Liberal Leader Mark Carney confirmed he will run for a seat in Nepean, a riding in Ottawa, the night before visiting Gov. Gen. Mary Simon on March 23 seeking dissolution of Parliament and triggering a snap election for April 28.
Nepean was previously held by Liberal MP Chandra Arya, who was disqualified from the Liberal leadership race and most recently from running as a candidate in the riding.
Liberal MP Chandra Arya in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang
Carney made the announcement late Saturday evening, March 22, hours after the Liberal Party posted on social media saying it was “thrilled” that their leader would be the candidate for Nepean in the next election.
“I’m honoured to be running in the community of Nepean to serve as your Member of Parliament,” Carney said on X. “This next election will be one of the most consequential in our lifetimes.”
A former governor of the central banks of Canada and England, Carney was sworn in as prime minister on March 14 after winning the Liberal leadership race on March 9.
Carney hence became the first prime minister in Canadian history to be appointed to the highest office without ever having held elected office.
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His decision to seek a seat in Nepean means he will be running in a riding adjacent to that of his main rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is seeking re-election in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton.
The Nepean riding has been held by Arya for the past decade. On March 20, the incumbent said on social media that he had received a letter from his party informing him his candidacy for the next election in the Nepean riding has been revoked.
The letter, dated that same day, said the decision was made after “a thorough review” of Arya’s eligibility to serve as a candidate for the party in the riding, and based on “a review of new information” by the party’s “Green Light Committee.”
The letter did not specify what the “new information” was about.
The Liberals similarly didn’t disclose the reason in January when they rejected Arya’s bid to enter the party’s leadership race. Arya announced his candidacy for the contest on Jan. 9, and by Jan. 22, had submitted the paperwork and a $50,000 deposit. On Jan. 26, the Liberal MP said he was informed by his party that he was disqualified.
Arya had said during his leadership campaign that a Canadian prime minister doesn’t need to speak French, a view that was met with strong criticism by the Liberal Party’s Quebec caucus.
In April 2023, Arya sponsored a petition in the House of Commons that called on the federal government to reconsider its proposed foreign influence transparency registry. The petition said such a registry was a “misleading way to identify sources of foreign influence” and posed “a serious harassment and stigmatization risk for racialized communities.”
The petition was put forward a month after Ottawa launched public consultations to guide the creation of such a registry, doing so amid widespread intelligence reports of China’s meddling in Canada’s elections.
Just over a year later, in June 2024, the government adopted its bill focused on countering foreign interference, with a key aspect of Bill C-70 being the establishment of a publicly accessible foreign influence transparency registry.
Speaking in a press conference at Rideau Hall after having visited Simon to dissolve Parliament, Carney was asked why he had chosen to run in the riding of Nepean, and the factors he had considered, in the context that Arya has represented the riding since Oct. 19, 2015.
“I’ve been a resident in the Ottawa area for almost 20 years,” Carney told reporters. “With the exception, of course, when I was quite obviously a resident in London, [UK,] when I was governor of the Bank of England.”
Asked what disqualified Arya as a candidate in Nepean, Carney gave a response similar to the March 20 letter which Arya had shared on social media.
“We have within the Liberal Party, a committee called the Green Light Committee, which takes into account various information about candidates, does basic candidate due diligence, if I can put it that way,” Carney said.
“I am not a member of that committee. They take their decisions.”
Matthew Horwood, Noé Chartier, and The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
