Canada’s new prime minister vowed that Donald Trump will never “break us” after riding a wave of anti-Trump sentiment to an unlikely election victory.
“As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” Mark Carney declared at a victory rally in Ottawa late Monday night.
“These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never, ever happen.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Carney took over as leader of the Liberal Party and caretaker prime minister last month after the resignation of Justin Trudeau—the veteran PM mocked by Trump as the “governor” of America’s 51st state.
He quickly called an election, although with the Liberals 20 points behind in the polls, the populist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre looked set to take over.
But Carney, a central banker with no direct political experience, managed to portray himself as the anti-Trump candidate: bland and monotonous in his delivery, but undeniably tough and competent.
It worked. The Liberals were returned as the largest party in parliament, although they look set to fall a few seats short of an absolute majority. Poilievre, long seen as the next Canadian PM, ended up losing his seat in the Ottawa area to a long-shot Liberal candidate.
Carney’s presentation as the anti-Trump candidate was no act, however. The 60-year-old represents pretty much everything Trump and the populist right rejects.
Born in the remote Northwest Territories, Carney earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he played goalie on the hockey team.
After studying at Oxford, playing with the field hockey blues, he spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs before becoming governor of first the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England—the first person to lead the central banks of two G7 nations.
Throughout, he always rejected the suggestion that he could end up in politics. “Why don’t I become a circus clown?” he replied in 2012 to a journalist who asked him if he might become a politician.
But events intervened, and Carney takes over at perhaps the most difficult time in modern Canadian history, as it tries to fend off Trump’s imperial ambitions.
“Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” Carney said in his victory speech. “The system of open global trade anchored by the United States—a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over."
“These are tragedies, but it’s also our new reality.”
