Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland will announce her intention to run for the Liberal party leadership just before the U.S. presidential inauguration, a source close to her campaign team said Monday.
The source also said Freeland’s first policy promise will be to impose dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports to match the tariffs U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has vowed to impose on Canada.
Trump has promised to impose 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico on Jan. 20, the day he is inaugurated.
The federal and provincial governments are working together to set retaliatory tariffs to respond to that threat, trying to target U.S. exports that would wreak maximum damage on regions important to Republican leaders including Trump.
Freeland was a key player in responding to Trump tariffs during his first term in the White House. As the minister of foreign affairs she oversaw a dollar-for-dollar tariff response to Trump’s imposition of import taxes on Canadian steel and aluminum in 2018.
Freeland initially led Canada’s cabinet committee working to mount the response this time but has not been at that table since she resigned from cabinet Dec. 16.
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That bombshell move—which came after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told her he was replacing her as finance minister with former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney—set in motion the final chapter of Trudeau’s tenure at the top. It ignited a firestorm of criticism within his caucus that ultimately led him to say last week that he would step down as soon as a new leader is chosen.
The party has now set the date for that as March 9, and candidates have until Jan. 23 to declare their intention to run.
The Freeland campaign source said maintaining Canada’s strong relationship with the U.S. is shaping her early policy decisions, and the dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs would be developed in concert with the provinces.
Trudeau is set to meet Wednesday with the premiers in Ottawa to finalize Canada’s response plan.
Freeland is expected to be joined in the race by Carney, and former B.C. premier Christy Clark though neither have yet formally declared their candidacies.
Ontario MP Chandra Arya and former Montreal MP Frank Baylis are the only two to officially join the contest.
A source close to Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said he plans to reveal Tuesday whether he will run, making his announcement during a talk at the Canadian Club in Toronto hosted by business journalist Amanda Lang.
Freeland, Carney, Clark, Arya, and Baylis are among the seven prospective leadership candidates with forms posted on the Liberal party website to collect the signatures they require to enter the race.
Cabinet ministers Karina Gould and Jonathan Wilkinson are also on that list.
Nova Scotia MP Jaime Battiste said Monday he is “laying the groundwork for an exploratory team” for a bid to make history as the first indigenous prime minister.
While Champagne has long been floated in media reports as a potential leadership contender, he appears to have no publicly available page on the party website seeking signatures.
To launch a leadership run, each candidate must collect 300 signatures from registered Liberals, including at least 100 from three different provinces or territories.
Transport Minister Anita Anand and Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon took themselves off a list of possible contenders over the weekend, while Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced last week they would not run.
They dropped out shortly after the party announced the tight timeline and a steep entrance fee of $350,000.
MacKinnon said in a social media post on Sunday that he wanted to enter to ensure strong bilingual representation, but the “time available does not allow me to mount the kind of campaign that I would want to run.”
Battiste also said in his statement that he’s “fully aware of the complexity” of raising such a hefty sum in such a short time period.
They also face a fast-approaching cutoff date of Jan. 27 to sign up members eligible to vote in the race.
“There are time constraints, no doubt about it,” Liberal MP Yasir Naqvi told reporters in Ottawa Monday, noting a federal election will follow closely after the new leader is chosen. “It’s important we have a strong leader in place as quickly as possible.”
Trudeau’s office confirmed the outgoing prime minister will refrain from weighing in during the race and will remain neutral.
The party’s leadership vote committee, led by former party president Suzanne Cowan and the party’s Quebec director Marc-Etienne Vien, is drafting the rules and procedures for the vote, while the leadership expense committee is working on setting the spending rules and limits.
Party president Sachit Mehra announced over the weekend that the committee has tapped Beatrice Keleher Raffoul to serve as the chief electoral officer for the vote.
