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With polls showing Liberal Leader Mark Carney is the front-runner in this federal election, the other three main party leaders on stage for Thursday's English-language debate spent much of the contest trying to tear him down. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took aim at Carney early on in the high-stakes debate, saying his government would not be all that different from the one led by his unpopular predecessor, former prime minister Justin Trudeau. He urged voters to make a change.
"Mark Carney is asking for a fourth Liberal term," Poilievre said. "Are you prepared to elect the same Liberal ministers, the same Liberal MPs, the same Liberal staffers?" Carney took Poilievre on, saying the Conservative leader is trying to paint him as Trudeau 2.0 and it's just not true — he will be laser-focused on the economy and producing results on the issues that matter most to Canadians after years of inaction on some big files.
"You spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and now they're both gone," Carney said. "I'm a very different person from Justin Trudeau." Liberal Leader Mark Carney, left, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre arrive to take part in the English-language federal leaders' debate, in Montreal, Thursday, April 17, 2025.
(Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press) Carney said Canada is facing the greatest crisis of our lifetimes with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening the country's economy and its very existence and he jumped into politics now because he believes he's best placed to address what he called the "Trump crisis" in this perilous moment.
He said that only weeks into his tenure as prime minister, he has already crafted an agreement with the provinces to break down decades-old internal trade barriers that have long held back domestic free trade by Canada Day. He said Canada's retaliatory tariffs are hitting the Americans where it hurts and he is posed to sit down with Trump to hash out a new bilateral agreement after this election. "We can give ourselves far more than Donald Trump can take away," Carney said.
"The biggest risk we have to face is Donald Trump. We've got to get that right." Poilievre zeroed in on pipelines, saying he will push through oil and gas development to tamp down Canada's dependence on foreign oil — and give Alberta's oil patch access to world markets.
He said Carney just isn't pro-pipeline enough because he will keep the past Liberal government's environmental assessment process, which is loathed by some parts of the natural resources sector. He said keeping those regulations "empowers Donald Trump to have a monopoly on our single-biggest export." NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was chippy throughout the debate, frequently interrupting Poilievre and Carney as they were speaking as he jockeys to get noticed while polls show support for his party has cratered.
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