Mark Carney folded himself into a window seat at the front of his official plane and prepared to put in his AirPods. After less than two weeks in the job the new Canadian prime minister looked tired.
The challenges were coming at him thick and fast. He had just left an election rally in the suburban city of Kitchener, Ontario, where he had been heckled several times with unfounded allegations regarding the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A conservative Canadian newspaper was about to accuse him of plagiarism in his Oxford doctoral thesis 30 years ago. He should have been heading to a campaign stop in Québec City but earlier that day President Trump had announced a 25 per cent tariff on all automotive imports, which threatens to wreck an industry that employs 125,000 people in Canada and generates a tenth of the country’s manufacturing output. Carney called it a “direct attack” on Canada, scrapped the Québec event and prepared to return to the capital for a day of emergency cabinet talks.
There were 33 days to go until the election.
In his time as governor of the Bank of England, there was a sense that Carney — the closest a technocrat comes to being a showman — relished crises such as Brexit and Covid. Despite the travel fatigue, Carney seems to be enjoying this one too, even if Trump’s erratic deployment of tariffs and vows to turn Canada into the 51st state are an existential threat to the country he now leads. Awaiting take-off for the night flight to Ottawa aboard his spacious Airbus A320, he chuckled that he didn’t always travel in such style. Hours earlier, when a Francophone reporter asked whether he would be speaking to Trump about the auto industry, the hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth before he replied: “Oui.”
On Friday a call between the two leaders was described by the president as “productive” and the prime minister as “constructive”, although no firm agreements emerged ahead of the start of the new tariff regime on April 2.
Carney is making the most of the standoff.
Canada’s Conservative opposition, led by the aggressive populist Pierre Poilievre, entered 2025 riding a poll lead of more than 20 points over the Liberal government. Poilievre had savaged Justin Trudeau, the three-term prime minister, for presiding over a cost of living crisis and imposing unpopular carbon taxes, accusing him of delivering “Justinflation” and calling for Canada to “axe the tax”.
But three shifts — Trudeau’s resignation in January, Trump’s belligerence towards America’s northern neighbour and Carney’s election as Liberal leader this month — have electrified a race that looked like a foregone conclusion.
Carney, 60, immediately cut the consumer element of the carbon tax, having previously been an advocate, and cancelled a proposed increase in the capital gains rate. He then called a snap election for April 28. Poilievre, 45, praised by Trump as “very good” as recently as January, suddenly looks like a man struck by an orange lightning bolt.
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The Conservatives’ lead has evaporated and some polls now give the Liberals a narrow advantage. On Thursday, the Ontario-based research firm Abacus Data put the incumbent party on 38 per cent and the Conservatives on 37 per cent. It drew attention to the crumbling of the third-place New Democratic Party. More than half of former NDP voters said they would vote for another party, with one in four going Liberal (twice as many as the Conservatives have attracted).
David Coletto, the founder of Abacus, said the Trump factor made this Canada’s “2017 moment” — a reference to how Brexit uncertainty in that UK election solidified support for the two main parties and squeezed out the Liberal Democrats. “A year ago, Mark Carney wouldn’t have fitted the times,” Coletto said. “I don’t think Canadians were in a mindset where they would have accepted a former central banker with no political experience who has a very hard time empathising with the average person. But now the question is much bigger than ‘Can I pay my rent?’ or ‘Is my food too expensive?’; it’s, ‘Is our economy even going to be able to withstand the chaos that Trump is creating?’ Trump has spurred this patriotism that Canadians aren’t typically known for.”
Trump has sabre-rattled since late January. He slapped 25 per cent on steel, aluminium and goods that do not comply with Canada and America’s free trade agreement, plus 10 per cent on imports of Canadian crude oil. Canada responded by putting tariffs on about $20 billion of American-made products such as steel and aluminium, and about $20 billion of consumer goods including alcoholic drinks and peanut butter. Trump has complained that Canada is letting fentanyl flow across the border into the US. Trudeau said the president was trying to engineer “the total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us”. Polls show little support in the US for Trump’s 51st-state ambitions.
On Wednesday, while Carney was meeting the head of Canada’s biggest private-sector union, Unifor, Trump announced tariffs on all foreign-made cars and car parts. The Carney campaign watched in silence on a big screen at a Marriott hotel on the outskirts of Kitchener as Trump declared: “It’s going to make our country very rich.”
Canada’s automotive exports to the US have declined over time. But the country still shipped almost C$79 billion ($55 billion) of cars, trucks and parts to America last year. General Motors, Stellantis — the parent company of marques including Chrysler and Jeep — and Toyota are among automotive giants that have assembly plants in Ontario.
The announcement sent a jolt through a country already radicalised by what most people view as a betrayal by a longstanding friend. Lana Payne, Unifor’s president, said the tariffs were “unwarranted and unjustified and potentially illegal”.
The atmosphere at Wednesday evening’s rally was febrile.
Tim Culliton, a 57-year-old construction boss, said the vote next month would be “a fight for Canada’s freedom”. “We need strong leadership,” he said. “It’s upsetting to Canadians. We love the United States and we want to get along, but we didn’t provoke this. So we have to stand up for ourselves.”
Some observers think support for Carney and Poilievre splits along generational lines — with wealthier baby boomers preferring Carney, and millennials and Gen Zers who are more concerned with housing costs flocking to Poilievre. The sea of grey heads and earnest smiles at the rally did nothing to contradict the first part of that theory — although Culliton was joined by his 25-year-old son, Connor. “The Conservative Party has captured social media in a way that I’ve not really seen before,” Connor said. “I’m trying to engage my friends but the Conservatives have sunk their teeth in.”
As Bank governor, Carney was known for his occasionally short temper. He has snapped at reporters on the campaign trail and looked exasperated when the third heckler interrupted his speech with a shout about Epstein — an association that appears to be based on a photograph of Carney’s wife, Diana, speaking to Ghislaine Maxwell at the 2013 Wilderness festival in Oxfordshire. “Very clever, very clever,” he said, clenching his jaw.
Poilievre’s team has landed some blows on Carney, including pointing out that as chairman of Brookfield Asset Management he was involved in a decision to move the investment giant’s headquarters from Toronto to New York, despite an initial denial. Poilievre, who speaks better French, made fun of Carney’s refusal to participate in a televised French-language leaders’ debate, offering to cover the C$75,000 appearance fee. On Friday the National Post published claims that Carney plagiarised parts of his 1995 Oxford doctoral thesis. Carney’s thesis supervisor, Dr Margaret Meyer, said she saw “no evidence” of that.
Carney, meanwhile, has repeatedly noted that Poilievre has refused to get parliamentary security clearance, meaning he cannot receive sensitive information. Poilievre, a lifelong politician who enrolled in the now defunct right-wing Reform Party before he was old enough to vote, says he does not want to be gagged on certain topics. But last week The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that as a result, Canada’s intelligence service had been unable to tell Poilievre about Indian interference in the 2022 process that saw him seize the Conservative leadership.
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Poilievre tried to refocus the election on domestic issues on Friday, announcing a crackdown on fentanyl dealers from a lumber yard on Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. Standing at a lectern bearing a slogan that seemed to have been inspired by Dominic Cummings (“STOP THE CRIME”), he decried a “lost Liberal decade” under Trudeau.
Plenty of people still believe he can win. Ginny Roth, a former Poilievre adviser, said support for Carney was “a mile wide and an inch deep”. Dan Nowlan, an aide to the former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, described Poilievre as a “very skilled politician” who appealed “to a totally different group of people who have generally felt like they haven’t been listened to”.
But a top Conservative strategist, Kory Teneycke, warned that Poilievre would lose unless he addressed the problem of Trump’s tariffs head-on and dropped his “Trumpy” communication style. In a country where cafés now advertise the Canadian provenance of their eggs, and consumers are boycotting American holidays and wine, the former governor of Canada’s central bank — with his ice-hockey rallying cry of “elbows up” — may now be the man to beat.
