Canada

As widely expected, Mark Carney has become the new Liberal party of Canada leader – and will become Canada’s next prime minister.  The former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor won by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, taking 85.9 per cent of the vote. Former Liberal deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland finished a distant second with 8 per cent. Carney will now meet with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to set a timetable for the transition of power. The fact that Carney won isn’t a surprise. What is surprising is many Liberals have put their faith in someone who doesn’t have any political experience. Carney has never

Ottawa For the past fortnight, Canada’s parliament has been empty. When Justin Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader, he announced a prorogation so his party could focus on a two-month succession battle rather than the business of governing. Excited Tories see the empty assembly as symbolic of the void in national leadership. They are confident their party will soon fill it. If they do soon manage to end a decade of Liberal rule, it will chiefly be thanks to Pierre Poilievre, who has been Conservative leader since 2022. There are few party leaders who excite British Conservatives more: both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn

The next 48 hours could well spell the end of Justin Trudeau. The Canadian Prime Minister – the last major western leader of the pre-Trump era – is reportedly considering resignation, ahead of a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday. Over Christmas, a growing chorus of Liberal MPs from across the country have been issuing calls for Trudeau to quit. The Globe and Mail newspaper quotes sources suggesting that he will make an announcement before the Wednesday meeting to avoid the appearance that he was forced out by Liberal opponents. Still, no one should be in any doubt: after almost ten years in office, Justin Trudeau’s luck may have finally run out.

When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1993 federal election saw the governing centre-right party, which had been in power since 1984, lose all but two of its seats in the House of Commons. It never recovered and became defunct within a decade. The comparison is particularly tempting given one of the factors behind the Progressive Conservatives’ demise was the emergence of a rival right-wing party called Reform. If the fate of the Progressive Conservatives is an object lesson in how even major political parties can die when they lose their way,

In the biggest demonstration since the Freedom Convoy, large numbers of Canadian families and supporters took to the streets across the country on 20 September to assert the rights of parents as primary educators and protectors of their children with the slogan, ‘Leave our kids alone!’  The ‘1 Million March 4 Children’ was spearheaded by Muslim Canadians in response to increasingly aggressive policy and curriculum changes in publicly funded schools, pushing radical gender ideology and putting content before children that protesting parents say is indecent or age-inappropriate. Turnout was impressive, with many thousands of participants in over 100 cities and up to 10,000 marchers reported at the largest gathering in Ottawa. Yes, it was the biggest