The new Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, called on Sunday the first elections for April 28, committing to defeat Donald Trump’s impulse to attach the huge neighbor of the north of the United States.
Carney, a former central banker, was chosen by the Centrista Liberal Party of Canada to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister, but has never faced the largest electorate in the country.
That will now change as Carney brought the parliamentary elections forward several months from October, and made it clear that the flood of threats from the president of the United States will be the crux of his campaign.
“I just request that the general governor dissolve the Parliament and call an election for April 28. She has agreed,” said Carney in a speech before the nation, referring to the representative of King Carlos III in Canada, a member of the British Commonwealth.
Trump “wants to break us, so that the United States can own us. We will not let that happen,” said Carney.
In power for a decade, the liberal government had slipped into a deep unpopularity, but Carney will hope to set up a wave of Canadian patriotism to a new majority.
Trump has irritated his northern neighbor by repeatedly discarding his sovereignty and borders as artificial, and urging him to join the United States as state 51.
The accident comments have been accompanied by Trump’s rotating commercial war, with the imposition of tariffs on Canada’s imports, which could seriously damage their economy.
“In this moment of crisis, the government needs a strong and clear mandate,” Carney told the followers on Thursday in a speech in the western city of Edmonton.
Survey Favorites
Domestic problems such as the cost of living and immigration generally dominate Canadian elections, but this time, a key topic leads the list: who can better handle Trump.
The president’s open hostility towards his northern neighbor, a NATO ally and historically one of his closest partners in his country, has overturned the Canadian political landscape.
Trudeau, who had been in power since 2015, was deeply unpopular when he announced that he was renouncing, with the conservatives of Pierre Poilievre seen as electoral favorites only a few weeks ago.
But surveys have been reduced spectacularly in favor of Carney since he took over the liberals, and now analysts call this race, eclipsed by Trump, too close to the call.
“Many believe that this is an existential choice, unprecedented,” said Félix Mathieu, a political scientist from Winnipeg University. AFP. “It is impossible at this stage to make predictions, but this will be a close choice with an electoral participation that should be increasing.”
Pailievre, 45, is a career politician, first chosen when he was only 25 years old. A veteran activist who speaks hard, has sometimes been labeled as libertarian and populist.
Carney, 60, has spent his career out of electoral politics. He spent more than a decade in Goldman Sachs and led the Central Bank of Canada, and then in the Bank of England.
The smallest opposition matches could suffer if Canadians seek to give a great mandate to one of the two greats, to strengthen their hand against Trump.
As for the United States leader, he professes not to worry, while advancing with plans to further strengthen tariffs against Canada and other important commercial partners on April 2.
“I don’t care who wins there,” Trump said this week. “But a while ago, before getting involved and changing the elections, which I don’t care […] The conservative led by 35 points. “
