Mark Carney, the front-runner in the race to become Canada’s next prime minister, squared off for the first time with his main rival Chrystia Freeland in a French-language TV debate that focused on how to handle U.S. President Donald Trump.
Freeland, the former finance minister, positioned herself as most capable of dealing with Trump because she’s done it before — she led the negotiations that resulted in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Carney pointed to his experience managing crises and argued the US president is different this time around.
“The Trump of today is not the same as before. He is more isolationist, he is more unilateralist, he is more aggressive,” Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, said Monday evening in Montreal. “We can’t control President Trump. We have to strengthen our economy immediately, and that will strengthen our position.”
“I don’t agree that we can’t respond to President Trump and that we can’t win,” fired back Freeland, who resigned her cabinet post in December, effectively finishing Justin Trudeau’s political career. She said Trump “poses the greatest threat to Canada since World War II,” and Canada must respond strongly with a “list of retaliatory tariffs to create pressure inside the US.”
Trump’s threat to impose 25% tariffs on most Canadian goods imported by the US and coerce Canada into becoming the 51st state have changed the political landscape ahead of this year’s vote. Canadians are weighing who they believe is best fit to deal with Trump in a potential trade war.
The face-off between the two leading candidates in the Liberal Party leadership race comes after Trudeau tried to recruit Carney to replace Freeland as finance minister, which led to her stinging resignation. Carney — who is also godfather to Freeland’s son — didn’t take the role.
The debate was ultimately an even-tempered affair, with the sharpest language reserved for Trump and broad policy agreements among those on stage. “We’re friends,” Freeland said during the event.
It was the first time Carney found himself in a formal televised debate as a politician — and it was a key test of his French. If he wins the Liberal Party leadership, the French-speaking province of Quebec will be crucial in a general election, where he would be up against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, a fierce and fluently bilingual debater, and Yves-Francois Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist party representing Quebec’s interests.
Over the past several weeks, Carney has been working on the language with his close advisers. Expectations for his French were low, and he managed to deliver coherent arguments against opponents who also speak French as a second language. He stumbled a few times — he accidentally said “We agree with Hamas,” but after Freeland noted the error, he quickly corrected himself and said “We are against Hamas.”
No Liberal leader from outside of Quebec has won a general election in Canada since 1965.
An English-language debate will take place Tuesday evening, and Liberal Party members will choose their new leader on March 9.
So far, Carney has gathered support from high-profile Liberal cabinet members such as Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, Defense Minister Bill Blair, Transport Minister Anita Anand and Labor Minister Steven MacKinnon.
Polls suggest Freeland is lagging behind Carney, but ahead of two other less well-known candidates, former government House Leader Karina Gould and businessman Frank Baylis. They are all more fluent French speakers than Carney. If Carney were to win the leadership, surveys show him in a tight race against Poilievre, a reversal from a few months ago when the Liberals were headed for major seat losses under Trudeau.
Canada is due to hold an election by October, but it’s expected sooner. Carney said in an interview last week that he would likely call an early election to secure a mandate before making major changes.
With assistance from Brian Platt and Thomas Seal.
Mathieu Dion, Bloomberg News
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