Previewing the Canadian Election’s Crypto Angle

Canada will host an election next week, where voters will consider a range of issues — the economy, housing, trade relations with the U.S. — as they choose their elected officials, who in turn will choose the next Prime Minister of the country.

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The narrative

Crypto is not a major electoral issue during this year’s Canadian election. Neither leading Prime Minister candidate has campaigned on digital assets, but here’s how they’ve discussed the issue in the past.

Why it matters

Canada infamously had massive crypto exchange collapses over the past few years, leading to concerted efforts from its provincial regulators to enact guardrails on the digital asset industry. While exchanges like Coinbase are calling for policies like a Canadian government task force or a bitcoin reserve, so far the leading candidates for Prime Minister seem to have other issues on their minds (namely: U.S. relations and trade, housing and the economy).

Breaking it down

When Canadians go to the polls next Monday, they’ll be choosing their Member of Parliament. The party with a majority of seats will form the country’s new government, and the leader of that party will become the new Prime Minister.

While the Conservative Party and its leader Pierre Poilievre held comfortable leads in polling averages through late-January 2025, the Liberal Party saw a massive surge in popularity after U.S. President Donald Trump announced tariffs with Canada (and most other countries). The Liberal Party, now with leader Mark Carney, has held a significant edge ever since, according to both polling data and Polymarket. Carney took over from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party last month.

Pierre Poilievre

Poilievre is a longtime Bitcoin and blockchain advocate who has led the Conservative Party since September 2022. He owns shares in a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). In 2022, he promised to turn Canada into the “blockchain and crypto capital of the world” during a campaign speech (a phrase Trump later used on the 2024 campaign trail).

“I want to take control of money away from politicians and bankers, and give it back to the people,” he said. “We need to give people the freedom to choose other money. If the government is going to abuse our cash, we should have the right to opt to use other, higher-quality cash.”

He even bought shawarma using bitcoin during his campaign for Conservative Party leader, discussing digital assets in a 30-minute interview with the owner of the restaurant.

He supported Canada’s trucker protest, which dubbed itself the “Freedom Convoy” in early 2022 to object to a vaccine mandate for any truckers crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. At the time, the Canadian government sought to freeze financial support for the protestors, including by sanctioning crypto wallets tied to the truckers.

While Poilievre does not appear to have specifically linked Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to the truckers who may have lost banking access, he did call bitcoin “the single most important asset you could own.”

Poilievre has also opposed the Bank of Canada’s research into a central bank digital currency, arguing that it could infringe on privacy rights or let lawmakers target benefits to supporters. Last year he supported a bill which would have banned a Canadian CBDC outright (echoing U.S. Republicans who have done the same here).

Canadian magazine Maclean’s reported that while Poilievre has said less about crypto in recent days, the Conservative Party as a whole still tends to support the industry, citing various Members of Parliament who have introduced bills or otherwise discussed crypto.

Poilievre did seem to discuss crypto publicly less after FTX’s dramatic collapse in 2022, which his political opponents used to issue warnings about his prior advocacy for digital assets. Poilievre may also be reckoning with Trump’s unpopularity in Canada, and seeking to distance himself from policies that may imitate the U.S. President’s.

Mark Carney

Carney was the head of both the Bank of Canada and later the Bank of England. While he hasn’t said a lot about Bitcoin, he did give a speech on the “future of money” in London in March 2018, where he criticized digital assets’ use, citing speculative mania and a lack of vendors willing to accept it as a payment tool.

“The long, charitable answer is that cryptocurrencies act as money, at best, only for some people and to a limited extent, and even then only in parallel with the traditional currencies of the users,” he said. “The short answer is they are failing.”

Carney pointed to transaction throughput, ease of access and other issues as barriers to digital asset adoption, but said his concerns with digital assets at the time were “not meant to dismiss them.”

“Their core technology is already having an impact. Bringing cryptoassets into the regulatory tent could potentially catalyse innovations to serve the public better,” he said. “Crypto-assets are an attempt to create the financial architecture for peer-to-peer transactions. Even if the current generation is not the answer, it is throwing down the gauntlet to the existing payment systems. These must now evolve to meet the demands of fully reliable, real-time, distributed transactions.”

Carney praised distributed ledgers in particular, and suggested that existing digital asset infrastructure could eventually lead to the creation of a central bank digital currency, though he said “there are also broader societal questions” around issues like privacy should a central bank pursue a CBDC.

Just over a year later at the Economic Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Carney suggested that a global hegemonic digital currency backed by central bank digital currencies could bolster the world economy against the role of the dollar.

“The dollar’s influence on global financial conditions could similarly decline if a financial architecture developed around the new [Synthetic Hegemonic Currency] and it displaced the dollar’s dominance in credit markets,” he said in August 2019. “By reducing the influence of the US on the global financial cycle, this would help reduce the volatility of capital flows to EMEs.”

Friday

• 17:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. ET) The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will hold the latest of its crypto roundtables, this time focusing on custody issues.

• (The New York Times) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had another group chat where he shared details about an impending military strike in Yemen. Unlike the Signal chat which included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Hegseth himself set this group up, and included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, the Times reported. NBC later reported that the information about the strike came from a message sent by an Army general through “a secure U.S. government system.”
• (Reuters) The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation plans to lay off a fifth of its employees, or 1,250 people, it told its staff according to Reuters.
• (AP News) The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced it would lay off 1,500 employees, but this move has been paused by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson.
• (The New York Times) Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat representing Maryland, met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was wrongfully sent to El Salvador to be imprisoned without a trial or hearing, and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s administration tried to stage the photos of his meeting with Van Hollen by placing glasses “with cherries and salted rims” for photos, the Times reported.

If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at nik@coindesk.com or find me on Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.

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See ya’ll next week!