Carney rejects suggestion Liberals driving western alienation

Liberal leader Mark Carney makes his way to the podium to speak during a campaign event on Friday, April 4, 2025 in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Liberal Leader Mark Carney on Friday rejected the suggestion that Canada will face a national unity crisis if he wins the election, instead pitching expanded funding for the CBC and Radio-Canada as an investment to protect Canada’s national identity and culture.

Carney was responding to an opinion piece penned earlier in the week by former Reform party leader Preston Manning, who wrote in The Globe and Mail that Carney is accelerating western alienation and that a vote for him would be “a vote for western secession.”

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“I resile to no one in terms of my understanding of the West, my connection to the West, and I’m part of a government that governs for all of the country and very much for the West,” he said when asked Friday what he made of Manning’s words.

“I think such dramatic comments are unhelpful at a time when Canadians are coming together, and that is the sense in the in the West as well.”

Carney noted that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre also rejected Manning’s separatist sentiment when asked about it at an event in Kingston, Ont., on Thursday.

“We need to unite the country. We need to bring all Canadians together in a spirit of common ground,” Poilievre said.

Western alienation is an age old theme in Canadian politics, and the political landscape in Canada remains divided. In the last Parliament, 65 of the 89 seats west of Ontario were held by Conservatives, compared to 55 of the 231 seats from Ontario east. The Liberals had 20 seats in the west, and 130 from Ontario east.

Carney describes himself as a western Canadian, having been born in Northwest Territories and raised in Edmonton. But he has spent most of his adult life elsewhere, including Ottawa, London and the United States.

Since the March 23 election call, Carney has not made it out further west than Winnipeg though he said Friday he will be back in Western Canada on Sunday.

He has campaigned mostly in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, and twice now has suspended his tour to return to Ottawa amid new tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump, in order to meet with premiers and his cabinet and business advisory committees on Canada-U.S. relations.

On Friday he was in Montreal, where he said Canada needs to defend its cultural identity in the face of Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty and a Conservative leader seeking to strip down the public broadcaster.

Carney pledged to boost CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding by $150 million a year and enshrine it’s funding structure in law so that Parliament would have to pass legislation to change it.

The Liberal leader sought to strike a contrast against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has pledged to defund CBC, saying it’s a waste of taxpayer money, while keeping Radio-Canada’s funding in place.

Such a move would require legislative changes.

Poilievre has also pledged to sell off its Toronto headquarters for housing.

Carney said that the English and French broadcasting services come together as a package deal.

“Instead of defending them, Pierre Poilievre is following President Trump’s lead and taking aim at our institutions, like CBC/Radio-Canada,” Carney said. “His attack on CBC is an attack directly on Radio-Canada and it is an attack on our Canadian identity.”

Trump has called on Republicans in Congress in recent weeks to defund NPR and PBS, America’s public broadcasters, claiming they support a “radical left” agenda.

Asked about CBC when speaking in Trois-Rivières, Que., Poilievre vowed his approach to CBC English services would have no impact on Radio-Canada and then attacked Carney for promising more spending without pledging specific cost reductions.

“We can’t go on spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need or our people are going to end up with even more brutal inflation,” Poilievre said. “I will be cutting waste, bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and other unnecessary expenses to reduce taxes, debt and inflation. That’s the choice in this election.”

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Carney has a rally scheduled in Scarborough Friday evening.

He’s ending the second week of the campaign with most polls showing the Liberals with a comfortable lead over the Conservatives, but the campaign is not without its snags.

The Liberals dropped another candidate Thursday night. Rod Loyola, who was running for the party in Edmonton Gateway, appeared in a video from 2009 where he showed support for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah at a protest.

Asked about the decision Friday Carney said simply that Loyola was “no longer a candidate.”

The Conservatives say the Liberals “were willing to tolerate Loyola,” and that his views were out in the open for years, including when first elected to the provincial NDP in 2015.

“Are we really to believe this was all a surprise to the Liberals? No,” wrote spokesperson Simon Jefferies.

“Any sort of political organizer in Edmonton/Alberta would’ve known Loyola’s history.”

— With files from Kyle Duggan in Ottawa

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 4, 2025.