President Donald Trump is set to face a new challenger in his North American trade war after Canada’s Liberal Party elected Mark Carney to succeed outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Carney, a 59-year-old economist and former central banker, won the race to replace Trudeau, who stepped down in January over his deep unpopularity. Carney is expected to be sworn in as prime minister early this week and call a federal election, where he will face off with the country’s conservatives.
Though a novice in politics, the premier designate served as governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and won praise for helping the country recover from the 2008 financial crisis. In 2013, Carney became the first noncitizen to lead the Bank of England in its 300-year history.
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“There’s someone who’s trying to weaken our economy: Donald Trump,” Carney said in his first remarks after the Liberal Party election. “He’s attacking Canadian families, workers, and businesses, and we cannot let him succeed and we won’t.”
Carney praised the Trudeau administration for “rightly retaliating” against America’s tariffs with a series of counter-tariffs on products made in the U.S.
“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. Think about it: if they succeeded, they would destroy our way of life.”
As for Trump’s talk of annexing its neighbor as the 51st U.S. state, Carney said “Canada never ever will be part of America in any way, shape, or form.”
“We didn’t ask for this fight but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” he said. “So Americans should make no mistake: in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.”
It’s a sharp turn from his comments last month, when Carney refused to dignify Trump’s annexation wishes.
“When you think about what’s at stake in these ridiculous, insulting comments of the president, of what we could be, I view this as the sort of Voldemort of comments,” Carney told supporters in Winnipeg, referencing the central villain of the Harry Potter series. “Like I will not even repeat it, but you know what I’m talking about.”
Carney, the son of two teachers, holds economics degrees from Harvard and Oxford. He won 85.9 percent of 150,000 votes cast by the Liberal Party’s members. Nearly 400,000 people registered to vote in the leadership race, the party announced in January.
