No question, Mark: Canada’s new PM

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

When new things catch on in China, they catch on really fast, particularly if they're supported by the Communist Party. Our correspondent went to the icy city of Harbin to join a fast growing tribe of Chinese skiers.

And until the last of her very many days, Rose Jerome kept knitting, even teaching the craft, until she was 105. Our obituaries editor reflects on the last known Holocaust survivor and the life she stitched together. First up, though.

So Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer.

Something very sudden happened in Canadian political rhetoric. In the last couple of months, it became very, very focused on American political rhetoric.

The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. Think about it. If they, if they succeeded, they would destroy our way of life.

And now the country has a new prime minister elect. After Justin Trudeau decided to step down yesterday, his Liberal Party held a leadership election and Mark Carney won it by a landslide. And the rhetoric kept coming.

We didn't ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. So the Americans, they should make no mistake in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.

Sounds like Mark Carney is not pucking around. But what action comes after all the words? Well, we'll have to see. And he might not be in charge for long. A vote has to be held by October. He may well call one sooner. For now, though, his sweeping win is a poignant coda to the career of his predecessor.

This is the entire Liberal establishment turning their backs on Justin Trudeau and his legacy.

Rob Russo is our Canada correspondent.

And Canadians turning towards the man that they believe can meet the Trump moment and resuscitate a moribund party, a party that was dead six weeks ago.

And it is sort of a remarkable turnaround. But let's talk about Mark Carney himself. I must say I really remember him most of all, if at all, as a mild mannered bank of England governor. Tell us a bit more about him and Jason.

Mr. Carney was also the Governor of the bank of Canada. And there were a lot of Canadians who seemed to be attracted to the notion. In other words, they speed dated him and fell for a cv. Canadians didn't really know who he was. He achieved some profile during the 0809 Great Recession here in Canada when he acted very, very quickly to lower interest rates, get credit going in the country. But he was a central banker. Everybody was pretty proud of him when he was recruited to become the first foreigner to ever lead the bank of England. He guided the economy through the bumps of Brexit. But about eight months ago, a pollster showed 1,983 Canadians pictures of Mark Carney. And 93% of them didn't know who this man was. So after not knowing who he was eight months ago, there is a large swath of the electorate that's prepared to put the future of their country, their future prosperity, in the hands of Mark Carney. It is a stunning ascension in Canadian politics.

And you say that that vote of confidence is in part a vote of confidence in the face of the challenge that Donald Trump presents. What has he said he'll do? How do you think he'll perform in that role?

Look, if Donald Trump didn't exist, Mark Carney's candidacy for Prime Minister would probably not have been viable. The Conservatives were steamrolling the Liberal Party up until a few scant weeks ago. But Mr. Trump's threats, tariff threats, but more importantly his threats to our sovereignty here in Canada, to the independence of Canada, turned things on their heads. And all of a sudden, Canadians were not worried so much about whether or not they could afford their first home, but whether or not they could hang on to their jobs. Enter Mark Carney.

Welcome, sir.

I welcome you to our land, America.

We are soon to.

Well, there was a border when I came, John.

Canadians who barely knew this man. And when they did know him, they knew him as a sober central banker, turned up on the Jon Stewart show and was cracking wise with the arbiter of political cool in the United States and telling him that Canadians had no interest in becoming the inhabitants of Donald Trump's 51st state.

Well, I mean, the bottom line is not going to happen because you don't want, you don't want to be with. We find you very attract, but we're not moving in with you. It's not you, it's us.

And all of a sudden a guy who was a technocrat, a guy who was identified as a member of the World Economic Forum elite, a guy who might have been stiff armed in an era of populism, all of a sudden those qualities of technocratic expertise, of calm, of soberness, those qualities are qualities that a lot of Canadians are searching for in this time of real unease. He said that he would bring in dollar for dollar tariffs for every dollar in tariffs that Mr. Trump applies to Canada. He also said that he would be prepared to use our energy exports if needed in order to make sure that Mr. Trump got the message that Canadians.

Were serious, put them on notice on the broader aspects of our commercial relationship. We are their largest supplier of energy. We are their largest supplier of electricity. We are their largest supplier of uranium. And that will begin to create the.

Leverage he is not afraid of using the significant leverage of Canadian oil. When he talks about energy, he's Talking about this 60% of crude that the United States depends on from Canada.

And the other big question here is not just what Mr. Carney will do in the near term, but how he might fare in the long term. There is an election coming.

Yeah, that election could come within days. For the first time in a year and a half, the Liberals are within striking distance of the Conservatives. Some surveys actually put them neck and neck with the Conservatives. So I would expect him to try to paint Pierre Poillievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, as a kind of Trump light, if not a Trump acolyte. There have been ads that Liberals have begun already running wall to wall during hockey games, which are quite popular at this time of year.

Everything is broken. Everything is broken.

Fake news.

Fake news. The left wing censorship regime, their woke censorship ideology, defeating the radical left, radical leftist authoritarian. Mr. Poiliev has not carried water necessarily for Mr. Trump, but Mr. Pollyvid had effectively drawn bonds between the Conservative Party and younger voters. For instance, unparalleled, unheard of in Canadian history. A lot of younger voters who were having trouble buying their first home, who were having trouble keeping up with inflation, but all of a sudden, Mr. Trump has put their very jobs in jeopardy. And so this upending of the political reality in Canada has meant that Mr. Poiliev's campaign slogan before Mr. Trump came along, which was canada is broken strikes a discord. Now with a lot of Canadians, they want to protect Canada, they want to defend Canada. And Mr. Poilievre's penchant for sloganeering is seen as shallow.

Now, now you say that an election could be called any time. Do you have your crystal ball to hand to suggest when exactly things might come, how it might go, what the campaigning might be like?

We should expect a very quick transition. Mr. Carney has had a transition team ready to go for this moment. For several weeks, he will be sworn in. Within a couple of days, he will announce his new cabinet. It will be about half the size of the current cabinet. He will then take a few days to decide what it is he wants to do in terms of a next election. No one would be surprised if in the next 10 days to two weeks, he dissolves the House and goes straight into a new election with a new cabinet team with some outsiders, people who are not necessarily known as liberals, in an attempt to try and form a national unity government. So that would mean that there would probably be some new Democrats on his team and maybe some conservatives as well. So you should circle a couple of dates on the calendar. April 28th is one date and May 5th is another. Those look like now the two likeliest dates for an early election.

Right, Rob, I will mark those dates down for the moment. Thank you very much for your time.

My pleasure. Psst.

Hey. Remember this conspiratorial whisper? It's when I have a deal to tell you about our sister operation. Economist Education runs a course on writing and storytelling for business, written by editors and journalists at the Economist. You, dear listener, can get 15% off the course by going to economist.com writingcourse and using the code intelligence.

Mention skiing and you might think of destinations like Zermatt in Sweden, Switzerland, or Aspen, Colorado. But the Chinese government is campaigning to put another city on the map, Harbin, in the country's north. And in China, where even strapping long planks to your feet is a political act. The efforts to turn that frozen city into the next winter wonderland are part of a Much grander scheme.

So Harbing is one of China's coldest cities. It's near the border with Russia. The temperatures often fall to below 20 degrees, but in recent years, it's become one of China's hottest destinations.

Sarah Wu writes about China.

It's such a fun place to be in the winter because you're seeing all of these southerners who have never seen snow in their lives, experiencing the joys of snow. Locals have given the southerners the nickname of little Potatoes Xiaotu do because southerners typically are shorter than those in the north. And they're spending a lot to go see this city made out of ice sculptures that are lit up at night. There's replicas of the Taj Mahal of the Taipei 101 building. It's really spectacular.

Harbin has been a tourist destination for a while, but it's now part of a bigger project for Xi Jinping. Is that right?

Yes. So people used to go to Harbing to see its Russian architecture, but now you see these signs that say ice and snow are as valuable as silver and gold plastered all over the city. It's also all over the news headlines. State media is really playing it up. And this is all part of China's push to build up its winter tourism and sports economy. So it calls this the ice and snow economy. To kick off the Asian Winter Games in Harbing in February, Xi Jinping told people that the ice and snow culture and economy are becoming a new driving force for developing Harbing and a new bond linking the city to the world. And this is Xi pushing for more interest in skiing, in snowboarding, in its related tourism, in manufacturing of heated socks for skiing, or machines to make snow for some of the ski slopes in the south.

And why does Xi Jinping want Chinese people to start skiing?

So at a time when China is facing slower economic growth, it is focused on new drivers. And so this is something that they've pushed for a while. Sea in 2014 set a goal for 300 million Chinese to engage in winter sports. And they hit that before the 2022 Winter Olympics, which further spurred middle class demand. By the end of 2023, China has said that it's opened nearly 2,000 skating rinks. That's triple the number five years previously. And the number of ski resorts has nearly doubled to almost 1,000. And so you really see winter sports taking off. And this year you feel the government making this concerted effort to promote the ice and snow economy.

And how much is this winter economy supposed to be worth to China.

So the government says it wants this sector to be worth $205 billion by 2030, and that's including everything from ski lessons to manufacturing of snow machines.

The skeptic in me wants to point out that a lot of these ski resorts are very tiny. We don't actually know how many people are going, is this sustainable? To grow the winter economy in this way?

It's been helping the local economy at the margins. So Harbing is at the heart of China's rust belt. The Northeast used to be one of China's wealthiest regions during the Mao era, and it's fallen behind after China started to open up. It's heavily reliant on the state sector and heavy industry, and the south was better positioned for exports and light manufacturing. And so we see this push helping the Northeast, which is very cold and snowy. We see it helping at the margins. I was at a small ski slope on the outskirts of Daqing, which is a oil city just west of Harbing. And there we spoke to ski instructors who told us their salary was about 7,500 yuan a month, and that's about double the the local salary. And so we do see this helping create new jobs for the young people that China's Dongbei rust belt region has struggled to hold onto. But it's not going to fix some of these deeper structural problems for the region. And when you build these attractions in a country where tourists really like to go to a set destination, a set attraction, they don't like to just go on road trips. Some may say building a ski resort helps. On the supply side, if you build the ski resort, they will come and spend money, but there are limits to that argument.

And, Sarah, what happens to resorts like the one in Harbin in the summer?

I went to Harbin in February, and that's already nearing the end of the winter ice and snow festival season. So locals already are saying when the snow melts, when these ice sculptures melt, the tourists will also leave. And local officials are now trying to boost that summer tourism trade, and it's often targeted at the same groups. Come summer, they'll be looking to escape the heat of the South. And so Haribin recognizes that the ice and snow economy is seasonal, and so they need to find ways to keep the income flowing even after the ice and snow have melted away.

Sarah, thank you so much. Great to have you on the show.

Thank you for having me.

Knitting has always divided opinions.

Ann Ro is the Economist's obituary's editor.

You either hate it because you've struggled trying to get the needles to cooperate and trying to rescue stitches. You've dropped, being left in the end with some awful, shapeless, tight bit of material when you weren't sure exactly what you were trying to create. Or else it's a wonderful symbol of slow living. It's calming. It means you can stand in queues or wait in airports and actually not be idling and wasting your time. You're doing something that pleases you and is all the time making progress. And Rose Jerome was definitely in that latter camp. She adored knitting the moment an aunt in Hamburg put knitting needles into her hands. She wanted to do only that, really. And she went on doing it until she was 102, went on doing it a little bit until she was even 113. Because on her birthday when she was 110, she got a wonderful set of new knitting needles and a ball of red wool. At the age of 90, she was still crawling about on the floor of her store in Forest Hills, putting pieces of damp material, knitted material together to make a dress or a jumper. She was really indefatigable when it came to that. She couldn't in fact, imagine what life would be like without knitting. But her life had certainly had plenty of disruption in it. And it began in Germany. She endured Kristallnacht in 1938. Then, when everything that was German Jewish in Breslau was either smashed or burned. She herself was Jewish. The Jews were all rounded up. Her husband Julius, was arrested by Nazi troops and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. She would have gone too, except that she was then heavily pregnant. The troops decided not to arrest her and she managed to escape to home. Then, by a very good piece of luck, relatives of theirs managed to get hold of exit visas for China, where Shanghai was almost the only port left that was taking in Jewish refugees. For two years they managed to work there. She had started knitting baby things quite seriously for her little daughter Reha, when they were making the crossing and her work was noticed by people. She was taken on as a knitter and as a maker of clothes and found Chinese women who could help her. So she built up quite bit a little business. Julius himself tried to do this and that, started a taxi service. And then he would go hunting and bring home quail and pheasant. But he really couldn't manage to make much of a living. So knitting was in fact sustaining them and ensuring their survival. In 1947, luckily again, they managed to get exit visas to go to America. And off they went. They landed in San Francisco, took the train to New York, where they had relatives still. And with her relatives, Rose started a business. It went pretty well, but Julius was still no help. He couldn't seem to settle in America, so she divorced him and had quite a hard time going from furnished rooms to furnish rooms with her daughter, trying to settle. And with luck, she met a man from the Adirondacks who ran a big resort there, and he was impressed with her productions and decided he would give her a knitwear stall in the lobby of his hotel. And there she flourished. She was well known, though, not only for the way that she taught knitting round New York and her general intrepidness through life, but for the sayings she had which had got her through. One was, there's nothing so bad that something good can't come of it. Another was, don't worry about small foolishnesses. She, for example, hadn't been able to choose the name of her daughter Raha, because Hitler had drawn up a list of the only names that children could have. But she got to like it and she didn't fret about it. Her most frequent phrase was, aren't we lucky? Weren't they lucky to have survived the war, to have got to Shanghai, to have avoided the concentration camps? And she had had a very successful business. But what was the secret of living to 113? Well, she would say, have good children. She had, she thought, the best child in the world. Eat lots of dark chocolate and she would probably add to that, keep knitting. In her very old age, her daughter Riha would sometimes listen to her as she snoozed and hear that she was counting in German. Ein, zwei, drei, wir. She was counting stitches again.

Ann Ro on Rose Jerome, who has died aged 113.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.