1 day Ago By Ari Yanover
After Mark Carney’s press conference last Thursday, when he said the old relationship with the United States is over, many Liberals might have had the same thought about the race to elect the 45th Canadian Parliament. It was as if the mild-mannered Liberal leader had found the last remaining phone booth in Ottawa from which to emerge transformed into the sober and assured prime minister. For a brief moment, he was no longer auditioning for the part, he was centre-stage playing the role — a luxury not open to his rivals.
Canadians took note. Liberal support is still ticking upward and, if an election were held tomorrow, they would most likely win a majority. The Conservatives are holding steady, but the NDP support is in single digits and the Bloc Québécois is also losing support to the resurrected Liberals.
The ballot question is clear for now: who is best positioned to handle the threats posed by Donald Trump? Tariffs will likely be with us as long as Trump is around, as was made clear in a Bloomberg interview with the chair of the president’s economic advisers, Stephen Miran, who offered an indication of how intrinsic they are to this administration. He said that U.S.
consumers are “flexible” and have options of what they can buy, while countries that export to America are “inflexible” and have no alternative markets. “They’re the ones who will bear the burden of these tariffs, which means there is going to be very limited pass through into downside economic risk or higher prices,” he said. The president’s “Liberation Day” of April 2 looms and the Wall Street Journal suggests he is pushing his advisers to be even more aggressive on new levies.
Thus far in this campaign, more tariffs means more anxiety, which translates into more support for the Liberals. But success can breed complacency and complacency breeds failure. The entire Liberal project depends on the credibility of one individual and Carney has just strained that precious commodity by defending what many Canadians will judge to be indefensible.
In January, Paul Chiang, the Liberal candidate for Markham-Unionville in the Greater Toronto Area, told a Chinese language media conference that the Conservative candidate for Don Valley North, Joe Tay, had a $184,000 bounty on his head for his advocacy of democracy in Hong Kong, and that anyone could claim it by taking Tay to Toronto’s Chinese consulate..
