Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland vowed to appoint frontrunner Mark Carney as her finance minister if she wins and becomes Canada’s next Prime Minister.
During a press conference held at an automotive manufacturing plant in Vaughan, Ont. on Wednesday, Freeland vowed to hit back against the U.S. if elected and that she would appoint her competitor Carney to her cabinet.
“I intend to win on Sunday and when I win. I will invite Mark to serve as finance minister in my government. We’ll make a great team,” she said. “We need a Prime Minister who has a seat in the House of Commons, who can lead a government that has the political legitimacy to fight this tariff war.”
CPAC’s recording of the conference repeatedly cut out, but Freeland was clear in her plans to match Trump’s tariffs and cause the most amount of economic harm to the U.S. until the tariffs are lifted.
If Carney was appointed as Freeland’s finance minister, he would not hold a seat in Parliament and would be encouraged to win his seat in the House of Commons.
This wouldn’t be the first time a seatless Canadian was appointed to Cabinet without holding a seat.
In 2006, Prime Minister Steven Harper appointed Michael Frontier to his cabinet as Minister of Public Works and Government Services to be a Montreal representative in the party despite not holding a seat, as the Conservatives held no seats in Montreal.
As per parliamentary conventions, a cabinet minister is typically expected to be a member of parliament or the Senate to be held accountable by elected representatives, but no rule bars it from happening. To remedy this, Harper subsequently appointed him to the Senate. Frontier resigned from the Senate in 2008 to run for a seat in Vaudreuil-Soulanges but was defeated.
Freeland also vowed to run as a Liberal MP in the next election, regardless of the outcome of her party’s leadership race.
She also signalled that her government would focus entirely on mitigating and tackling U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“When I stepped down from the government on Dec. 16, in my resignation letter, I explained that the threat from Donald Trump was existential, that we needed to focus all of our attention on that threat, that we could not afford to spend money on anything else,” Freeland said. “I have sadly been proven right, and I also committed to my constituents, to all liberals and to all Canadians that come what may i’ll run in the next election.”
Trump implemented 25 per cent across-the-board tariffs on Canadian trade Tuesday, to which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to hit back with 25 per cent tariffs of his own.
Trump has signalled that his tariffs would remain in place until he was satisfied that Canada has effectively secured the border and limited the flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl, into the U.S. He’s also repeatedly referenced an unbalanced trade relationship between the two countries.
Freeland also signalled that if Canadian union and business leaders think she should stay on as Prime Minister until the U.S. threat is quashed, she will do so. This marks the closest a Liberal leadership candidate has come to saying they won’t trigger an election.
“We are facing what is the gravest threat to our country since the Second World War. I’m a member of parliament. (If I) have just been chosen as leader…(I have) the right and the ability to govern, to govern for the whole country in a united way, and to lead us as a government through this tariff fight,” she said.
“That needs to be a national conversation. And if I hear from the premiers, from business leaders and from Union leaders, we want you to govern. We now need a united Canada that can stand up to that tariff threat. Then, that is the approach I will take.”
Freeland also said that though border and drug smuggling concerns are valid and shared by Canada, Trump has used those concerns as a pretext for what he really wants to do: wage economic war against Canada.
“This has never been about that. This has been about the United States seeking, frankly ridiculous pretext to declare economic warfare on Canada,” Freeland said. “Canada needs to fight back. We need to be united, strong and smart in our fight.”