With its hefty $350,000 entrance fee and a 45-day campaign, the only people who can enter the Liberal Leadership Contest are Party Insiders with deep Liberal insider connections and even deeper pockets.
Only Liberal Party insiders stand any chance of raising $350,000 in 30 days.
This leaves many Canadians feeling like the Liberal Party is selling the Prime Minister’s Office.
Leadership hopefuls must declare their intent to run by January 23, 2025, and submit a $50,000 payment to the Liberal Party of Canada.
The winner of this contest becomes the new Liberal Party leader and Canada’s 24th and unelected Prime Minister.
They will likely also become the shortest-serving prime minister in Canadian history, beating Prime Minister Charles Tupper’s record of 70 days, set in 1896.[i]
Liberal John Turner lasted only 79 days.[ii]
Who Is In?
Chandra Arya, Jaime Battiste, Frank Bayliss and Karina Gould are all confirmed entrants into the Liberal Leadership contest.
Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland and Jonathan Wilkinson are all expected to announce in the coming days.
Who is Out?
Anita Anand, François-Philippe Champagne, Christy Clark, Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, and Steven MacKinnon have all confirmed they will not enter the contest.
Entry Fee Payment Schedule
Here’s the payment schedule for the $350,000 entrance fee:[iii]
- A refundable payment of $50,000 due by January 23, 2025.
- A non-refundable payment of $50,000 due by January 30, 2025
- A non-refundable payment of $125,000 due by February 7, 2025.
- A non-refundable payment of $125,000 due by February 17, 2025.
A Two Horse Race?
“It’s pretty clear the race is between Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney and both of them are very, very well connected,” said Martha Hall Findlay, who now heads the school of public policy at University of Calgary.[iv]
Mark Carney
By the time you read this, Mark Carney will officially be in the race. He is scheduled to make the announcement at an Edmonton event today.
Mark Carney claimed, in his interview with talk show host Jon Stewart[v], “I am an outsider.”
If he’s an outsider, then he’s the most connected outsider the Liberal Party has ever known, with direct access to everyone from the Prime Minister to back bench MPs and every major player in the Liberal Party’s back rooms.
“Three independent Liberal sources tell the Sun that Telford has been seeking support for Carney with key supporters and that much of the PMO staff is behind Carney as well.”[vi]
If Carney is such an “outsider” to the Liberal Party elite, why is Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, making calls on his behalf?
If Carney is such an “outsider” why is Justin Trudeau’s former top advisor, Gerald Butts, part of Carney’s campaign team?
Carney’s “outsider” line doesn’t pass the smell test.
“Sources in the party say Trudeau and his team are furious about how Freeland resigned from cabinet,” writes Brian Lilley, “blasting Trudeau in an open letter about his ‘costly gimmicks.’
“Apparently, none of them have a problem with what Trudeau did to Freeland, it’s just another example of the feminist Prime Minister not actually supporting women.”[vii]
Carney’s Climate Hypocrisy
In 2021, research into Carney’s claims that Brookfield Asset Management is “carbon neutral” showed the company invested hundreds of billions of dollars in at least five coal, oil and natural gas projects elsewhere.[viii]
They’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars more since 2021.
Does Carney believe it’s okay to kill Canadian coal, oil and gas jobs, so long as he and Brookfield Asset Management profits from these same projects around the world?
“You make billions of dollars off foreign pipelines and you shut them down here at home, putting people out of work.” [ix]
“Mr. Carney, you’ve just said you support your leader’s decision to kill a western Canadian pipeline that ships the most ethical product in the world, yet you also support your company’s decision to invest billions of dollars in foreign pipelines in Brazil and in the UAE.”
“It is clear that this is not about the environment,” Poilievre continued. “If it were, you’d be consistent and oppose fossil fuels everywhere, but you’re happy to profit off of foreign fossil fuel companies while killing jobs among our own people.”
“How do you address that flagrant hypocrisy? It smacks of the Davos Elite at its worst.”
Carney failed to answer the question directly, opting for Trudeau-like spin instead.
Chrystia Freeland
Chrystia Freeland is expected to announce her candidacy at a campaign event on Friday, January 17th.
Freeland is the face of every Justin Trudeau policy introduced since he took office in 2015.
She, like Carney, is well connected to the Liberal Party machine but, unlike Carney, she carries the weight of all of Justin Trudeau’s failures.
While she attempts to make hay out of quitting Cabinet in December, the reality is that Trudeau’s legacy is Freeland’s legacy.
No amount of Liberal spin doctoring can change that.
“Freeland is not a caucus favourite, and — like many of her cabinet peers — may struggle to differentiate herself from Trudeau’s record.”[x]
Her inability to differentiate herself from Trudeau, along with many of Trudeau’s team actively working on Carney’s behalf, may prove to be an insurmountable mountain for her to climb.
No matter who buys the Prime Minister’s chair, nothing changes for licensed firearms owners.
Confiscating legally-owned firearms from licensed owners is bedrock Liberal Party Policy. That Trudeau is about to step down does not change this fact.
The gun confiscation process is no longer in the hands of politicians, it’s firmly in the hands of government bureaucrats.
As we noted last week, government bureaucracies are like locomotives moving massive numbers of rail cars.
While it takes a massive amount of energy to get the locomotive and its train moving, once it attains cruising speed that momentum is very difficult to stop.
Canada’s gun confiscation bureaucracy, despite all the negative press surrounding confiscations and the politicians pushing them, is a locomotive with a massive amount of momentum.
The Liberal confiscation train will not stop unless there is a change in government and, even then, it will take immense, swift, and intentional effort from a new (likely Conservative) Prime Minister to derail Justin Trudeau’s firearms confiscation agenda.
What We Know
We know that Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government will fall when Parliament resumes on March 24th.
We also know that whoever becomes Canada’s 24th (and unelected) prime minister, they hold the Liberal Party’s confiscation agenda close to their heart.
Our only hope (after two failed attempts in 2019 and 2021) is that we finally elect a majority government that opposes the Liberal confiscation agenda.
As of this writing, the only party that stands a credible chance of becoming that majority government is the Conservative Party of Canada.
Whether you agree with all their policies or not, no other party can defeat the Liberals in the 2025 federal election.
We agree that other parties arguably have better policies on our shared issue. Since those parties will not – and cannot – form government, their policies are irrelevant.
The only policies that matter are the ones that can be implemented after the next federal election.
As distasteful as that may sound, it is a fact.
Your Family, Your Heritage, Your Culture and Your Guns
For the love of your family, your heritage, your culture and your firearms, support the Conservative Party in this next federal election.
Then, once a Conservative majority government is elected, do everything in your power to make sure they keep their election promises to our community.
That’s our job – to hold them accountable.
Thank them when they keep their word, ridicule and shame them at every opportunity if they do not.
That’s all politicians understand; gratitude from faithful supporters when they keep their word and ridicule and shame from spurned voters when they do not.
[i] https://thecanadaguide.com/history/prime-ministers/charles-tupper/
[ii] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/john-turner
[iii] https://liberal.ca/liberal-party-of-canada-announces-leadership-expense-rules/
[iv] https://edmonton.citynews.ca/2025/01/15/liberal-leadership-freeland-carney/
[v] https://x.com/RealAndyLeeShow/status/1879055579408384306
[vi] https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/trudeaus-team-goes-all-in-on-carney-clark-implodes
[vii] ibid
[viii] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/02/26/mark-carney-brookfield-net-zero-cop-fossil-fuel-coal-oil-gas/
[ix] https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/oil-gas/pierre-poilievre-vs-mark-carney-a-heated-exchange-on-pipelines
[x] https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/heres-whos-running-to-replace-justin-trudeau-were-tracking-the-contenders-for-liberal-party-leader/article_bcdfda88-cd0f-11ef-8834-67e73816609e.html
