Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly insisted she supports Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and is focused on her own re-election, but wouldn’t explicitly rule out a future Liberal leadership bid, in an interview on CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday.
The questions come amid a profile of the minister published in the New York Times on Wednesday, labelling Joly as Trudeau’s “possible successor.”
“What I can tell you is, right now, the prime minister is the prime minister,” Joly told host Vassy Kapelos. “He’s going to be the candidate for the next election, and I’m 100 per cent supporting him.”
“And I’ve been supporting him from the get-go, when he decided, as a young MP, to become the leader of the Liberal Party, since 2012,” she added. “So I’ll continue to do that.”
When pressed on her leadership aspirations, Joly wouldn’t directly deny them.
“I’m saying that my goal is to get re-elected in the next election, and to be representing Ahuntsic-Cartierville (Que.), and I think that is a prerequisite to any other political engagement,” she said.
Trudeau has repeatedly insisted he plans to stay on as Liberal leader through the next election, whenever that may come. But questions around his leadership and whether he’ll hand over the party’s reins — either before or after an election — have persisted, especially amid consistently lagging polling numbers.
Joly also fielded the question about her leadership aspirations on Wednesday, telling reporters at a press conference she is “100 per cent supportive of the prime minister,” as she was when she gave the interview to the New York Times in July.
Asked again during that press conference specifically whether she is worried rumblings of her leadership ambitions will step on the toes of the Prime Minister’s Office, Joly said: “My job is to do my job.”
“What I’m doing right now is engaging with my counterparts to try to find ways to bring back peace to the Middle East, to support Ukraine and Ukrainians, and at the same time, also to make sure we have a good relationship with the U.S., including having also a very strong stance on the question of China,” she said, before reiterating she stands behind the prime minister.
The Sunday Strategy Session regular panel on CTV’s Question Period also weighed in on the issue.
Joly told reporters she had no control over the date of the profile’s release, having given the interview months prior. Still, according to Scott Reid — a CTV News political analyst and former communications director to former prime minister Paul Martin — the timing is “damn strange,” especially factoring the re-election of Donald Trump in the United States.
“If it had come out in August and September, that kind of era — we’re back in the pre-Trump-tariff era, feels like it’s an era ago — but if it had come out then in the fall, we were talking about Trudeau’s leadership and whether he was going to stay, I think it would have been a real thunderbolt, but now it feels like a piece that’s out of sync with contemporary political reality,” Reid said.
He added Trump being set to head back to the White House in January seems to have “emboldened” Trudeau to stay.
Kory Teneycke, who was Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign manager and former director of communications for former prime minister Stephen Harper, agreed. He said the profile coming out at this point is actually likely “unwelcome” for Joly, who should avoid becoming the face of another potential insurrection from within cabinet.
“I don’t think it matters. He’s not leaving,” Teneycke said. “There isn’t a race to run in, as it stands right now. But it’s not a welcome headline in a time of many troubles for these guys.”
Kathleen Monk, a former NDP strategist and director of communications to the late Jack Layton, called the New York Times profile “a PR coup, but not a political coup,” especially when accounting for the timing of its publication.
“Foreign Affairs is a hard place to run a leadership contest from,” she added. “It’s too externally focused. You want to be in a domestic portfolio to be running that race.”
