Justin Trudeau’s nine years as Canadian prime minister is coming to an end after he announced he will step down as leader of the governing Liberal Party.
It means his party must now find a new leader to compete in a general election in which polls suggest they are heading to defeat.
Here are some of the people expected to enter the Liberal leadership race.
Potential candidates to succeed Trudeau
Chrystia Freeland
The former Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister was one of the strongest allies of Trudeau before resigning from the cabinet recently. While heading Foreign Affairs she helped the country “renegotiate a free trade deal with the US and Mexico.” She also was in charge of Canada’s financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Born to a Ukrainian mother in the western province of Alberta, the 56-year-old was a journalist before entering politics.
She entered the House of Commons in 2013 and two years later joined Trudeau’s cabinet with a trade brief after he swept the party to power.
Mélanie Joly
To foreign leaders, the 45-year-old is a familiar face, having represented Canada on the world stage since 2021.
As the current foreign minister, she has taken several trips to Ukraine in a show of Canada’s support. She travelled to Jordan to aid in the evacuation of Canadian citizens in the region when the Israel-Hamas war erupted.
Joly has also been at the heart of some of the government’s greatest foreign policy challenges, including the diplomatic crisis sparked by the alleged assassination of a Sikh separatist leader on Canadian soil by Indian agents.
The Oxford-educated lawyer is a well-connected francophone politician who previously ran for mayor of Montreal.
She was tapped by Trudeau personally to run for a federal job in politics.
“He would periodically call me to say, ‘Mélanie you need to run, we want you to run,'” Joly has said.
Senior advisers have hailed her ability to work a room of either seven or 700, and she has long held ambitions to run for Liberal party leader, close friends told Canadian magazine Macleans.
Pierre Poilievre
Leader of the Conservative Party since 2022, Poilievre is the frontrunner for the prime minister’s office if the Liberals lose. Current polls give Conservatives a 21-point lead over Liberals, according to Mail. According to his biography on the campaign’s website, he “is a life-long conservative, champion of a free market, and fighter for people taking ownership of and responsibility for their own futures.”
Mark Carney
Former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, Carney is widely considered a strong contender. Being a Harvard and Oxford graduate, Carney brings decades of expertise in economics and diplomacy.
Trudeau himself admitted that he had long been trying to recruit Mark Carney to his team, most recently as finance minister.
“He would be an outstanding addition at a time when Canadians need good people to step up in politics,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a Nato conference in July 2024.
Carney, 59, who has been serving in recent months as a special adviser to Trudeau, has long been considered a contender for the top job.
The Harvard graduate has never held public office but has a strong economic background, serving at the top of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
Anita Anand
The Oxford-educated lawyer has built a reputation for her expertise in financial regulation and governance. She secured vaccines during the pandemic as Minister of Procurement and led military reforms as Defence Minister. Now heading the Treasury Board, her rise signals leadership potential despite speculation of political pushback.
The 57-year-old lawyer entered the political scene in 2019 when she was elected to represent the riding of Oakville, just outside of Toronto.
Anand was then appointed minister of defence in 2021, leading Canada’s efforts to provide aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia and overseeing a personnel crisis at the Canadian Armed Forces mired by sexual misconduct scandals.
When Anand was shuffled out of that department to oversee the Treasury Board, many saw it as a demotion and critics of Trudeau went as far as to speculate that it was punishment for her ambitions to one day lead the party.
In December, she was moved again during a cabinet shuffle, into the role of transport minister and minister of internal trade.
Dominic LeBlanc
Liberal politician and Trudeau’s close ally, LeBlanc currently serves as Minister of Finance and Intergovernmental Affairs.
LeBlanc, 57, is one of Trudeau’s closest and most trusted allies.
Their friendship runs deep, with LeBlanc even babysitting Trudeau and his siblings when they were young.
He has a record of stepping into portfolios at difficult moments, including becoming finance minister within hours of Freeland’s bombshell resignation.
LeBlanc also took on the tricky assignment of accompanying Trudeau to Mar-a-Lago in November to meet Trump.
The former lawyer has been a parliamentarian for more than two decades, having been first elected in 2000 to represent a riding in the Atlantic province of New Brunswick.
Like Trudeau, LeBlanc was born into a political family. His father served as a minister in the cabinet of Trudeau’s fabled father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and later as Canada’s governor-general.
LeBlanc has shown previous ambitions to lead the party, running in 2008 but losing to Michael Ignatieff. He did not run again in the next leadership race, which was won by Trudeau.
He is in remission after cancer treatment and is known to be an affable and a strong political communicator.
