With the United States acting more like an economic foe than an ally under the presidency of Donald Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada’s former strength, built on our bond with America, has become a “weakness” that must be corrected.
In a pre-recorded address released Sunday morning, Carney said his intention was to talk “directly and regularly” about his plan for Canada and promised he would “never sugarcoat our challenges.”
The main point of this message, according to a source, was that during a time of disruption he wanted a venue where he could talk directly to Canadians, and in an extended format.
The world, he said, has become more “dangerous and divided,” and Canada must re-evaluate its most critical international relationships and undergo a shift in national strategy.
“The U.S. has fundamentally changed its approach to trade, raising its tariffs to levels last seen during the Great Depression,” said Carney in the nearly 10-minute-long address that was recorded in a home in Ottawa. “Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses; weaknesses that we must correct.”
Workers in the auto, steel and lumber industries are “under threat” because of U.S. tariffs, he said, and businesses are holding back investments because of the “pall of uncertainty that’s hanging over all of us.”
“The U.S. has changed and we must respond,” said Carney, before launching into his Liberal government’s record and achievements, and invoking the “Canada Strong” plan he announced during the 2025 election campaign; a plan that was meant to Trump-proof the nation.
Without naming the opposition Conservatives, Carney seemed to allude to them when he said there are “some who say there’s no need for a comprehensive plan” –- that Canadians should “wait it out” in the hope that U.S. relations will go back to how they were in the “good old days.”
He pointed out that young Canadians have experienced no such good days -- their entire lives having been impacted by the shocks and crises of global wars, financial strife and COVID-19.
He admitted his plans that include building new trade and energy corridors, doubling the size of clean energy capacity and creating “one Canadian economy out of 13” are ambitious. “But in a crisis, fortune favours the bold,” he said.
The prime minister then showed a small statue of Maj.-Gen. Sir Isaac Brock, the British army officer known as the “Hero of Upper Canada” for his role during the War of 1812. He said the statue, a gift from comedian Mike Myers, reminds him “that when we’re united as Canadians, we can withstand anything.”
“Before Canada even existed, it had a shape in Brock’s imagination,” said Carney. “Faced with the threat of an American invasion, Brock built alliances across our land and inspired what would eventually become Canada.”
Carney continued referencing history, saying it was an “ambitious” and “determined” Canada that built big things like the St. Lawrence Seaway, the CN Tower and the Trans-Canada Highway after the Second World War. He said his government is making big structural changes now, too, to “make us stronger at home and less reliant on the United States.”
He closed his message with a sentiment meant to instill confidence, invoking a practice called “forward guidance” that he developed during the financial crisis when he was governor of the Bank of Canada – a practice that involved using “overwhelming force against our problems until they were solved.”
“There’s much forward guidance to be found in our shared history. We will get through this because of who we have always been,” he said. “It’s our country. It’s our future. We are taking back control, to build Canada strong.”
His defeat would be a turning point for Hungary – and a blow to the international hard-right
Since 2010, Hungary’s illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has won election after election, repeatedly defeating rivals on his march to reshape the country and become Europe’s longest serving head of government. That could change on Sunday. Polls show that his Fidesz party is on track to lose to centre-right rival Péter Magyar and his Tisza party in the country’s parliamentary elections.
An Orbán defeat would be seismic. It could mark a turning point both for Hungary, and for the network of right-wing parties, think-tanks and organisations across Europe and North America, which have long viewed the illiberal politician as a beacon of far-right ideals.
Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian politician, academic and author, served as the rector and president of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest beginning in 2016. The university was established in 1991 after the fall of communism, and funded by George Soros, the Hungarian liberal billionaire – and one-time ally, turned nemesis of Orbán. In 2017, ahead of yet another election, Orbán expelled the CEU out of Hungary, forcing it to relocate to Vienna and prompting widespread backlash. Ignatieff, who remained the rector until 2021 and whose wife is Hungarian, returned to the country ahead of Sunday’s election. He spoke to the New Statesman from Hungary about the election, the rise of Péter Magyar and Orbán’s role as “ideological avatar for the entire radical right sweeping Europe and North America”.
Megan Gibson: How has Viktor Orbán’s time in power changed Hungary over the last 16 years?
Michael Ignatieff: Well, he began in politics as a liberal and moved to the right in the nineties when he was just a young man in his twenties. As a young prime minister, having led Hungary into the European Union, he then lost an election. In 2010 he came back to power because he exploited [voters’] disillusionment with Hungary’s entry into Europe. The Hungarians, for example, had bought mortgages [denominated] in euros and francs [due to low interest rates and then] had to pay them back [at higher rates after the Hungarian currency fell]. This was a huge issue. In other words, entry into Europe meant ordinary Hungarians were confronted with what capitalism was actually like – and a lot of them went underwater. Orbán used that issue – plus Western European condescension towards Eastern Europe – to propel himself into power. So campaigning against Europe was fundamental to his rise to power and has been fundamental to him staying in power.
But to your question, what has he done to Hungary over the last 16 years? He’s used European money to rebuild the infrastructure of the country. Everywhere you look, you see European money that’s built roads, schools, hospitals, public goods of all kinds. As I’ve said elsewhere, he runs against Europe Monday through Friday, exploiting Hungarian suspicion of Western Europe, and on Friday and Saturday cashes European cheques.
The second thing he did was tie the Hungarian economy to the German car industry. That helped to give Hungary about five or six years of very substantial growth and that consolidated his hold on the electorate. The period between 2010 and the beginning of the Covid crisis was in some ways, the best years Hungary had experienced since the end of the Cold War.
But since about 2020, things have gotten steadily rougher. The economy is performing poorly. Corruption is rampant and systemic. It’s not occasional skimming – it’s the rationale of the whole regime. Everybody takes 10 per cent and all the international studies show that Hungary is one of the most corrupt states in the European Union.
The short answer to your original question is: he took a functioning democratic system in Hungary and transformed it into a corrupt single-party illiberal democracy. And he did it within the European Union, which was powerless to stop him.
You were at a Péter Magyar campaign rally this morning. All the polls at the moment say he’s ahead and in line to win on Sunday. What is his political background and what has his pitch been to Hungarians?
Magyar is a 45-year-old ex-member of Orbán’s inner circle. He was married to Orbán’s Minister of Justice [Judit Varga], and was a bureaucrat in the Fidesz team in Brussels. He broke with the party two years ago of a horrible scandal in which his [now former] wife, as Minister of Justice, and the president of the country, a female Fidesz politician, pardoned a sex offender within the party [who had been] convicted of paedophilia. Not accused of it, but convicted of it by the court. Magyar broke with the party on essentially a moral issue, and then founded a new party. Astoundingly, in about four or five months, he drove it up [the polls] by constant hard work and touring the countryside. After barely six months, [his party won] seats in the European Parliament in the elections of 2024. From that base he has basically eliminated the existing opposition and now he’s effectively the civil challenger to Orbán.
He’s very interesting because it’s a centre-right challenge to Orbán. This man is not a liberal, he’s not a social democrat – he’s a conservative. But he has managed to create a huge groundswell of moral revulsion at the corruption that Hungarians had taken for granted. He stood up and said, ‘we can do better’. And that, I think, crystallized something that was just waiting to be expressed.
The other thing is that he’s a ferocious campaigner. Today he showed up in my wife’s hometown for a rally at 11:30 and he will be campaigning at six successive stops and won’t end till 10 o’clock tonight. And he’s been doing this for two years. He’s the first opposition politician who’s decided to challenge Orbán in the Orbán heartland, which is the small villages and small towns that are the basis of his electoral support. I think it’s fantastic politics – he shows up on the back of a truck and puts up his sound system. Today in front of the station in our small town, there were 600 or 700 people. Wildly enthusiastic, extremely well organised. His ground game, as we would say, is absolutely formidable. I think he stands a very good chance of winning on Sunday.
It’s interesting to run on changing the system when he comes from Orbán’s party. Is he still married to Orbán’s Justice Minister?
No, they’re long since divorced. They have children and they’re working it out. But part of his authority with the public derives from the fact that he can say, ‘I used to be one of them, and I know just how bad they are’. That’s a very strong argument.
He’s had a lot of people on the Hungarian left – the old Hungarian left – very suspicious of him precisely because he’s centre-right. But a lot of people think the only way Orbán can be defeated is a challenge from the centre-right.
If Magyar’s on the centre-right and he comes from Orbán’s party and the country’s institutions have been so reshaped under Orbán, would a government led by Magyar be much of a step change for Hungary? Or would it be a shadow version of the same old system?
Nobody knows. Will he reproduce the Orbán system? Leave an illiberal democracy in place, do nothing to strengthen the constitutional court, do nothing to restore free media? I think he is committed [judging] by his rhetoric to make a really serious attack on corruption. On the constitutional side, he’s committed himself to term limits as prime minister, and that’s pretty serious. He’s saying, ‘I don’t want to perpetuate just another Orbán kind of regime’. So he’s made commitments that I think lock him into some pretty substantial change.
The difficult issue for him is that he’s said ‘I want to take us back into the centre of Europe; I don’t want Hungary to be the constant dog in the manger in Europe. I want us to be front and centre’. That implies that he would be less resistant to European efforts to fund [Ukraine and Volodymyr] Zelensky than Orbán has been. Orbán has made the core of his campaign a refusal to fund Zelensky’s war effort. This is, as some people have said, surrealistic politics. He’s based his campaign on the fearmongering that Brussels and Kyiv will drag Hungary into the war and that Hungarian soldiers will die in Ukraine. Magyar is saying [in response]: ‘you can’t be serious?’
It’s important to remember that Hungary has a border with Ukraine, so this is very close and people are frightened of war here. So Magyar has to thread that needle. Like all countries close to the Ukrainian front, a lot of the oil that Hungary depends on is Russian but flows through Ukraine. Orbán [who has a close relationship with Russia] has used that as the basis for saying, vote for me and your oil bills won’t go up. So Magyar’s most complicated issue [will be] reversing the Orbán policy of complicity with Russia without endangering fuel supplies.
From the outside it’s been striking how prominently foreign leaders have featured throughout this contest. Zelensky, as you just mentioned, and JD Vance was just in the country campaigning on behalf of Orbán. How effective do you think someone like JD Vance has been in rallying support?
Well, it’s not just JD Vance. [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio was here. Trump was beamed in live from Washington to this huge [Orbán] rally that was held earlier this week.
What this is telling you is that this election is much more important than just an election in a small country in eastern Europe. And the reason is that Orbán has made himself the chief spokesman and ideologue of the illiberal democracy that Trump admires, Vance admires, Rubio admires [along with] the German right, France’s National Rally, [Geert] Vilders in the Netherlands. He’s made himself the ideological avatar and spokesman for the entire radical right sweeping Europe and North America. And that means that Trump, Vance and Rubio are showing up in Budapest to help Orbán win.
But will they turn the election? I think that is very doubtful. Magyar got up today at this rally I was at and said ‘this election’s going to be decided by you’. He was pointing to Hungarians. It’s a pretty attractive line, it seems to me. This is our democracy, and we’ll do the choosing. Now, I don’t know whether at the margin JD Vance will help or hurt [Orbán’s chances], but my gut tells me this is a lost cause. I may be proved completely wrong on Sunday, but I don’t think this external support will sway the election. What the external support tells you is this election is very important to the conservative counter-revolution worldwide.
The Orbán regime does fund this network of right-wing institutions and think-tanks and fellowships both in Hungary and abroad. What happens to those institutes if he’s no longer in power?
I think they will disintegrate. I can’t imagine that Magyar will want to assume the mantle of leading illiberalism in Western civilization. I think he’s got other fish to fry, like fixing the economy, ripping out some of the corrupt practices, getting Hungary back at the centre of European politics rather than at the quarrelsome extreme. The conservative international [network], which Orbán has created, will be dismantled if Magyar wins. Washington doesn’t like that. The right-wing conservatives in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, don’t like it either.
What are the chances of Magyar winning on Sunday, but Orbán refusing to accept a loss?
The experts who know the Hungarian electoral system do say that there is substantial vote buying [going on]. You know, you vote for Fidesz and you get a sack of potatoes, that kind of stuff. [Then there is] municipal public works, which employs the very poorest people, is controlled by Fidesz mayors. And so you only get a job, say sweeping the leaves in the municipal park, if you vote for Fidesz. So there’s a lot of that and it’s worth several hundred thousand votes at least.
Issue number two: everybody says that the opposition, Magyar, would have to win by a plurality of five per cent in order to have a majority because the electoral system is skewed to favour Fidesz. But I still think victory for Magyar is likely. I just feel the momentum is on his side. The polls have been absolutely consistent for not just the last six weeks, but for the last six months.
But your question was, will Orbán go quietly? And here nobody knows, but I would think two things are important to bear in mind. First, is that whatever you feel about Orbán – and it should be clear by now that I detest the regime – Hungary is not a police state and he does not possess the kind of paramilitary police that, say, Belarus possesses. So even if he wants to hold onto power, he doesn’t have the instruments of repression he needs in order to hold off a surge of outrage or public demonstrations in the city of Budapest. Budapest is solidly Tisza [supporting] and Budapest will not go quietly if they feel the election has been stolen. If the plurality is very clear, or if Magyar sweeps, then I think Orbán won’t [even attempt to] hold power.
I think it’s important to remember Orbán is only in his early sixties. And you could imagine a situation in which he negotiates his exit from power – that is, don’t try to put me into jail because I can really bring down the roof here and I will go quietly. Then [he could] sit in parliament for a couple years, hoping that an inexperienced, incoming administration screws up a very difficult economic situation. Then he [might] somehow force an election, come back and say, I told you so. That’s a very attractive scenario for a guy like Orbán. He takes a break, comes back and closes out his political career with a come-behind victory.
If it’s knife edge, then we’re into territory that I just can’t predict one way or the other. But we need to entertain the possibility of a knife edge [result] where Orbán ekes out a victory and then the question will not be, will Orbán try to hold on, but will Magyar accept defeat?
It depends crucially whether Orbán and Magyar play the democratic game the way it should be played. And frankly we don’t know. We’ll have to see what happens on Sunday.
The UK government has been forced to drop legislation that would ratify its deal to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after the US withheld its backing for the plan.
UK officials acknowledged on Friday that the legislation had run out of time to proceed to the statute book within the current parliamentary session, which will end later this month.
The setback on the proposal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands — which includes a joint US-UK base on Diego Garcia — is a sign of further strain in the UK-US bilateral relationship, following President Donald Trump’s repeated criticism of Britain over its response to the Iran war.
Downing Street is frustrated with U-turns in the US position on the proposed agreement over the British Indian Ocean Territory, according to people familiar with the matter. It was Washington’s refusal to formally exchange letters to amend a 1966 British-American treaty on the Chagos Archipelago — an essential step in the process to transfer the islands’ sovereignty — that forced the UK to drop its bill.
Under the controversial deal the UK would cede sovereignty of the territory to Mauritius, while leasing back the island of Diego Garcia for 99 years at a total cost of £3.5bn in current prices.
Britain has maintained the treaty will protect the future of the base, after the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2019 that Britain must hand over the islands “as soon as possible”.
Diego Garcia has become a flashpoint in bilateral relations after the UK refused to allow the US to use it to launch initial strikes against Iran. Britain has since given the US approval to use the base to attack Iranian missile sites and other military capabilities targeting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth and US secretary of state Marco Rubio had welcomed the deal, but in January Trump lambasted the treaty agreed with Mauritius as an “act of great stupidity” by Britain.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in turn accused the president of heaping scorn on the deal “for the express purpose of putting pressure” on the UK over the future of Greenland, the semi-autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.
The bill had been paused since January after the Conservatives introduced a motion to stall its progress, claiming that the proposed UK-Mauritius deal was incompatible with international law because it interfered with the 1966 bilateral treaty.
Plans for the Chagos deal remain on hold while wrangling continues between London and Washington. Britain accepts that US support is crucial for it to progress. The decision to drop the bill was first reported by The Times.
In a post on X, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the length of time it took for the government to drop the bill “is another damning indictment of a prime minister, who fought to hand over British sovereign territory and pay £35bn to use a crucial military base which was already ours”.
While the Conservatives have staunchly opposed the treaty, negotiations for a deal began under the last Tory administration.
A British government spokesperson said: “Diego Garcia is a key strategic military asset for both the UK and the US. Ensuring its long-term operational security is and will continue to be our priority.
“We continue to believe the agreement is the best way to protect the long-term future of the base, but we have always said we would only proceed with the deal if it has US support. We are continuing to engage with the US and Mauritius.”
Last week a group of Chagossians won a landmark case that could pave the way for them to live permanently on the Indian Ocean archipelago.