The Decibel - Mark Carney will be the prime minister – what happens next?

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

The Liberal Party of Canada have chosen their new leader — and the country’s 24th prime minister. Former Bank of Canada Governor, Mark Carney won in a landslide, capturing nearly 86% of the vote. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau steps aside, Carney will take his place as the first Canadian prime minister with no political experience.While the Liberals have gained in the polls, Carney will be challenged as soon as he enters office. Parliament is prorogued until March 24—where Carney holds no seat, the opposition parties have said they’ll vote for an early election, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic and annexation threats persist.Today, the Globe’s senior reporter in Ottawa, Stephanie Levitz, is here to break down Sunday’s results, the unique challenges that lie ahead for Carney as an untested leader, and what it could take for the Liberals to hold onto power through this upcoming election.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

On Sunday night, the Liberal Party of Canada chose their new leader. In first place, the next Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, with 131,674 votes, resulting in 29,457 allocated points, representing 85.9% of the vote. Former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney won in a landslide. In second place was former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, then former House Leader Carina Gould, and former MP Frank Baylis. With Justin Trudeau stepping down and the Liberals still in power, Carney will become the Prime Minister. And he'll be the first without any political experience.

He'll face significant challenges from the moment he takes office. The Liberals have made up a lot of ground in the polls but are still behind the conservatives. Parliament is off until March 24th and the opposition parties have said they'll vote for an early election. And hanging over all of this are the constant threats from US.S. President Donald Trump. So today, Stephanie Levitz is here. She's a senior reporter with The Globe. Stephanie will break down Sunday's results,

the challenges that lie ahead for Carney, and how long he might keep the job. I'm Monica Ramen-Welms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Stephanie, thanks so much for joining us on I Know What is a very busy day for you. My pleasure, thanks for having me. So you were just at the convention hall

where the Liberal Party was selecting their new leader. What was the atmosphere like in there? It was definitely happy. As much as everybody is talking about these being really difficult times for Canada vis-a-vis the the tariff threats from Donald Trump and also difficult times for the Liberal Party, really. I mean, there's been so much turmoil for the party in the last several months. The polls have been terrible.

The prime minister quit. Lots going on. And people this time felt the vibe was much more optimistic in there. You know, 2000 people, not a terrible turnout for a Sunday night in March, beginning of, you know, Ontario's March break, for example. So energetic, happy, and, you know, for the first time kind of energized

would be really the thing that I took away. Liberals have been moping around for a lot of months now, and now it seemed like at least, you know, as one MP said to me, I'm not saying we're gonna win the next election but at least it feels as though we've got a fighting chance. Hmm, okay. Well let's talk about how this vote went then because since this is of course a party leadership race, only registered members

of the Liberal Party could vote, we know Mark Carney won this and he won it on the first ballot. How decisively did he win compared to the other candidates? Oh, I mean it was a rout and I can think of every battle adjective there probably is. on the first ballot, how decisively did he win compared to the other candidates? Oh, I mean, it was a rout, and I can think of every battle adjective there probably is. The way the Liberal Party elects a new leader, they use this point system. So of all the points in the country,

what I'm trying to say is Mr. Carney won about 86% of them. That's more decisive just for frame of reference than when Pierre Pauly won leadership of the Conservative Party in a massive landslide victory in 2022. Percentage waste, Mr. Carney won more. Raw vote totals, this is where it gets a bit interesting because the voter turnout was quite low. It was less than 40%. Raw voter totals about 131,674 people voted for Mr. Carney compared to, wait for it, 11,134 for Ms. Freeland, 4785

for Karina Gould, and 4,038 for former MP Frank Baylis. So Mr. Carney's victory was decisive. Yeah. I mean, those numbers really tell you the story, right? So Carney won close to 86% of the vote. Freeland had about 8%, Gould had 3.2%, Bayless had 3%. So those numbers are quite stark. They are. I mean, you know what the folks on the floor were saying after the fact is even if they were supporters of Krista Freeland,

let's say, the party clearly wanted a break from Justin Trudeau. They wanted a clean break and try as she might. She was too tight with Justin Trudeau and that's not what the party wants. That's not what they think is needed to beat Pierre Paglia. Was there anything that stood out to you here Stephanie about this race that you think is worth mentioning? It wasn't really a race to be the leader of a political party and I know that sounds counterintuitive because it was the race to be leader of the Liberal Party but really this boiled down to who do the liberals think is best suited to lead

the government and take on Donald Trump. It wasn't a contest about what does it mean to be a liberal today. It was not an ideological battle of wills. It wasn't a are we progressive? Are we center? Are we center right? The sort of things that often characterize a political leadership contest. That wasn't it.

This was about who is best to do two things, fight Donald Trump and defeat Pierre Poliev. And even defeating Pierre Poliev, there wasn't a great deal of analysis or rumination or debate about what the liberals ought to put in the window to do that, that was true to who they are because the candidates, three out of the four, were running, for example, on an end to consumer carbon pricing, on a rollback of the capital gains changes, on, you know, Mr. Carney talked a lot about developing natural resources. I mean, that's a conservative play.

But there was no discord over that. There was nobody throwing up their hands and saying, but wait a minute, we're liberals. We don't believe in those things. That part of this equation just wasn't part of the campaign. Interesting. So I guess what does that tell you about the party? Like what it means that the liberals chose this candidate, chose Carney at this point in time? Yeah, it means that the liberals are picking a candidate for this moment, right?

They're looking for a man or a woman it could have been to meet the moment. And the moment in the telling of, I guess, those who voted in the campaigns of those who ran was more of a centrist, you know, blue liberal, as they like to call them, somebody who is fiscally conservative, but socially progressive. Again, there was very little conversation in this campaign about socially progressive policies, say, like, you know, national $10 a day childcare, didn't even really talk about climate change. Like some of the things that would be hallmarks of progressivism weren't really part of this. And so, you know, you see someone whose the focus is on economic fundamentals as opposed to social

programs or social policies. That probably tells us something about where the liberals are feeling that they've done, which is too much focus on social cultural issues and not enough focus on really what is the purview of the federal government writ large, which is economic stewardship. And we did hear from Mark Carney after he won this vote. He spoke at the convention. What did he say? He really framed his victory I think two tracks, right? He has a twin mandate here. One is to defeat conservative leader Pierre Poliev and he has some very harsh words for Mr. Poliev.

You could hear the campaign ads writing themselves. So Donald Trump thinks, thinks he can weaken 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. It was campaign fighting words coming out of Mr. Carney's mouth. And then there was, you know, conversation about Mr. Trump as well and how Canada should prepare itself best to take on this threat. Again, less of a geopolitical lens to that

compared to, say, Christa Freeland and how she ran her campaign. He was talking about what needs to happen domestically, how we shore up our own, you know, giving that raw raw, like, let's focus, let's get the Canadian economy running again. We can give ourselves far, far more than Donald Trump can ever take away. But it will take extraordinary efforts.

It won't be business as usual. We will have to do things we haven't imagined before at speeds we didn't think possible. Not so much about, and then I'm going to call Donald Trump and I'm going to say elbows up like that, you know, that's not really where he was going. So it was a bit of a rah rah. It was a long speech. A lot of themes that we heard during his leadership bit about, you know, growing up and his family and community and faith and really intended to sort of

signal that he's ready to hit the ground running to run a national campaign and also again to start dealing with the president because let's not forget in a matter of days a week Mr. Carney isn't just leader of the Liberal Party he becomes prime minister. Yeah so it sounds like he spoke about things at quite a high level there which is what you would expect for a speech like this. Do we have any sense though, Stephanie, of how Carney will lead or what he said he will do? Again, you know, we talked about it a bit already.

He talked about things like getting rid of the consumer price on carbon. He talked about rolling back capital gains. We know that he's promising a middle class tax cut, whatever that's going to look like. He wants to start looking at energy, you know, natural resources and how to get those to market a bit faster. And that's what we know. It's not a heck of a lot. Someone said this to me last week is that we are past an era where a political party will go before Canadians with like a hundred pages of a platform. You know, that's not the deregur thing anymore. It's more in

our attention economy. It's you're looking for things that are to grab people's attention, drive them to vote, and motivate them less that you're looking for substantive policy that people can chew on. You know, he had extensive plans that he put out during the leadership campaign, but lots of political party leaders have been elected on leadership campaign platforms that never saw the light of day once the general election came around. Of course, we also heard from current prime minister Justin Trudeau at the convention.

He addressed the Liberal Party there. And this really marks the end of his legacy in a way, right? He's been leader of the party for nearly 12 years. So Stephanie, what did Trudeau say? And I guess what kind of reception did he get from the people in the room as well? Yeah, that was an interesting moment in the convention. I would have thought there'd been a bit more emotion to it, you know, like if any of our listeners here have ever gone to summer camp or maybe in high school, you get to the end of your graduating year, there's a slideshow and it's all your greatest memories.

There's usually some sappy music and you're kind of thinking fondly over what was, and that was not the energy tonight. It was still Mr. Trudeau in fighting form. He was a little bit wistful. He was a tad nostalgic. He referenced the slogan that won him the election in 2015, hope and hard work, talked about his family, his kids, but really made a point of saying,

yes, I could go back over mind all of my successes and do the things, but you know really made a point of saying yes I could go back over my and all of my successes and do the things but really again he was focused on the moment focused really on looking liberals in the eye and saying the fight is being brought to us we have to win it. This is not a given. Freedom is not a given. Even Canada is not a given. None of those happen by accident. None of them will continue without effort. It takes courage. It takes sacrifice. It takes hope and hard work. In some vein, you can imagine, let's say a decade hence, there's another Liberal Convention, and just like we had at the one now with former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien,

giving this sort of rah-rah, you could see Justin Trudeau coming on back in another few years to give that rah-rah. So not about him, but about the party and about what needs to go forward. Yeah, we heard Kretzschian speak as well on Sunday night, of course. What does that tell you that that was the reception and that's the way that Trudeau kind of presented, you know, this is his legacy,

this is his chance to speak to the party? What does it tell you that that's how it came across? I mean, he didn't wanna leave, right? This is not how Mr. Trudeau wanted this to end. You know, it's fair to say that he was not happy with being forced out, for lack of a better word, having the hand played for him that he wasn't ready to play himself.

There's probably some still lingering bitterness there. Also though, it's fair to say that in the last several weeks, Mr. Trudeau has been given a new sense of purpose, a new sense of energy, a new sense of direction. And in part that's because he's only had to focus on one thing. I mean it is true that in the last several days the government has made massive announcements. Major major announcements, major funding announcements. They have appointed a slew of people.

He has filled every Senate vacancy. There are bits and pieces there that are, let's close up the business. Let's get things done. But he's walking away at a time, you know, I was talking to a cabinet minister tonight, Anita Anand, who at one point was quitting politics. She wasn't going to run again. And she decided that she is going to run again. And I said to her, well, why are you doing that? I thought you were done with this. And she made the observation that as a Canadian right now, what else can I do but

serve? What else can I do but try and fix this? And you can imagine for Mr. Trudeau whose whole life in some way or another has been connected to public service in this country, like his legacy, don't like his legacy, like him, don't like him, it doesn't matter. This is a hard thing to walk away from, but he is still beloved by many people in the party and he's certainly not going to be crude or callous on the way out and say, you know, screw you. He's going to try and keep people motivated.

He's going to try and keep people united. That's how he sees himself, a leader, a motivator, a uniter, and that's how he's going to go out. We'll be back in a moment. So Mark Carney will be entering the Prime Minister's office without a seat in the House of Commons. I want to talk to you about this Stephanie because he's gonna be the country's first prime minister with no prior political experience. How rare is all of this? It's pretty rare. It's exceptionally rare to have such limited political experience. There are party leaders, of course, who've been elected before with no federal, meaningful federal

political leadership experience. Jagmeet Singh, currently the leader of the New Democrats, would be an example of that. We have not had a major party leader, prime minister without a seat in the House of Commons since John Turner. And funnily enough, Turner won the liberal leadership race after Justin Trudeau's father Pierre Elliott Trudeau left politics and left the Liberal leadership in 1984. So we're here in a cycle. One Trudeau begets a Turner and this Trudeau begets a Carney. What's unique of course in this scenario as well is that the House of Commons is currently prorogued. It's not sitting. It's a minority liberal government, which also means that should Mr. Carney choose to return the party to the House of Commons,

again, absent a seat, the opposition parties have all said they'll bring it down as fast as they can. So he could be in this unique scenario where he is sort of the prime minister, but not a member of parliament, then he goes right into an election. More likely case here is that parliament does not come back on the 24th of March as it's scheduled and Mr. Carney will, you know, visit the governor general, ask her to dissolve and call an election within the next week to 10 days. Okay, so there's a few options it sounds like that he could take here. Let's start talking about this transition here, Stephanie, and what happens next. Do we have a sense of how the prime ministership is going to transfer from Trudeau and Carney and how that's going to look?

Yeah. So the transition for Mr. Carney has already been underway. His team, you know, got a former clerk of the privy council on board to start helping him navigate that. He's expected to meet the prime minister as early as Monday to start like a formal transition, to meet with the existing cabinet to meet with caucus. He's got to put together his own cabinet when a prime minister resigns as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will have to do formally. It is as though all of government has resigned with him. So Mr. Carney is going to have to swear in a new cabinet. That doesn't mean he's going to have to shuffle every chair or put a bunch of new people into

portfolios. He could choose to leave everybody there. That could be a very short-lived cabinet too, because we might go to an election soon. So this cabinet might not have that long to live there. Yeah, it may be like a two-month cabinet at best, right? So you would wonder why bother changing around a bunch of ministries. I mean, he still does have the idea that he's got to show a break from the Trudeau liberals, but he's in a tricky position because you want the break from the Trudeau years. But right now you're in the middle of very tense talks

with the United States. So to suddenly swap out your finance minister, foreign minister, trade minister, public safety minister, where with all the key files on Trump, that's probably not gonna cut it. And so we'll get a new cabinet in place, swear them in, and then probably we're off to an election. And do we have any sense of how quickly Mark Carney will become prime minister?

Like are we talking days or weeks here? Days, I would think it's days. Monday, March the 10th will be his first day, full day as liberal leader. The House is prorogued until March the 24th. So if he wants to get any of this done before the House comes back, there's 14 days in which to do it. So somewhere in that 14 day period, he's got to have to be Prime Minister, swear in a new cabinet, find an election platform, potentially dissolve government and call for an election, or write a speech from the throne, which is the first thing a new government has to do,

and be in the very awkward position of having the Governor General read the speech from the throne, while he, the leader and Prime Minister, is like up in the public gallery with the rest of the onlookers I guess waving down or something because he doesn't have a seat because he doesn't have a seat so he couldn't sit on the floor of the House of Commons Wow okay in this upcoming federal election fight that we know is going to happen at some point here Stephanie what challenges will mark Carney face? They'll face a number of challenges one One, the polls now suggest that the liberals are running competitively with the conservatives.

But the vast majority of the public probably doesn't actually know who Mark Carney is. They've never met him. They've never been introduced to him. Is that fine? Are they just willing to continue voting liberal because they've always voted liberal? Or would they like a chance to get to know the guy?

He is going to be going up against an exceptionally well-financed conservative war machine that is determined to win this election. I mean, they raised 41 million dollars last year alone. They are blanketing the airwaves with ads. You can expect to have that continue right up until the election is called. His French is going to be a challenge for him, the extent to which he can hold his own. What is he like as a politician? The liberal leadership debates were very tame. They were very nice. They were not debates.

No one was really attacking anyone. In a federal leadership debate where you have conservative leader Pierre Poliev, the new Democrats with Jacques M. Singh, the bloc with Yves-Francois Blanchette, the Green Party, Elizabeth May, they're all gonna be going gangbusters on Carney. And can he handle the cut and thrust of that environment in a way that doesn't lead to

missteps? He has not done a lot of interactions with the media. He has not been challenged regularly. There has been limited opportunity to ask him questions. When questions have been asked, tends to get his back up. There's a lot of challenges ahead. It is true that he has a resume on paper that is exceptional.

He was the governor of the Bank of Canada. He was the governor of the Bank of England. He was chair of the board of a multi-billion dollar investment firm. He is a blue chip person with extensive private sector and academic experience. Does that translate to being able to run, to become the prime minister in a

general election in a year 2025? We will see. Yeah so he's got an uphill battle on a number of fronts there but so much of this election is going to be focused on the relationship with the states and I do want to bring this up because we talked a little bit about Trump Stephanie. There was some good news for Carney in a recent Angus Reid poll. It said that 43% of Canadians think Carney is actually the best leader to go up against President Trump, compared to 34% who said conservative leader Pierre Poliev would be the best. Do we know what's behind those numbers? Like, why do Canadians, in this sense at least, appear to trust Carney over Poliev?

It's a good question. I referenced this earlier. Like a lot of politics right now is about feeling and tone and affect. And Mr. Carney has the affect of a very calm, central banker guy. And perhaps, you know, people see that as the better foil than Pierre Polyab's sort of energetic fighter persona, which for a long time is what people loved about Pierre Polyab. That he was such a fighter, that he was willing to get down there in the trenches and fight for the things they believed in. And he was fighting for them too. Maybe now that's become a liability. It's interesting politics that way.

And you can see that in Mr. Polyab recently launched some new ads, digital ones, and especially, they're talking about his attitude. Like the ads are about, oh, people think I'm a little, you know, a little too much. Well, wouldn't you rather a little too much to go up against Donald Trump? I'm paraphrasing dramatically there, but that's the vibe. And so that's interesting. I find it challenging some of those poll numbers, and I'll be honest, because I find it difficult to believe that people know who Mark Kearney is

when they're asked those questions. We know that with every political leader, probably save for Justin Trudeau, who was a celebrity when he came into politics. The vast majority of Canadians don't know who anybody is when they're first elected. And so when pollsters are calling them up, that's a high degree of recognition for Mark Carney.

And so it'll be interesting to see how that shifts. And it's also people vesting a lot of hopes right now without Mr. Carney being tested whatsoever. And so I don't know if those numbers will hold. Do we have a sense then of how Pierre Poliev and the Conservatives actually plan to run against Mr. Carney in an election? Yeah, they're going to do a couple of things. One, they're going to try and brand him as being tightly aligned with Justin Trudeau even though he never served as a de facto member of parliament in the Trudeau government. They're going to talk about his expertise, the economic expertise that he lent the liberals. They're

going to try and tie him to the liberal record. They are going to try and remind voters as much as they can that Mr. Carney might be changed in a sense, but in reality what's happening here from the conservatives point of view is the liberals are just trying to get a fourth term. And you best not give them a fourth term because everything you've been angry about with them for the last several months or years, just going to get more of the same. So don't give them a fourth term. The Conservatives very much think the ballot box question in this election is still an affordability thing.

It's going to be people saying that they are worried about their own finances. They're worried about how things look for their kids. They're still worried about being able to find or afford a house. Trump makes all those things worse. All those fears more acute. But what Mr. Poliev is going to try and do, I think, is really focus on Canada need, in his view, Canada needs to get its own house in order before it can really take on Donald Trump and try and refocus Canadians

on answering the question, are you better off today than you were when you last voted for the Trudeau Liberal government? If the answer is no, then you should vote for me. That's their framing, I think, of this election. Whether it works for them, we'll see. Stephanie, just before I let you go here, for a long time within the Liberal Party, the story was that Trudeau had to go. And now that he's gone and they've got this new leader, what is the feeling among party members? Like, do they think they have a better shot in the upcoming election? They absolutely do think they have a better shot. Liberals are feeling really buoyed by this change.

I was saying to a Liberal at the convention, I said, you know, do you think that Krista Fieland is not getting enough credit for the fact that if she hadn't quit, you might not be here right now? You know, and he laughed and he said, well, it's objectively true that she knocked over the domino, really, that led us here. But the reality is,

Carney is new. Carney is different. People are talking about Mark Carney. And that gets me excited to run, this member of parliament said, it gives me the energy I need to go knock on a thousand doors every single day and try and win my seat and that's what the Liberals really needed they needed that energy that's what they're saying they needed that's what they say

mr. Carney gives them and we'll see if they can build on any of that energetic momentum as we head toward an election. Stephanie, always so good to talk to you. Thank you for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Fra, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. You can subscribe to The Globe and

Mail at globeandmail.com slash subscribe. Thanks so much for listening.