Canada hosts a choice next week where voters will consider a number of questions – economics, housing, trade conditions with the US – when choosing their elected officials, who in turn choose the country’s next prime minister.

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The story

Crypto is not a major election problem during this year’s Canadian elections. None of the leading prime ministerial candidate has fought for digital assets, but here is how they have discussed the question in the past.

Why it matters

Canada had notorious massive crypto exchange collapses over the past few years, which led to coordinated efforts from its provincial regulators to adopt protective frames in the digital asset industry. While exchanges like Coinbase call for policies such as a Canadian government’s task force or a Bitcoin reserve, so far the leading candidates for prime minister seem to have other problems in their minds (namely: American connections and trade, housing and the economy).

Breaks down it

When Canadians go to the polls next Monday, they select their MP. The party with a majority of the seats will form the country’s new government and the leader of this party will become the new prime minister.

While the Conservative Party and its leader Pierre Poilievre held comfortable leads in voting average through late January 2025, the liberal party saw a massive increase in popularity after US President Donald Trump announced duty with Canada (and most other countries). The liberal party, now with leader Mark Carney, has had a significant edge ever since, according to both polling data and the polyming field. Carney took over from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leader of the liberal party last month.

Pierre Poilievre

Poilievre is a long-time Bitcoin and Blockchain Advocate, which has led the Conservative Party since September 2022. He owns shares in a Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF). By 2022, he promised to transform Canada into “Blockchain and Crypto Capital of the World” under a campaign speech (a phrase that Trump later used on the 2024 campaign track).

“I want to take control of money away from politicians and bankers and give them back to the people,” he said. “We have to give people the freedom to choose other money. If the government wants to abuse our cash, we must have the right to choose to use other cash of higher quality.”

He even bought Shawarma using Bitcoin during his campaign for the conservative party leader and discussed digital assets in a 30-minute interview with the owner of the restaurant.

He supported Canada’s Trucker Protest, which called himself “Freedom Convoy” in early 2022 to object to a vaccine mandate for all trucks crossing the US-Canadian border. At that time, the Canadian government tried to freeze financial support to the protesters, including by sanctioning crypto -drawing books tied to the trucks.

While poilievre does not appear to have specifically connected Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to the trucks that may have lost bank access, he called Bitcoin “the only most important asset you could own.”

Pileievre has also opposed Bank of Canada’s research into a digital currency in the central bank and argued that it could violate privacy rights or let legislators target benefits to supporters. Last year, he supported a bill that would have banned a Canadian CBDC directly (repetition of American Republicans who have done the same here).

The Canadian magazine Maclean’s reported that although Pileievre has said less about crypto in recent days, the Conservative Party as a whole still has a tendency to support the industry, referring to various MPs who have introduced bills or otherwise discussed crypto.

Poolievre looked to discuss crypto publicly less after FTX’s dramatic collapse in 2022, which his political opponents used to issue warnings about his previous proponent of digital assets. Poolievre can also count on Trump’s unpopularity in Canada and try to distance themselves from policies that can emulate the US president’s.

Mark Carney

Carney was the leader of both Bank of Canada and later Bank of England. While he hasn’t said much about Bitcoin, he gave a talk about “Future of Money” in London in March 2018, criticizing Digital Assets’ use, quoting speculative mania and a lack of suppliers 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 parallel to users’ traditional currencies,” he said. “The short answer is that they fail.”

Carney pointed to transaction flow, easy access and other problems such as barriers to the adoption of digital asset, but said his concerns with digital assets at that time were “not intended to reject them.”

“Their core technology already has influence. To bring cryptoassets into the regulatory tent can potentially catalyze innovations to earn the public better,” he said. “Crypto assets are an attempt to create financial architecture for peer-to-peer transactions. Even if the current generation is not the answer, it throws the grip of the existing payment systems. These must now develop to meet the requirements for fully reliable, real-time, distributed transactions.”

Carney praised distributed headbooks in particular and suggested that existing digital asset infrastructure could eventually lead to the establishment of a central bank’s digital currency, though he said “there are also wider societal issues” about questions such as privacy if a central bank pursues a CBDC.

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

“The dollar’s influence on global economic conditions can similarly decrease if a financial architecture developed around the new [Synthetic Hegemonic Currency] And it displaced the dollar dominance in credit markets, “he said in August 2019.” By reducing the influence of the United States on the global economic cycle, this would help reduce the volatility of capital streams to EMES. “

Friday

• 17:00 UTC (13:00 ET) The US Securities and Exchange Commission holds the latest of its crypto round tables, this time focusing on custody.

• (The New York Times) Defense Secretary Pete Hegeth had another group chat where he shared details of an impending military strike in Yemen. Unlike the signal chat, which included the Atlantic editor -in -chief, Hegeth himself set up this group 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 a ravaged general through “a safe US government system.”
• (Reuters) Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation plans to dismiss one fifth of his employees or 1,250 people, it told his staff according to Reuters.
• (AP NEWS) The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it would dismiss 1,500 employees, but this step has been a break by US district judge Amy Berman Jackson.
• (The New York Times) Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat who represented Maryland, met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was unlawfully sent to El Salvador to be imprisoned without trial or consultation, and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s administration tried to arrange the pictures of his meeting with Van Hollen by placing glasses “with cherries and salted rims” for photos, the Times reported.

If you have thoughts or questions about what to discuss next week or any other feedback you would like to share, feel free to e -mail me at [email protected] or find me at bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.

You can also participate in the group interview at Telegram.

See you next week!