With polls showing Liberal Leader Mark Carney is the front-runner in this federal election, the other three main party leaders on stage for Thursday’s English-language debate spent much of the contest trying to tear him down.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took aim at Carney early on in the high-stakes debate, saying his government would not be all that different from the one led by his unpopular predecessor, former prime minister Justin Trudeau. He urged voters to make a change.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was chippy throughout the debate, frequently interrupting Poilievre and Carney as he jockeys to get noticed while polls suggest support for his party has cratered. He spent much of his time trying to paint Carney as an out-of-touch elite who will cut public services.
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet was on a similar message track, accusing Carney of being a corporate bigwig who won’t stand up for Quebec’s interests.
Carney held his own in the face of the onslaught, trying to portray himself as the adult in the room who is best placed to help steer Canada through a period of tremendous upheaval with its once-solid relationship with the U.S. in tatters and the economy on shaky ground.
“Mark Carney is asking for a fourth Liberal term. Are you prepared to elect the same Liberal MPs, the same Liberal ministers, the same Liberal staffers all over again for a fourth term?” Poilievre said.
During the English-language federal election debate in Montreal on Thursday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Liberal Leader Mark Carney of using former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s staffers to write his talking points for the debate.
Carney took Poilievre on, saying the Conservative leader is trying to paint him as Trudeau 2.0 and it’s just not true — he will be laser-focused on the economy and producing results on the issues that matter most to Canadians after years of inaction on some big files.
“It may be difficult for Mr. Poilievre. You spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and they are both gone,” Carney said. “I am a very different person than Justin Trudeau. I am focused on results.”
As for the claim he is taking direction from Trudeau’s people, Carney said with a smile: “Look, I do my own talking points thank you very much.”
Carney said Canada is facing the greatest crisis of our lifetimes with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening the country’s economy and its very existence and he jumped into politics now because he has what it takes to the lead the country through the “Trump crisis” and this perilous moment.
He said that only weeks into his tenure as prime minister, he has already crafted an agreement with the provinces to break down decades-old internal trade barriers that have long held back domestic free trade by Canada Day.
He said Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are hitting the Americans where it hurts and he is poised to sit down with Trump to hash out a new bilateral agreement after this election.
“We can give ourselves far more than Donald Trump can take away,” Carney said. “The biggest risk we have to face is Donald Trump. We’ve got to get that right.”
Poilievre returned to the theme of Carney being a Trudeau repeat throughout the debate and, in a particularly dramatic moment, he asked the current Liberal leader at one point to apologize to Canadians for the inflation they experienced in the post-COVID period.
Carney said he wasn’t in the last government, he briefly served as an economic adviser on a part-time basis and he didn’t advise the Liberals to do any of the things that fuelled the cost-of-living crisis. He said he’s already cut the last government’s carbon tax and he has a plan to build many more homes than they did, which would help with affordability issues.
“The way you judge someone is how how they act,” Carney said. “When I was governor of the Bank of Canada, inflation was below two per cent and the dollar was at parity. That is the kind of success I can deliver for this country.”
Carney said he’s an experienced crisis manager who helped Canada get through the Great Recession and the U.K. navigate Brexit — and he can do it again now.
“I’ve built strong economies,” he said. “And we will build the strongest economy.”
More cross-talk and jabs
The debate was much more combative than Wednesday’s French-language event.
There was more cross-talk and pointed attacks, probably because this is the last match-up of the campaign and millions of people were expected to watch just before advance polls open Friday. The commission’s last English debate in 2021 pulled in 10 million viewers.
Singh was often leading the assault, accusing Carney of being a Bay Street sellout and saying Poilievre is “disgusting” for how he’s described Palestinian aid groups caught up in the Gaza conflict. Blanchet at times struggled in his second language but accused Carney of saying one thing about pipelines in English and another in French.
Polls suggest Poilievre is in second place in an election that’s shaping up to be a two-man race, and he took his chance to take Carney on — including sparring with the Liberal leader on the issue of crime.
Poilievre said the last Liberal government let criminals run wild and violent crime spiral out of control and he is promising to invoke the notwithstanding clause to stop the courts from blocking some of his more aggressive anti-crime measures, including a plan to lock some people up for much longer.
Carney said “it’s very dangerous” for Poilievre to threaten to override Canadians’ Charter rights, saying Poilievre might say it’s about punishing hardened criminals but it could be “a slippery slope” with other freedoms potentially under threat.
“It’s not where you start but where will you stop,” Carney said.
Poilievre said he’s more interested in the protecting the Section 7 Charter rights of Canadians to enjoy life, liberty and security of the person — not the rights of convicted criminals.
“He says its dangerous for me to ensure that mass murderers stay behind bars for life. You know what’s dangerous? Turning them loose on our streets,” Poilievre said. “People are living in terror.”
The Carney campaign has sensed crime is a weak spot for the party given past criticism of bail policies — especially in Toronto and the surrounding region. Carney announced some tough-on-crime measures earlier in the campaign and said tonight he supports a crackdown.
Under pressure on crime, Carney raised firearms and Poilievre’s pledge to dismantle the last government’s gun control legislation. “You can’t be tough on crime unless you’re tough on guns,” Carney said.
Poilievre also zeroed in on pipelines, saying he will push through oil and gas development to tamp down Canada’s dependence on foreign oil — and give Alberta’s oil patch access to world markets.
He said Carney just isn’t pro-pipeline enough because he will keep the past Liberal government’s environmental assessment process, which is loathed by some parts of the natural resources sector. He said keeping those regulations “empowers Donald Trump to have a monopoly on our single-biggest export.”
Blanchet said Quebec won’t stand for an oil pipeline running through the province — even though some recent polls show voters there are open to these projects to reduce the region’s dependence on foreign oil.
Blanchet said it doesn’t make sense to build pipelines with long construction lead times to take on Trump when he will be out of office in four years’ time.
“Mr. Trump will be 90 years old and not the president,” Blanchet said.
“He might be, he might try,” Carney said, prompting a chuckle from Poilievre — a rare moment of levity between the two.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, Liberal Leader Mark Carney, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet outline what they perceive is the biggest security threat to Canada right now.
Singh said Poilievre talks a big game about building more homes but his track record under former prime minister Stephen Harper was lacklustre.
Pointing to past reporting on Poilievre’s track record, Singh said Poilievre got very few homes built when housing was part of his cabinet portfolio.
“It was six homes and that’s the facts,” Singh said, holding up six fingers. “You can count to six, which is great.” Poilievre bristled at the suggestion, saying the number of homes built on his watch was a lot higher than that.
Singh said Poilievre’s claims that the Liberals are anti-oil is “wild.”
“The Liberals bought a pipeline and they’re pretty pro-pipeline. I don’t know what Pierre’s complaining about but that’s what they did,” he said.
He said a Conservative government would torch the environment with no rules on development, allowing “big polluters” to run rampant.
Poilievre said his climate agenda is all about driving down emissions abroad by exporting more Canadian energy to displace coal used in places like China and India.
At the conclusion of the English-language debate in Montreal on Thursday night, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, Liberal Leader Mark Carney, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre deliver their messages to Canadians less than two weeks before election day.
Poilievre came down hard on the last Liberal government’s track record on immigration, saying the party’s leaders let too many people in, which has led to “massive overcrowding in our communities.”
He promised to get back to “normal levels” of immigration and rid the temporary foreign worker stream of fraud, something the Liberal government has started to do.
He said Carney wants to follow “a radical policy” of ever more people coming in to get the country’s population to 100 million by the end of the century.
Carney didn’t get a chance to respond to the accusations but said in last night’s French-language debate he supports a cap on immigration to reduce the number of newcomers.
Singh pressed Carney on his time at Brookfield Asset Management, a company that has some of its investment funds registered in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
Singh said Carney spent his time in the private sector looking out for billionaires and can’t be trusted to look out for working people, if elected.
“Who’s side are you really on?” Singh asked at one point, asking voters to return more New Democrats “to force Liberals to worry about people they will forget.”
Carney defended the company he used to chair, saying it’s a “Canadian success story” and one of the largest infrastructure companies in the world, a widely held stock that helps fund pensions for workers like teachers and firefighters.
“Yes, I have had a long career in the private sector. I’m proud of that career and I’ve always acted with integrity,” Carney said.
Singh also pressed Carney on his commitment to do away with the capital gains tax inclusion rate hike that Trudeau first put in place. Carney said he needed to do that now because higher taxes would torpedo economic growth.
“We need to build this country. Innovators, entrepreneurs need to be rewarded — that’s why I brought it back down,” Carney said.
