During the English leadership debate, some of the most compelling exchanges included Mark Carney fending off accusations from Pierre Poilievre that the Liberal leader was just another version of former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
“You spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax,” Carney said to the Conservative leader in one memorable exchange. “They’re both gone.”
“You’re doing a pretty good impersonation of him with the same policies tonight,” Poilievre responded.
There were similar moments throughout both debates — Poilievre trying his best to link Carney to his predecessor and the Liberal leader repeatedly stressing that he is a “very different person from Justin Trudeau.”
The attempt to claim Carney and Trudeau are cut from the same political cloth has been a significant feature of the Conservative campaign. But it also raises questions just how fair such comparisons are, and have if they’ve been an effective point of attack against the Liberal leader.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, speaking during the English-language leaders’ debate on Thursday, says Liberal Leader Mark Carney is making the same promises as former leader Justin Trudeau. Carney responds by saying that both Trudeau and the carbon tax are gone.
“Poilievre clearly wants to be going against Trudeau. He wishes Trudeau was the opponent, and sometimes he tries to pretend that he still is,” sad Lori Turnbull, a political science professor at Dalhousie University.
Certainly, the two leaders seem to agree on one aspect of the former prime minister: he’s widely seen as unpopular across Canada, was likely headed toward defeat if he stayed on and any comparison to him is politically damaging.
That’s why the Conservatives have spent a significant part of the campaign keeping Trudeau’s name alive, and more importantly, trying to link him to his successor. While Carney has made a point of outlining their differences, Poilievre has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that Carney is “just like Justin.”
‘Different person, different policies’
Carney hasn’t rejected all possible similarities to Trudeau, saying in a recent interview with the popular Sunday night Radio-Canada show Tout le monde en parle, that he shares Liberal Party values — including solidarity, equality and reconciliation — with the former prime minister.
But he has stressed, as he did in a February interview with the Toronto Star, that he’s “a different person with a different life experience and a vastly different professional experience than the prime minister.
“Different person, different policies, different approach to governing,” he said.
Yet some Conservatives claim that Carney is just another version of Trudeau, arguing he has surrounded himself with some of the same Trudeau team, has some similar Trudeau policies and that there’s not much political daylight between the two. Meanwhile, Poilievre has been recently claiming that the Liberal platform was pre-written before Carney became leader, something the Liberal Party has strongly denied.
Carney does have a couple of former Trudeau cabinet ministers — Marco Mendicino and David Lametti — as part of his team. But one of the Conservatives’ major knocks against Carney, and why they suggest he’s inextricably linked to Trudeau, is his role as an economic adviser to the previous government.
During the English debate, Poilievre raised the topic of inflation and asked Carney to “apologize to the many people who suffered as a result of the inflationary policies that you advised Justin Trudeau to implement.”
Carney rejected the claim, to which Poilievre asked if he was denying that he was Trudeau’s economic adviser.
Carney served as Liberal economic adviser
“I did not provide any of that advice,” Carney said.
In August 2020, Bloomberg News first reported that just five months after stepping down as Bank of England governor, Carney was advising Trudeau on an economic recovery plan in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then in September 2024, the Liberal Party announced that Carney would serve as the “chair of a Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth.”
“Mark’s unique ideas and perspectives will play a vital role in shaping the next steps in our plan to continue to grow our economy and strengthen the middle class, and to urgently seize new opportunities for Canadian jobs and prosperity in a fast-changing world,” Trudeau said in a statement at the time.
But Daniel Beland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, said it’s difficult to know what economic role Carney played in the previous Liberal government because advice and decision-making can be two different things.
“We don’t know what advice Mark Carney actually provided because it’s behind closed doors. That’s what advisers do. So it’s hard to demonstrate what responsibility he has … in terms of fiscal policy, for example.”
However Sean Speer, who was a senior economic adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper, recently wrote what might be most significant “is that it’s far from obvious how a Carney government would differ from a Trudeau government.”
While pointing out that Carney had repealed the consumer carbon tax and the last budget’s capital gains tax increase, Speer still questioned the presumption that Carney is more centrist than Trudeau.
“One may be a banker and the other a drama teacher, but their core assumptions about politics are strikingly similar,” he wrote in a recent post on the political analysis website The Hub.
Trudeau did some ‘silly fiscal things’: Economist
In a subsequent post, following the release of the Liberal platform, Speer wrote that the Liberals are proposing to run larger and longer deficits than those envisioned by the Trudeau government and that when it comes to public spending, Carney “seems poised to match or exceed Justin Trudeau’s profligacy.”
During the English-language leaders’ debate on Thursday night, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre used his one question to any other party leader to press Liberal Leader Mark Carney on his past experience advising former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Don Drummond, who was associate deputy minister at Finance Canada and senior vice-president and chief economist for TD Bank, said the “later years version of Trudeau did some really, really bad and outright silly fiscal things.”
Those included the six-week GST holiday and the raising of the capital gains inclusion rate, he said.
“I can disagree with some of the things on the current Liberal platform, but there’s nothing that I would say is really bad and silly like they were doing.”
He did say, however, that he’s concerned Carney is not taking an axe to the deficit and that there’s a lot of new spending.
“The overall fiscal stance is maybe not all that different than Trudeau and company, but at least they struck out the silliness that had cropped into it,” he said.
Beland added that while Carney doesn’t seem keen on balancing the budget, the overall platform is more focused on the economy, compared to Trudeau who emphasized social policy expansion and progressive causes.
“I think what Mark Carney is doing is reorienting the party more toward the centre compared to Trudeau.”
But comparisons to Trudeau may be all politically moot if they have little impact on the voting public. A recent Angus Reid Institute survey reported that 35 per cent of Canadians see Carney as a major change from Trudeau, while 24 per cent said he was a minor change. Thirty-two per cent said he was basically the same and nine per cent were not sure.
David Coletto, founder and CEO of Ottawa-based polling and market research firm Abacus Data, said data shows that voters are distinguishing between the two leaders, and view Carney as far more competent than the former prime minister — especially when dealing with the economy.
“Enough people like Carney and are able to look past the idea that they would be electing a fourth Liberal government in part because they don’t perceive him to be like Justin Trudeau,” Coletto said. “They do see differences.”
