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TOP STORY
Whoever wins the Liberal leadership race, Canada’s next prime minister will be selected in a contest that has featured more foreign endorsements and foreign media than any other Canadian election in modern memory.
Frontrunner Mark Carney famously appeared on the New York-based The Daily Show just before he officially launched his campaign. A clip of the appearance now fronts Carney’s official campaign video.
Key challenger Chrystia Freeland has also been pitching her candidacy to U.S. audiences, including a recent podcast sitdown with Bloomberg News editor David Gura.
“I think you guys don’t think about Canada very much; I think when you think about Canada maybe you think about hockey, maybe you think we’re quite nice and we say ‘please’ … and we say ‘sorry’ a little more than you guys would,” Freeland told Gura.
Of the 10 endorsements featured thus far on the Freeland campaign’s official X account, two are from non-Canadians. The account FreelandHQ highlighted endorsements from U.S. talk show host Bill Maher and British financier Sir William Browder.
“Watch out Donald, I know Chrystia, and she’s running to be Prime Minister, not Governor of the 51st state,” read Maher’s endorsement.
U.S. media hits have also been featuring heavily into the schedule of outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau. After cancelling a slate of year-end interviews with Canadian media, one of Trudeau’s first interviews following his announced intention to step down was a 10-minute appearance with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
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“Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian; one of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, ‘Well, we’re not America,’” he said.
The leadership race is being contested in part on who is best to negotiate with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. As such, candidates are under some incentive to exhibit their ease in speaking to Americans and garnering sympathy from American audiences.
Nevertheless, even in Canadian general elections it is exceedingly rare that candidates will take time out to do interviews with non-Canadian media. And foreign politicians and media figures typically don’t bother to highlight a preferred candidate.
Canada’s 2021 federal election featured just four electoral endorsements from prominent non-Canadians. Former U.S. president Barack Obama endorsed the Liberals, as did his ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
The NDP, meanwhile, was endorsed by Democratic lawmakers Bernie Sanders and Rashida Talib.
The last time the Liberals had a leadership race, in 2013, it was barely mentioned by U.S. sources aside from an Associated Press article noting that the son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau was one of the contenders.
“Trudeau’s son seeks Canadian party post,” reads the headline of an October 2012 story that hit the back pages of several U.S. newspapers.
But the Liberal Party race would not be the only corner of Canadian politics that has attracted outsized levels of foreign attention in recent months.
Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has been endorsed by several high-ranking members of the Trump administration, including Trump’s national security advisor Mike Waltz.
Back in May, Waltz posted a video of Poilievre along with the caption, “This guy is going to send Trudeau packing in 2025.” The Conservative leader has also been repeatedly promoted by Trump ally Elon Musk.
Poilievre has also shown a capacity to attract unusually high interest from predominantly U.S. audiences.
Poilievre’s sitdown interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson on the U.S.-owned Daily Wire network has attracted 4.5 million YouTube views as of press time, and millions more on other internet platforms.
The episode, entitled “Canada’s Next Prime Minister,” is easily the most widely circulated interview ever conducted with a sitting leader of the opposition.
IN OTHER NEWS
The Government of Quebec has announced that multiculturalism is a failure, and that while they still like the idea of running a Quebec that is ethnically heterogenous, it’s got to be one in which there is adherence to a single, shared culture. “We are a nation, we have a culture, we have democratic values, men and women are equal. People coming here must accept that,” the province’s minister of immigration, Jean-François Roberge, told a press conference this week. Roberge made the comments in advance of a bill to promote “interculturalism” as an alternative. The announcement comes after months of controversies in which Quebec public schools with heavy Muslim populations were alleged to be discarding elements of the curriculum dealing with issues such as gay rights and sex education. Not to mention the heavy density of anti-Israel rallies in Montreal, some of which have featured mass Islamic prayers on blockaded streets.
U.S. President Donald Trump has occasionally mused about replacing all U.S. income taxes with tariff revenue – leading to fears that his threatened 25 per cent tariffs against Canada would be permanent. But in the most detailed explanation of the Trump tariff strategy to date, Trump’s secretary of commerce nominee, Howard Lutnick, told a Senate hearing that if Canada shows “action” on border security it will be spared 25 per cent tariffs. However, he said Canada could eventually be hit with smaller, across-the-board tariffs intended as a protectionist measure to shield U.S. industries from international competition.
And let’s check in on three dark horse candidates of the Liberal leadership race:
- Cape Breton’s Jaime Battistetold the local Cape Breton Post that the excitement for his bid is “electric.” “The reception has just been amazing, when I go in the grocery store just to get some groceries for my son, people are giving me the thumbs-up,” he said. Although this is limited to the 4,000 or so residents of the community of Eskasoni, Battiste said he suspects the enthusiasm is similar in other communities.
- Ruby Dhalla has promised to “reduce gas prices,” “deport illegal immigrants,” and has proudly adopted the moniker of being “Canada’s female Donald Trump.”
- Frank Baylis, easily the wealthiest candidate in the race (his eponymous Baylis Medical Company was sold for more than $2 billion in 2021), has received the endorsement of Celina Caesar-Chavannes, a former Liberal MP who has become of the most vocal ex-Liberals to denounce Trudeau, even doing so in a longform interview with Jordan Peterson.
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