Front Burner - Mark Carney and war in the Middle East

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

U.S. President Trump announced Thursday that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a 10-day ceasefire, following diplomatic talks in Washington. This follows an intense period of violence, in which more than 2100 people have been killed in Lebanon, including a Canadian citizen.Prime Minister Mark Carney has condemned Israel’s actions in Lebanon, which he characterized as an illegal invasion. CBC’s Evan Dyer says that’s a major change from how Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau spoke about Israel. He discusses why that change came about, and what it says about how Carney views Canada’s place in the world.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Hey Canada. Did you know you can help shape the future of our historic sites? The National Trust for Canada is excited to announce the Next Great Save competition is back with support from ecclesiastical insurance. Historic sites across the country are competing for $65,000 in prizes to renew for the future. Sites like the Niagara on the Lake Museum in Ontario. Your vote decides the winner. Vote today at nextgreatsave.ca.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson.

So my murdered brother is not, his blood is not going to go gold for no reason. He got deliberately assassinated. And he's a pure civilian that had no intention to do any harm to anybody. This is Hussein Hader, whose brother, Windsor, Ontario resident Hassan Hader, was killed in an Israeli attack in southern Lebanon last week. Why? I asked the actual government, Canadian government, where's your action on this? If you tell me you sorry and if you give me your condolence What is your gandallis is going to bring me? It's not going to bring my brother back.

More than 2,100 people, including 168 children, have been killed in Lebanon since March 2nd, according to Lebanon's health ministry. This all began when the militant group Hezbollah attacked Israel in support of Iran, and Israel responded with a massive campaign that has included airstrikes in southern Lebanon and Beirut, as well as the occupation of the South that has forced more than a million people from their home. Trump announced Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese president Joseph Ayyoun had agreed to a 10-day ceasefire following diplomatic talks in Washington earlier this week. Prime Minister Mark Carney has condemned Israel's actions in Lebanon, which he characterized as an illegal invasion. My colleague Evan Dyer wrote a piece about how Carney's rhetoric on Israel is much stronger than that of past prime ministers. He's here with me to talk about what has changed in Canada's approach to the region and

why. We'll also talk about just what the Kearney government's foreign policy looks like. What are the consistencies in it? And what are the contradictions? Evan Hay, it's always great to have you on. Hi, Jamie. Thanks for having me. Okay, so you and I are chatting around noon on Thursday, Eastern time. And President Trump has just announced that there will be a 10-day ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel. that news, I'm sure, is a massive relief to many at the moment, though we can talk about whether or not it will hold. But of course, after the U.S. announced a ceasefire with Iran, we saw Israel hit Lebanon with this massive aerial blitz.

There was back and forth about whether Lebanon was included in the ceasefire. Iran said it was. Israel and the U.S. said it wasn't. You know, the latest on Thursday before this announcement of a ceasefire was that Israel had destroyed. the last working bridge over the Latani River. And just what did the latest moves from Israel up to Thursday signal to you about what Israel was trying to accomplish in Lebanon? Well, Israel stated its intentions very clearly. The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, had said that the intention was to go actually beyond the Latani River as far as the next river up the Sararani River in Lebanon. So to push more than 30 kilometers into Lebanese territory and remain there indefinitely.

And he also spoke about creating a buffer zone, a sterile zone. And we saw the beginnings of that with these large-scale demolitions of homes and other buildings in South Lebanon. So basically, the Israeli army was destroying dozens of villages in South Lebanon with explosives to prevent the return of the residents, to prevent Hezbollah using those as firing positions, obviously, as well. And the intention clearly was to force everybody out. There were displaced. displacement orders issued for the entire population south of the Latani. But in practice, we know that there were some exemptions for Christians who were contacted by the IDF, Fliq, mayors and so on, of Christian villages, contacted by telephone to tell them they could stay as long as they didn't shelter any of their Shia Muslim neighbors. And so the majority population was ordered to leave. But it doesn't appear, if this ceasefire is going to take place at 5 p.m. today, it doesn't appear that any of that is likely to happen because the Israeli army is still very far. far from the Latani River. In some places, there are only a couple of kilometers really into

Lebanon. I mean, there are still villages within two, three kilometers of the border that they have not succeeded in taking. So this will be a less ambitious end to the war in terms of Israel's objectives if the ceasefire does indeed hold. And, you know, let's just say the ceasefire goes ahead. It came after talks this week at the White House between Israeli and Lebanese officials. Donald Trump said that he is now invited Netanyahu, the Israeli-Pran. Minister and Lebanese President Joseph Aune to the White House. And just take me through what could happen over the next 10 days, a couple of different scenarios, I would imagine.

Well, I would say that the first problem with this ceasefire is that this is not actually an agreement between the warring parties, because on the one hand, you have one of the warring parties, Israel. But on the other side, you have the government of Lebanon. And actually, the war is not between Israel and the government of Lebanon, per se. It's between Israel and Hezbollah, which is not a direct party to these. ceasefire talks. And President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon would be an odd person to represent Hezbollah at peace talks because he has a very poor relationship with them, partly because his government and the government of Prime Minister, Noaf Salam, who really is the top Lebanese official, is trying to disarm Hezbollah, has ordered Hezbollah to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and also because it is a Lebanese national priority to have the Lebanese army be the only armed force in.

the country. Hezbollah in return has accused him of being a traitor. It's not a good relationship between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah. So it's still not fully clear to me if Hezbollah will comply with the terms of this ceasefire. But at the same time, Hezbollah would probably welcome a halt to the fighting because it doesn't necessarily have a way to prevent Israel from reaching the Latani River if the fighting continues. And what about Israel's position, you think? Well, Israel, if it were fully in control of the situation and didn't have to accommodate the Trump administration's desires, I don't think this ceasefire would be happening. I mean, they stated their goals pretty clearly. This clearly falls short of those goals. I think that we have to assume that if Israel were calling the shots entirely, the war would continue. Okay. So let's talk about Canada's response to what has been happening in Lebanon up until this moment.

Prime Minister Carney has called Israel's occupation of Lebanon illegal. It's a violation of their territorial sovereignty, integrity to sovereignty, and the point I was making as well from a practical perspective, the government of Lebanon has banned Hezbollah. He's taking action, is trying to take action against Hezbollah and their terrorist activities and their threats to Israel. And that is the purported justification for this, this invasion. So we condemn it. What stood out to you about that language from our Prime Minister?

Calling it an illegal invasion. Invasion, of course, is just a statement of fact, the key word being illegal. Invading another country generally is illegal unless you have a UN Security Council resolution authorizing that. The exception is in cases of self-defense. And Israel has argued that it is acting to defend itself because there have been armed attacks across its border and those constitute grounds for legitimate war. But of course, it's a feature of this border that there's nearly always something happening there. There's usually multiple Israeli incursions into Lebanon a day.

I mean, most of those are surveillance over flights, but there's also being numerous air rates before the start of the current round of hostilities. So ceasefire violations since the last round of fighting ended since the last ceasefire in 2024 are counted in the thousands, not in single digits, but in the thousands. And they include 50 airstrikes in January by Israel inside Lebanon, another 44 in February. This is all before the current round of fighting really kicked off on March 2nd. So by calling this illegal, I think that what Mark Carney is saying is that he's not accepting the Israeli explanation or the Israeli version of events that this is a war of legitimate self-defense. I want to take a look at like a historical example here where there might be some parallels.

I know former Prime Minister Stephen Harper faced kind of similar questions about Lebanon back in 2006 during the war in Lebanon then. And he did answer them very differently. And just first, remind us what was going on in 2006 in Lebanon and talk to me a bit about how Harper responded then. Well, the 2006 war was not that different from this war in terms of the war goals of Israel. This was really the fallout of the occupation of southern Lebanon, which lasted from 19. 1982 to 2000. When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, it took with it a number of Lebanese prisoners who remained in Israel. And there were disputes after that withdrawal about getting those prisoners back. And there were efforts by Hezbollah to grab Israelis to use as bargaining chips. And of course, Israel wanted to hold onto its Lebanese prisoners also as bargaining chips. It all came to a head in 2006 where Hezbollah crossed the border, went into Israel proper, attacked a group of IDA of soldiers, killed. several of them, took two back with it into Lebanon, who were dead. It didn't emerge that they were dead until the end of the war when Hezbollah returned bodies rather than living Israeli

soldiers. But that kicked off a war that lasted for about a month. And one of the first things that happened in that war was that Israel attacked UN-based Kayam, which is where one of the Unifil or the UN observation force and peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon has a large base. And that killed Canadian Army Major Peta Hes von Krudner, who was in there as a military observer. There was also the bombing of Beirut International Airport and some very sort of blood-curdling language about the war coming from Israel. For example, the chief of staff of the IDF threatened to smash all the civilian infrastructure so much that he said the clock will be turned back 20 years for the Lebanese people. And Stephen Harper, as you say,

responded to that in a very different way from the way that we've seen. Yeah, tell me more about his response. Well, he said that Israel's response under the circumstances has been measured. He refused to condemn the bombing, and he maintained that after the death of the Canadian Army major, Peta Hess von Krudner. He sort of put the blame on the Canadian major or the Canadian Army for the fact that he was there. And, of course, he was there obeying Canadian Army orders. He was there because the Canadian government had asked him to be there, right?

So that caused quite a bit of criticism at the time. There was also a Canadian family killed in the bombing, a family of seven members, four children, the Alacros family. And he didn't condemn that either. And it became a source of quite a bit of tension within Canada that Stephen Harper's view of the bombing was perhaps at odds with many people in the Canadian public who felt that the bombing was excessive. Yeah. And just we've got these two prime ministers with different responses, you know, maybe worth noting here. I don't know if Carney has said anything yet about the Canadian recently killed, but Anita Anon or Foreign Affairs Minister has condemned it.

And just what do you think ultimately accounts for the differences between Carney's position in 2026 and Harper's position 20 years ago in 2006? Well, I mean, they're different eras, different wars, but I think that more importantly, they're different people. I mean, Stephen Harper was famously sympathetic to Israel, famously close also personally to Benjamin Netanyahu. people will recall that he serenaded Benjamin Netanyahu on the piano quite literally. So Stephen Harper probably would take the same view of this war that he took of the war in 2006. In a way, it's more instructive to actually look at the difference between Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau, who is a member of the same party, but who also actually had some pretty significant differences from Mark Carney. because Trudeau, although he was not vocal about support for Israel in the way that Stephen Harper was,

he did in practice keep Stephen Harper's policies, particularly on the way that Canada voted on Israeli-Palestinian issues at the UN. And, you know, the period in which Canada was perhaps most hostile to the Palestinian cause, what began under Stephen Harper really when he attained his majority in 2011 and continued for the first four or five years of Justin Trudeau's time in office. And it only really began to change in 2019. And then you began to see some incremental changes in the way that Canada votes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first vote that flipped, actually, was a vote on self-determination for the Palestinians in 2019. And then as the Trudeau period drew to an end in 2023, you started to see a few more votes start to flip, particularly in Trudeau's last year in 2024. Canada flipped its votes on several important issues, which were settlements, the protection of refugee

properties that they must be preserved through the occupation for return to eventual return to their owners. And then the most important one of all was the peaceful settlement motion, which is voted on annually every year and which explicitly calls for withdrawal. But I think when we saw Mark Carney come to power in March, I think you started to see Canada to take more substantive steps, steps that were more substantive than just votes at the UN General Assembly. And just, you know, elaborate for me a little bit more on why we even saw a more aggressive ship from Trudeau to Carney. Do you think it was the players, or do you think it was also the landscape?

Right? Like, I'm looking at this latest Legé poll from about a week ago that shows only 22% of Canadians have a favorable impression of Israel at the moment, down from 33%. Unfavorable views have also really sharply risen to 63%. So is Carney operating in a very very... different context even from the latter years of Trudeau? Only to a certain extent. I mean, yes, there's been an incremental, more than incremental shift in public opinion on Israel, but I do think it's important to remember that most of the Gaza war happened

under Justin Trudeau. So really, if you were going to react to the Gaza war, that would have been the time when the killing and fighting was most intense. So I think it really is a difference of the players partly. And if you see what happened after Mark Carney came into office, He came into office in March, I believe, and then in June you saw sanctions on Israeli cabinet ministers. Now, we had seen sanctions before on Israeli settlers, but these are really are nobody's. These are people who are causing trouble in the West Bank.

It's another matter to take sanctions against two Israeli cabinet ministers, Itemar Ben-Gavir and Bezlel Smotrich, who are sort of the poster bad boys of the Israeli government, if you like, but who had not previously been sanctioned. And then in September, of course, the biggest step of all was the recognition of Palestine. And we offer our full partnership in building the promise of a peaceful future for both the state of Palestine and the state of Israel. And that was something that had long been talked about. Justin Trudeau's government had talked about it, hinted at it, but never actually did it. But you do see it happen when Mark Carney becomes prime minister. And I think that that's a substantive change.

I think it's about the change of prime minister. And just what is it about him that resulted in that? Like, what did you think it is about the player? Well, I mean, as you say, the war has gone on. And as it's gone on, public support for Israel has eroded. Public anger has increased. So there is that. But I do think that perhaps there's just a different worldview at work here.

If you think about when Justin Trudeau came into office, his campaign manager was Stephen Bronfman, who said that he was going to be more pro-Israel than Stephen Harper. And certainly Mark Carney didn't run on promises of that kind. So I think that there is a somewhat different worldview. We used to discuss these matters, you know, and when we travel with the prime minister, and I mean, and these are off the record conversation, so I'm not going to reveal any of the details of them. But I would say this, that I was often struck by the fact that Justin Trudeau seemed to feel on an emotional and personal level what was happening in Ukraine, but did not seem to feel that about Gaza.

And often when discussing Gaza, the main sort of emotion that he seemed to transmit was frustration or impatience with having to talk about it. Whereas when you discuss the same topic with Prime Minister Mark Carney, I think you see impatience with Israel. And that's a difference. Hey, Canada. Did you know you can help shape the future of our historic sites? The National Trust for Canada is excited to announce the next great safe competition is back with support from ecclesiastical insurance. Historic sites across the country. country are competing for $65,000 in prizes to renew for the future.

Sites like the Niagara on the Lake Museum in Ontario. Your vote decides the winner. Vote today at nextgratesave.ca. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters, part stand-up, part quiz show, and part comedy competition. We take on the most pressing questions on the minds of all Canadians, like, is carpet superior to hardwood? Listen to the debaters, wherever you get your podcasts, and prepare to be, well, floored. There still remains, of course, of course, this vociferous criticism of Canada's current position vis-à-vis Israel. Lots of Canadians who feel the Carney government hasn't gone far enough.

We have heard off the top from the brother Hassan Hayder, who was killed in a drone strike in Lebanon last week. He is asking, where is the action from the Canadian government on this? And, I mean, is it fair for me to say that we haven't actually seen anything conquering? since this war in Lebanon began, beyond statements? It is fair to say. I mean, there haven't been any concrete actions against Israel since March 2nd. In all of 2026, I haven't seen any sanctions against Israel by Canada at all. There have been statements.

But I do think the statements actually are very interesting and revealing of a change of attitude by Canada. If you look at the statement from Anita Anand calling for the respect and protectionist civilians and so on. It really puts Hezbollah and Israel on the same plane in a way that we haven't seen before. It uses very similar language. Actually, everywhere where it calls for Israel to show restraint or condemns an Israeli action, it does the same for Hezbollah. It's very careful to be even-handed. It uses the language of strong condemnation. So we strongly condemn the airstrikes launched by Israel across Lebanon, including in Beirut, which killed civilians and targeted civilian infrastructure. At the same time, we strongly condemn Hezbollah's indiscriminate attacks against

Israel and its people. So Canada is using the same term there, strongly condemn for both Israel and Hezbollah. And these adjectives are not coincidental. They go through committees and they discuss where to put every comma in a statement like this. So when the word strongly condemn is used for both Israel and for Hezbollah and both are accused of targeting civilians, that's a word. That That's intentional. And the statement then continues, Canada firmly supports the Lebanese government's efforts to restore an exercise full state authority, including through the disarmament of Hezbollah. What Canada is really saying in its statement is that its support is only in this conflict for the elected government of Lebanon. It balances blame for Israel and Hezbollah. They are the bad actors. The innocent party in Canada's view is the elected government of Lebanon. calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah, of course, accords with the desires of that elected government of Lebanon,

which has been trying to disarm Hezbollah, and probably also, of course, with the majority, you know, the wishes of the Lebanese majority. So there haven't been concrete actions against Israel. Nobody wants to pick a fight with Washington, which probably would be the result of picking a fight with Israel right now if you took concrete actions against them. But this is a significant thing here that Canada is lumping Israel and Hezbollah together as equally guilty. parties while positioning the government of Lebanon as the good guy. This was not something that would have happened before. The Carney government is also currently facing criticism around weapons exports. I mean, so so is the Trudeau government. But I'm thinking of this letter recently written by two Kretchen era liberal ministers, Lloyd Axworthy and Alan Rock. They wrote a letter to

Anita Anand, imploring the government to put stronger controls on weapons exports. They said they were deeply concerned that the government voted down an NDP bill in March that would prevent Canada from sending arms to the U.S. And then the idea here is that the U.S. can then send arms to countries where we won't send them directly, right? Countries like Israel. Right. The loophole. We currently would not send them arms directly. We have restricted arms exports there since 2024. I think 15 liberals supported the bill. But why did the majority vote it down? This perhaps would come back to the points that Mark Hardy was making in his Davos speech, which are about values-based realism.

So this is the realism part, I suppose, of that equation, where Canada has shut down direct exports to Israel, which is not that hard to do, but it's left this loophole open. That's the allegation. And there's some truths to that, of course, because closing that loophole would require Canada to involve the United States in what is effectively an arms boycott of Israel. there's no chance of the United States going along with that, of course.

I mean, in the United States, you literally have laws against boycotting that prevent the government from even contracting with a company that has respected an anti-Israel boycott in another country, for example. So there's no chance that the U.S. government would go along with that. And I think that probably the Canadian government concluded that if we were to try to oblige the U.S. to separate out the arms that we sent to them or somehow, you know, mark them so that they won't be forwarded to Israel, you'd probably get direct blowback from the United States, and it might very well result in them simply refusing to buy arms from Canada at all. But the chance of them taking Canada's side on that are pretty much zero. So I think that that's probably the logic that's driving the government's calculations there. Yeah, Anita Anand has also said that, like, she thinks the bill's definition of military items was too broad, that it included

components contained in a vast number of manufactured goods that cross the border every day, such as basic nuts and bolts. And she says it would have crippled small and medium businesses and undermined, well, relationships with allies, I guess. We should be talking about the United States, probably there, right? What would her critics say back to that, you think? Well, of course, they want to shut down all movement of Canadian arms to Israel. I think in her statement about nuts and bolts

and jamming up the gears of small business and causing problems with allies, it's the causing problems with allies. It's probably the major consideration there. The liberal government is, of course, trying to juggle the opposition that it gets within Canada, the heat that it draws within Canada for allowing this loophole to remain open against the heat it would get from the Trump administration, which it's really trying to avoid picking fights with, and it's decided that the heat from the Trump administration is more threatening. And, of course, they would be accused, therefore, of being too pragmatic in this sense, of being too driven by realism,

not enough driven by values, that the realism is trumping the values in the values-based realism. That would be the allegation. I want to put another critique to you that I heard from former NDPMP Brian Massey. Recently, he had joined the Hader family at that news conference. He called on Canada to cease all trade with Israel. He said, though, quote, sadly, what we've seen over the last number of years is Canada become a bystander state, an indirect facilitator. You're either an ally of human rights or you're not. And at one point, Canada would have been the intervener to try to end the violence.

Now, it's Pakistan. I mean, he's obviously referring to Pakistan's role in moderating the ceasefire agreement between Iran and Israel and the U.S. He seems to be saying that we used to be a much more important player in international diplomacy. And I just wonder if you think that critiques holds water. I mean, it's certainly like a vibe that I have heard. I mean, I would say, first of all, with respect to Pakistan's role here, it wouldn't have saved, Mr. Heider, of course, because Pakistan succeeded in negotiating a temporary halt to the Iran side of the war, which did not extend to Lebanon, unfortunately. So that only country that can really stop Israel in Lebanon is probably the United States. Would Canadians want Canada to try to take that role? Or would Canada have taken that role in the past? I actually think the answer to both of those questions is no. I mean, I don't think that there would have been a time in the past where Canada would have been. a natural intervener in a war between the United States and Iran as a sole mediator. I think Canada is one of those countries that tends to operate in concert with other countries.

We see that all the time, actually, that Canada waits to move until it has some companions. You know, we were just discussing the sanctions against Israeli cabinet ministers, for example. There, it moved with Australia, New Zealand, the UK, I think Norway also on that one. And it always is looking for these coalitions. The same with statehood. It moved with Britain and France. So I don't think that it's an accurate description. of Canada's past, that it would have thrust itself forward as a mediator. And I'd also bet that

if you polled Canadians on whether they would want Canada to do that, a lot of them would conclude that that's probably a pretty thankless task and maybe even a fool's errand. So Canada has a lot of reasons to not get involved in this. It doesn't want to pick fights with Washington over issues that don't bear directly on the U.S.-Canada relationship because there's already plenty of fights going on. And, you know, if we listen to what Carney had to say in Davos about values-based realism, I guess realism here is to recognize that Canada would probably not be able to change too many of the dynamics in this war. And so if you want to increase pressure against Israel, for example, you're going to want to pick your time.

And probably the time when it's an ally with the U.S. in a war is not the time that you want to pick a fight with Israel because you're picking a fight with Washington. So you would tend to want to keep your powder dry until you need it, probably. I guess on that note, many people, including Lloyd Axworthy, since we're talking about him so much former foreign affairs minister, also criticized Carney's initial response to the Iran war, which he called confusing. I mean, I think other people had even more negative things to say about it. Because at first, Carney did support the strikes and the need to curtail Iran's nuclear power. But then he later called the conflict, quote, another example of the failure of the international war. under, unquote. And there were certainly, you know, many people who said his initial position was in direct contradiction with his Davos speech, where he talked about values-based realism

and where he said, quote, Canada needed to be principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN charter and respect for human rights. And I mean, how are you looking at that initial reaction to the war in Iran now? And how do you think that Carney's position shifted over time and why? Well, I think he has made efforts to walk back that initial overly favorable response to the war as it was criticized by some in his own party. And I think that that is a recognition on the part of the Carney government that Lloyd Axworthy was probably right when he said that this contradicts what you said at Davos, you know? In the Davos speech,

there were kind of two messages, right? There was the message that the old order is gone. You know, let's not try to pretend it still exists. He talked about that sign in the window metaphor, the Veslaf Havel story. Let's take our sign out of the window and stop pretending. But it also had a second part to it, which was let's not give up on preserving what we can from that old order, the values that we can still defend in conjunction with other middle powers. And that's not some romantic vision, this is because the big powers are becoming predators. We need to try to preserve as much as we can as of the ruled base order, and we need to do it or gets crushed or swallowed in this new world that we're living in. So it's a very pragmatic thing. If you think about

those three fundamental values that he mentioned there, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, those are really all the same thing. They're really all about the UN Charter, right? They're about not messing with other countries, with other countries' borders, not attacking other countries. They're about the UN Charter. The core principle of the UN Charter, you can really put it in three words. Don't start wars. If you seize territory through force, you have to give it back.

When he comes out at the start of a war and appears to make justifications for starting that war, when there is not an imminent self-defense issue, one can argue about the nuclear program, but there's not an imminent self-defense issue, then he is contradicting what he said at Davos. And I think the walkback is recognition that that, yeah, he did. He did do that. We've been focusing on the Middle East a lot, but I just want to zoom out a little bit and talk about Carney as a foreign policy operator, like a little bit more broadly. I mean, we see him on the world stage. He's pretty comfortable.

He has spent, you know, 84 days abroad this year, far more than recent predecessors. A lot of the travel has been trade-related. He's very comfortable with economic issues. Like there's no question there, right? And that speech at Davos certainly turned him into a bit of a rock star on the world stage. How comfortable do you think he is with these kind of geopolitical issues beyond economics? Well, I've never really bought the idea that Mark Carney is just an economist who's like a neophyte in the world of politics or who doesn't understand issues outside of his, you know, his academic field. because being the governor of the Bank of England during the period when he was governor was a very political job.

You know, he was, first of all, he had to go through Brexit, and he was a target of political attacks there. I remember that the pro-Brexit side attacked him in much the way you see Jerome Powell being attacked now by the Trump administration, and they accused him of trying to start a project fear to prevent Brexit, for example. And he had to deal with all of that politics. He had to deal with Europe and the European Union. He was also involved in the 2008 financial crisis in helping a rescue package for Ireland, for example. So this is someone who has dealt with political issues in the past in his job. And he has a PhD from Oxford.

He's a pretty worldly guy. Right now, of course, he is heavily focusing on economics and his travels also focus on economic and trade issues. But I don't think that's just because that's his wheelhouse where he's comfortable. I think that's because that is seen as a national priority. and indeed he did run on those issues of diversifying and expanding Canadian trade. So I think that's where his focus is for those reasons. It's not because that's his own personal interest. I haven't seen any sign that Mark Carney doesn't understand geopolitics.

What about the people around him? Is there anyone who is playing a significant role right now when it comes to Canada's foreign policy? Who are they? I think, yeah, I think he's pretty much his own man on that front. I mean, it would be easier to describe who was around Justin Trudeau on foreign policy or who influenced Justin Trudeau because you can certainly see people like Roland Paris and Brian Clow. I think Katie Telford was an influence on him, certainly on foreign policy. Christopher Freeland certainly, too, had a pretty defined worldview. Very much so.

Like certainly the whole Ukraine policy was very much coming from Christopherland. There are people around Mark Carney too. He has David Morrison, who's, you know, longstanding public servant who has a lot of track. recorded with the G7 and so on as a Sherpa. He consults heavily with Dominique LeBlanc on U.S. matters. And there's also Mark Andre Blanchard, who's a very well-regarded Canadian diplomat. But I think really he's his own main guide. I have no doubt that he wrote that speech that he gave at Davos himself, for example. And just, you know, it's interesting to me that you didn't mention Anita Anon there, right? Who is the current minister of foreign affairs?

Well, Anita Anand is not someone who seems. all that comfortable in her role, perhaps, compared to how she came across when she was procurement minister during the COVID pandemic, for example, where her star started to rise within the Liberal Party. She seemed a lot more of a happy warrior in that portfolio, I would say, then she does today. She is, of course, a foreign minister at a time where you have a prime minister who is very heavily involved in those files, which, of course, kind of restricts her role a little bit. So I, I think she's not someone who comes to the front and takes radical positions or controversial positions in her role.

And she's not someone who thrust herself to the front as a formulator of policy or big ideas either. That feels like a good note for us to end on then. Kevin, thank you. This was great. Thanks for having me. All right. That is all for today. Front burner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Joytha Schengupta, Shannon Higgins, Kevin Sexton, McKenzie Cameron, and Dave Modi. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producers Arlene Chow and Imogen Burchard. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos, and I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you on Monday. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.