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• 00:00The Canadian government has rightly retaliated and is rightly retaliating with our own tariffs that will have maximum impact in the United States and minimum impact here in Canada. The my government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect. Former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, meanwhile, has won the race to become Canada’s next prime minister. He says retaliatory levies against the US are going to stay in place until Trump drops his tariffs. Bloomberg’s Ottawa bureau chief Laura Kane joins us now. So yeah, the realization of a long held dream there for Mark Carney. Laura. Now he’s in the is setting up too for an election down the track. Can he win? Well, it’s gotten a lot closer since he got involved, I’ll tell you that. For months, Justin Trudeau was really lagging in the polls behind Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. And now with Justin Trudeau’s decision to resign in January and open up this Liberal leadership race that Carney has now won. And with Trump’s threats coming from the US, those polls have significantly narrowed. So now that Carney has realized his ambition to win this leadership race and to become the next Prime minister, he will be sworn in in the coming days. He has a decision to make should he call an election now, right at this moment that the polls seem very close, but then plunge Canada into a situation where we have a caretaker government amid a massive trade war with our biggest trading partner? Or should he face parliament and try to get some support from opposition parties? So that’s going to be what he has to think about over the next couple of weeks. But we do expect that he may be leaning toward calling an election soon. And as I said, the conservatives still have a lead in the polls, but it is a lot closer now that Mark Carney has gotten involved. And some polls even have him neck and neck with the conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, we have you, Pierre. Paul has made a lot of hay out of criticizing the former prime minister, Justin Trudeau. What sort of attack lines is he likely to put together against Mark Carney? Well, he has started calling him Sneaky Mark Carney. And the reason for that is that he’s really taken aim at Mark Carney’s history as a businessman. He’s a former Goldman Sachs banker. More recently, he was chair of Brookfield Asset Management, which is a major investment firm in Canada. And Pierre Poilievre has called on him to proactively disclose his financial holdings rather than go through the months long process that’s required once you become prime minister. So Pierre Poilievre has tried to paint Mark Carney as someone who is secretly perhaps holding financial assets that could be conflicts of interest for him and even potentially B points of leverage that he says Donald Trump might have over him. Now, we don’t know if that’s the case. And Mark Carney has said he would put his assets in a blind trust. But that is certainly how Pierre Poilievre is going about trying to paint Mark Carney as sort of an elitist, out of touch and potentially someone who’s hiding something from the Canadian people. Well, dealing with the US trade policy is obviously going to be a major feature of the election. What are both parties saying about that at the moment? Well, there is broad agreement in Canada that we have to fight back and fight back hard. So both leaders, the conservative leader and Mark Carney, have said they would keep Canada’s retaliatory tariffs in place until the U.S. drops theirs. Mark Carney has also talked a lot about trying to diversify Canada’s trading partners, saying that the relationship is irreparably changed, that we can no longer trust the US. And today saying I will find, you know, new trading partners and strengthen those that we already have with other countries. It will also reduce internal trade barriers to try to strengthen Canada’s economy. There’s really been a huge shift in Canada away from thinking of the US as its greatest ally and trading partner as to potentially even an adversary at this particular moment. And Canadians, including Mark Carney in his speech tonight, are taking Donald Trump’s sovereignty threats very seriously. Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’d like to make Canada the 51st state. Justin Trudeau said last week that that is a serious threat. So Canadians are taking that very seriously. And Mark Carney saying very clearly tonight Canada will never be part of the United States and that we will forge our own economic future. Do we know when the election is going to be held yet? No. So, as I said, I mean, he could decide to call the election as soon as next week. Another option is to wait just a week after that, parliament will resume. And so he could face the opposition parties at that point and they could decide to bring down the government. His Liberal Party doesn’t have a majority of seats in Parliament, so it’s in a pretty dicey situation if he tries to hang on a little longer in Parliament. So if he does call an election next week, as is starting to be expected in Canada, Canadians would go to the polls in late April. So, you know, it could all be happening very quickly here for Mark Carney, sworn in as the new prime minister sometime this week, potentially calling an election next week. And then we’ll see whether Canadians choose him or the conservative leader to be their leader in the long term as they face this tariff threat from the US.