to fund the military, and mismanaging immigration and the economy, saying its “post-national globalist ideology” made Canada more vulnerable to Trump’s trade war.
President Trump’s current and threatened tariffs on Canadian goods could usher in economic instability in the country and push Canada towards a recession.
Trump placed 25% tariffs on Canadian goods on 2 March before partially pausing them for a month. On 12 March, a blanket 25% duty on all aluminium and steel imports went into effect, hitting Canadian importers.
The Trump administration plans further global tariffs on 2 April, in the campaign’s second week.
Canada has retaliated so far with tariffs on about C$60bn ($42bn; £32bn) worth of US goods.
Carney on Sunday called the trade war with the US one of the “most significant threats of our lifetimes”.
Referring to Trump, he said: “He wants to break us so America will own us. We will not let that happen.”
Carney has promised further retaliation, though he has conceded there is a limit to Canada’s tariff response given the different size of the two economies.
Poilievre said that Canada must respond firmly to threats from the White House.
“We have to convert our anger and our anxiety into action,” he said. “We have to become strong, self-reliant and sovereign to stand up to the Americans.”
The campaign will last just five weeks – the shortest allowed. Besides the US-Canada relationship, much of the focus will be on the economy, including cost-of-living issues.
Who else is contesting?
In the Canadian federal election, voters do not cast a ballot directly for a prime minister. Instead, the leader of the party with the most members of parliament traditionally becomes PM.
Four main parties will contest the election – the Liberals, the Conservatives, the New Democrats (NDP) and the Bloc Québécois, who only run candidates in the French-speaking province of Quebec with a focus on their regional interests.
The Green Party and the People’s Party of Canada are also in the running.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said on Sunday that neither Carney nor Poilievre are the right choices for Canada, accusing them of protecting the wealthy, not ordinary Canadians.
“You deserve a prime minister you can trust to make decisions in your best interest,” he said.
The Bloc is facing pressure from a surge of support for the Liberals in Quebec.
Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet pitched his party as a voice for industries in Trump’s sights – from aluminium to dairy and lumber – that are all significant in the province.
The Greens for the first time are running with co-leaders: Jonathan Pedneault and Elizabeth May.
“We must vote now as though our country depends on it, because more than ever before, it does,” said Pedneault on Sunday.
At dissolution of Parliament at the time the election was called, the Liberals held 153 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives were the official opposition with 120 seats. The Bloc had 33 seats, the NDP had 24 and the Green Party held two.
How Trump’s threats have changed everything about Canada’s politics
If you had asked Canadians a few months ago who would win the country’s next general election, most would have predicted a decisive victory for the Conservative Party.
That outcome does not look so certain now.
In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has surged in the polls, shrinking the double-digit lead their Conservative rivals had held steadily since mid-2023.
The dramatic change in the country’s political landscape reflects how Trump’s tariffs and his repeated calls to make Canada “the 51st state” have fundamentally altered Canadian voters’ priorities.
Trump’s rhetoric has “pushed away all of the other issues” that were top of mind for Canadians before his inauguration on 20 January, notes Luc Turgeon, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa.
It has even managed to revive the once deeply unpopular Trudeau, whose approval rating has climbed by 12 points since December. The prime minister, of course, will not be in power for much longer, having announced his resignation at the start of the year.
On Sunday, his Liberals will declare the results of the leadership contest to determine who takes over a party running a precarious minority government. The new leader will have two immediate decisions to make: how to respond to Trump’s threats, and when to call a general election. The answer to the first dilemma will surely influence the second.
A federal election must be held on or before 20 October, but could be called as early as this week.
Polls indicate that many Canadians still want a change at the top. But what that change would look like – a Liberal government under new leadership, or a complete shift to the Conservatives – is now anyone’s guess, says Greg Lyle, president of the Toronto-based Innovative Research Group, which has been polling Canadians on their shifting attitudes.
“Up until now, it was a blowout for the Conservatives,” he tells the BBC.
That is because the centre-right party led by Pierre Poilievre, has been effective in its messaging on issues that have occupied the Canadian psyche for the last few years: the rising cost of living, housing unaffordability, crime and a strained healthcare system.
Poilievre successfully tied these societal problems to what he labelled Trudeau’s “disastrous” policies, and promised a return to “common sense politics”.
But with Trudeau’s resignation, and Trump’s threats to Canada’s economic security and even its sovereignty, that messaging has become stale, Mr Lyle says. His polling suggests the majority of the country is now most afraid of Trump’s presidency and the impact it will have on Canada.
Trump’s 25% tariffs on all Canadian imports to the US, some of which have been paused until 2 April, could be devastating for Canada’s economy, which sends three-quarters of all its products to the US. Officials have predicted up to a million job losses as a result, and Canada could head into a recession if the tax on goods persists.
Trudeau left no doubt how seriously he is taking the threat, when he told reporters this week that Trump’s stated reason for the US tariffs – the flow of fentanyl across the border – was bogus and unjustified.
“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” the prime minister warned.
“In many ways, it’s an all encompassing, fundamental issue about the survival of the country,” Prof Turgeon tells the BBC. Who is best placed to stand up for Canada against Trump has therefore become the key question in the forthcoming election.
The Conservatives are still ahead in the polls, with the latest averages suggesting 40% of voters back them. The Liberals’ fortunes, meanwhile, have been revived, with their support climbing to slightly over 30% – up 10 points from January.
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Liberals have attempted to highlight similarities between the Conservative leader and Republican president. At last week’s leadership debate, candidates referred to Poilievre as “our little version of Trump here at home” and said he was looking to “imitate” the US president. A Liberal Party attack ad juxtaposed clips of the two using similar phrases such as “fake news” and “radical left”.
There are clear differences, however, between the two politicians, in terms of style and substance. And Trump himself has downplayed any parallels, telling British magazine The Spectator in a recent interview that Poilievre is “not Maga enough”.
Still, polls suggest a slipping of Conservative support. A recent poll by national pollster Angus Reid indicates Canadians believe Liberal leadership front-runner Mark Carney is better equipped to deal with Trump on issues of tariffs and trade than Poilievre.
The former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England is touting his experience dealing with economic crises, including the 2008 financial crash and Brexit.
And the shift in the political mood has forced Conservatives to recalculate their messaging.
If the election is called soon, the campaign will take place at a moment when Trump’s threats have inspired a fierce patriotism among Canadians. Many are boycotting American goods at their local grocery stores or even cancelling trips to the US.
Prof Turgeon says this “rallying around the flag” has become a key theme of Canadian politics.
The Conservatives have shifted away from their “Canada is Broken” slogan, which Mr Lyle says risked coming across as “anti-patriotic”, to “Canada First”.
Conservatives have also redirected their attacks towards Carney. Before Trump’s tariffs, they ran ads saying he is “just like Justin” in an attempt to tie him to Trudeau. But in recent weeks, the Conservatives have started digging into Carney’s loyalty to Canada.
Specifically, they have questioned whether he had a role in moving the headquarters of Brookfield Asset Management – a Canadian investment company – from Toronto to New York when he served as its chair.
Carney has responded that he had left the firm by the time that decision was made, but company documents reported on by public broadcaster CBC show the board approved the move in October 2024, when Carney was still at Brookfield.
The move, and Carney’s equivocation of his involvement with it, was criticised by the editorial board of Canada’s national newspaper the Globe and Mail, which wrote on Thursday that Carney must be transparent with Canadians.
More broadly, the paper wrote: “Every party leader must understand that Canada is entering a years-long period of uncertainty. The next prime minister will have to call on the trust of Canadians to lead the country where it needs to head but may not want to go.”
Given the anxiety reverberating among Canadians, Mr Lyle says that any ambiguity about Carney’s loyalty to the country could yet be damaging for him and the Liberals.
Whenever the election comes, and whoever wins, one thing is certain: Trump will continue to influence and reshape Canadian politics just as he has in the United States.
