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While national broadcasters predict that Mark Kearney won the Canadian election, his majority in Congress falls on balance after a campaign dominated by US relations under Donald Trump.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Agency, Carney’s party is on track to win the largest number of seats, and has earned the right to form a government as polls have been shut down in most parts of the country.
But whether he could command a majority in Congress or rely on other parties to govern in a minority administration remained too close to calling on Monday night.
The results show an astonishing recovery for the Liberal Party, who lost the course to lose power in the course until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for almost a decade resigned as leader earlier this year and was replaced by Carney in March.
His victory will also be greeted worldwide as a sign that centralist internationalist politics could succeed in elections during Trump’s time.
Carney cited his experiences as he ran the Canadian central bank during the financial crisis and the Bank of England after Brexit, preparing to deal with the economic disruption caused by the US president.
Former Goldman Sachs and Brookfield executives, who first joined electoral politics in January, must align global efforts to manage key negotiations with Canada’s biggest trading partners and limit damages from Trump’s trade policy.
Liberals took advantage of the patriotic surge in the face of Trump’s tariffs on Canada, unspoken about how it would become the “51st nation” of the United States.
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“This is Canada, and we’ll decide what we’re doing here,” the prime minister said in his final message to the country ahead of Monday’s vote.
With Trump’s tariffs becoming a central issue in the campaign, Carney told voters that Canada’s old ties with the US “abyte” and vowed to enter into a “broad renegotiation” of the country’s trade contract.
He led the vote for years before Trudeau left, and until the US president stepped up his attack on Canada, Polyavel struggled to shake up his liberal efforts in recent weeks to portray him as a magapopulist who could not stand up to the US president.
The new Democrats, who supported Trudeau’s minority government in Congress, were poised to suffer serious losses as voters moved to two major parties.
