Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke down in tears Sunday during his farewell speech during a Liberal Party conference.
Both Trudeau and his replacement as Liberal leader, Mark Carney, blasted U.S. President Donald Trump in their speeches and vowed to fight back against Trump’s tariff threats.
Trudeau announced he would resign in January amid cratering poll numbers, dire election forecasts for the Liberal Party, a growing sense among both Liberals and the general electorate that he could not go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump, and a severe crisis within his party.
Trudeau prompted that crisis by reportedly attempting to force his deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, to resign over a bitter dispute about his spending proposals. Freeland was seen as a top candidate to replace her old boss, but in the end Liberals chose former central banker Mark Carney to lead their party and become the next prime minister, at least until the next election is held. Carney won in an 86 percent landslide, while Freeland came in a distant second with eight percent of the vote.
The Liberals had been all but given up for dead by election-watchers, but their fortunes have been greatly improved by dumping the unpopular Trudeau and coming together against Trump. Both the outgoing Trudeau and incoming Carney were harshly critical of Trump in their speeches, and both urged Canadians to rally around the Liberal Party to oppose Trump’s tariffs.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m damn proud of what we’ve done over these past ten years, but tonight is about our future as a party, as a country,” Trudeau said in his tearful farewell address to the party conference.
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“Your country needs you maybe more than ever. And I have no doubt that you will answer the call, because you’ve done it before. Liberals will meet this moment,” he said in a speech frequently given over to histrionics, as though Canada were on the verge of being conquered and enslaved by Trump.
“Democracy is not a given, freedom is not a given, even Canada is not a given,” he said.
Carney took over with a more muscular speech that hammered both Trump and Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre.
“Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer. Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered – because a person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney thundered.
The left-wing New York Times (NYT) found some irony in the fact that Carney’s resume is actually much closer to Trump’s than Poilievre’s. Carney is an unelected technocrat who ran for Liberal leadership as a political outsider, while Poilievre “has been a lifelong politician without much experience outside Canada’s parliamentary rough and tumble.”
Carney said in his speech that Poilievre “just doesn’t get it” because “he’s that type of lifelong politician – and I have seen them around the world – who worships at the altar of the free market, despite never having made a payroll.”
Carney did not say exactly where he found all of these politicians who worship at the altar of the free market, but he went on to paradoxically insist that his own familiarity with market forces made him a better choice for prime minster than the Conservative leader.
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“Unlike Pierre Poilievre, I have actually worked in the private sector. I know how the world works, and how it can be made to work better for us,” he insisted.
“I’m proud of the voices of Canadians who are making their voices heard and their wallets felt,” he said, alluding to Canadian boycotts of American products.
“Our provinces are stepping up to the fight. When we are united, we are Canada strong. The Canadian government has highly retaliated. My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect,” Carney said.
“The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” Carney railed in his speech. “We have made this the greatest country in the world, and now our neighbors want to take us. No way.”
Carney sought to thread the needle between his past as a “globalist evangelist for green investment,” as the NYT put it, and his new image as a technocrat champion of Canadian capitalism who can beat Donald Trump at his own game.
“I know that markets don’t have values, people do. When markets are governed well, they deliver great jobs and strong growth better than anything. But markets are also indifferent to human suffering and are blind to our greatest needs,” he said.
Liberal Party leaders quoted by CTV News on Sunday sought to give Trudeau a soft exit, and perhaps even rehabilitate his squishy image a little, by praising his final actions against Trump as prime minister:
“I’ve been looking back at the last decade that we’ve been working together and it’s quite extraordinary. We went from a financial crisis, to a COVID crisis, to the biggest challenge to Canada from the United States of America,” Innovation Minister Francis Philippe Champagne said. “I think history will be kind to him as someone who stood up for Canada, as someone who provided great leadership at very dire times for Canada.”
Immigration Minister Marc Miller, who is a personal friend of Trudeau, said the outgoing prime minister put a greater focus on reconciliation than any of his predecessors.
“There’s been some criticisms, but he will be remembered as the guy who essentially really, really gave some acceleration to reconciliation with Indigenous people,” Miller said.
Under Canada’s system, Carney will become prime minister as soon as Trudeau formally resigns from his office. Most observers expect him to take that step sometime this week.
Canada’s next election was scheduled for October, but Canada’s Global News argued that the Liberals will try to call the election much sooner – possibly announcing a date within the next two weeks – because they want to ride their current polling high, and strike before Poilievre and the Conservatives have a chance to weaken the new Liberal leader.
“I think it’s going to be fast, partly because, as we know, the Conservatives have an awful lot of money in the bank,” former deputy prime minster Sheila Copps told Global News. “They’re going to try and pin Carney back as soon as he’s elected.”
“If the Liberals under the leader go into an election, then the election rules kick in as to what you can spend on advertising. Before the election, it’s pretty much carte blanche,” Copps explained.
Global News and polling firm Ipsos took a survey over the weekend that found 86 percent of Canadians want to hold federal elections right away, “so Canada has a prime minister and government with a strong mandate to deal with Trump’s tariffs.” The Liberals currently hold a slight polling lead over the Conservatives, for the first time since 2021.
