- Former central banker Mark Carney favoured going into Monday's polls.
- Pierre Poilievre lost a 20 point lead after echoing President Donald Trump in campaign.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney looks set to beat pro-crypto candidate Pierre Poilievre as the Great White North goes to the polls Monday.
Polymarket punters may have put Conservative Leader Poilievre’s chances of clinching the premiership at 80% for over a year.
But Carney now leads the election race by roughly the same margin on the day of the election, according to Polymarket and Kalshi.
The polls suggest a similar outcome, with The Economist’s poll of polls giving Carney an 88% chance of bagging today’s election.
EKOS Politics suggests that Carney’s Liberal Party will clinch 43.6% of the votes compared to the Conservatives’ 37.5%.
Carney’s skyrocketing chances seemingly cap the crypto community’s hopes of getting an industry backer into 24 Sussex Drive.
Instead, the industry may be forced to deal with a leader who has criticised crypto in the past and whose current views remain uncertain.
‘Not a store of value’
Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, has long been a critic of Bitcoin.
“It is not a store of value because it is all over the map. Nobody uses it as a medium of exchange,” he said of Bitcoin in 2018.
Instead, he’s backed the creation of central bank digital currencies.
It’s unclear where Carney stands on crypto these days. His platform did, however, say that “Canada should lead the world in AI, tech, and digital industries.”
It’s a stark contrast to Poilievre who has worn his crypto support on his sleeve.
Like US President Donald Trump, he’s also pledged to make Canada the “blockchain capital of the world” and opposed the issuance of CBDCs.
In the first few weeks of taking office, Trump banned the creation of a digital dollar via an executive order.
The similarities with the White House occupant don’t stop there. Poilievre’s early campaign strategy portrayed him as a populist foil to the then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Poilievre’s “Canada First” slogan also drew comparisons to Trump, as did his support of the 2022 trucker blockade and his stated aim to end the Liberal Party’s “radical woke agenda” if elected.
The Trump effect
Those similarities have now come back to bite him.
The Canadian election has been as much an American affair as a Canadian one, and one that saw Poilievre lose a massive lead in the polls — and crypto betting sites — since Trump took office in January.
Crypto has played an infinitesimal role in this year’s vote.
Instead, the main issue has been the US president’s aggressive tariffs on Canada and his threats to annex the country.
Those moves have rallied citizens to cut back on American goods and travel.
A majority of voters, or 55%, say Carney’s Liberal Party will be best suited to handle the trade war between Canada and the US, while 30% said the same about the Conservatives, according to a mid-March poll from the Angus Reid Institute.
Even before “Liberation Day” on April 2, when Trump issued the bulk of his import taxes on roughly 90 countries, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly called his initial round of tariff threats a “psychodrama.”
That’s also meant a complete reversal for Poillievre’s political prospects.
On February 1, Polymarket punters gave him an 83% chance of winning the election.
Those odds dropped to 51% by March 25, before Carney took the lead.
Poilievre has distanced himself from Trump, tweeting today that the US president should “stay out of our election.”
If bettors on Polymarket and Kalshi are right, it won’t be enough.
Liam Kelly is a Berlin-based reporter for DL News. Got a tip? Email him at liam@dlnews.com.
