Prominent Trudeau cabinet minister Anita Anand is no longer jumping ship.
Anand, Canada’s transport minister, is going to be seeking re-election after all, despite announcing her retirement from politics a month ago, according to a CBC report.
The report said Anand will join Mark Carney, the presumptive frontrunner in the ongoing leadership race, at an event on Friday.
Anand announced in mid-January that she will not be seeking re-election in the coming general election shortly after Trudeau announced his resignation as leader of the Liberal party.
“Now that the prime minister has made his decision to move to his next chapter, I have determined the time is right for me to do the same, and to return to my prior professional life of teaching, research and public policy analyses,” said Anand in her statement.
Anand has been the member of parliament for Oakville since 2019, currently serving as minister of transport and internal trade and previously serving as defence minister and president of treasury board. Given she was elected in October 2019, she only stands to receive a pension if the next election is held after.
At the time of Anand’s retirement announcement, the Liberal party was trailing the Conservatives by a sizable margin in public opinion polls.
While the riding of Oakville has been abolished for the next general election, 338Canada projected the Conservatives to win Oakville East and Oakville West by considerable margins before and shortly after Trudeau’s resignation.
However, since Trudeau resigned and President Donald Trump had threatened Canada with tariffs, polls have shown support for the Liberals rise significantly, and polling aggregators now project both Oakville East and West to be tightly contested races.
If Anand intends on running in Oakville East, she will face off against Conservative candidate Ron Chhinzer; running in Oakville West would pit her against the Conservatives’ Tim Crowder.
True North reached out to Anand’s office for comment, but no response was given.
In response to a request for comment from True North, the Conservatives shared a response Poilievre gave in a radio interview last week indicating he’s not concerned about polls.
Because Canadians understand that after nine years of the Trudeau Carney Liberals, housing costs have doubled, the national debt has doubled, food bank demand has doubled,” he said. “They know that Carney supported Trudeau’s carbon tax and actually said he wanted to raise it further, which he will do after the election. And they know by contrast that I’ve been saying the opposite to the Liberals.”