(Bloomberg) -- Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said she won’t enter the leadership race to succeed Justin Trudeau as prime minister.
Joly, who has long been seen as a contender for the Liberal Party leadership, will instead focus on her cabinet job ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 and his threat to impose economically devastating tariffs on Canada.
“The threat is now. I’m the foreign minister now. Jan. 20 is in a week or so. So my job is to work on retaliatory tariffs as we speak,” she told reporters before entering a meeting of the Canada-US cabinet committee on Friday.
Her decision means Trudeau’s two frontline ministers in managing the US relationship will stay in their roles during the leadership race, scheduled to conclude March 9. Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced earlier this week he would not enter the contest in order to focus on countering Trump’s tariff threat.
Trump enters his second term in the White House as a seasoned politician with a deeper understanding of Washington and geopolitics, Joly said. In addition to preparing retaliatory tariffs, the minister said she’s in touch with Trump’s appointees including his national security adviser and border czar.
“Their action plan is already ready. On Jan. 20, they’re starting and putting that into action. And so that’s why we have to be ready,” she said.
“I think that when President Trump talks, we listen. We need to take him very seriously. We need to show the American people and people around Trump that there will be real consequences — that Canada has a deep affection for the US, has a strong relationship, is its closest ally, but also we have leverage.”
Joly, 45, was first elected to Parliament in 2015 and has been foreign minister for three years. She’s overseen the government’s sanction regime against Russia and managed its response to the Israel-Hamas war — an extremely tricky and divisive issue for the Liberals.
Prior to running federally, Joly ran to be Montreal mayor in 2013 and finished in second place, despite being a newcomer to politics. Her organization in Quebec — a very strategic region for the Liberal Party — was one reason Joly was seen as a potential top contender in the leadership race.
--With assistance from Laura Dhillon Kane.
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