Outspoken TV personality Kevin O’Leary has sent the race to win the job of being Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief rival in Canada further into Donald Trump territory.
O’Leary declared his candidacy for leadership of the Conservative Party on Wednesday morning, joining a field of 13 other candidates -- some of whom are invoking parts of the U.S. president-elect’s insurgent messaging in a bid to distinguish themselves.
While the field includes former cabinet ministers, it’s O’Leary who has a formula and resume most akin to Trump’s. Long on name recognition after years as a broadcaster while thin on party ties, O’Leary is an outspoken business figure who has appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank with Mark Cuban.
He is styling himself as the candidate to stand up to the incoming president. “With the election of Donald Trump to our south, Canada’s largest trading partner is headed by a businessman with an aggressive strategy that could hurt the Canadian economy,” O’Leary said in an online statement Wednesday. “Trudeau doesn’t stand a chance, and we deserve better.”
The Conservatives are Canada’s official opposition party, holding the second-most seats in the House of Commons. They governed from 2006 to 2015, when former Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped down as leader after being defeated by Trudeau’s centrist Liberal Party.
TV Personality
Before Shark Tank, O’Leary appeared on its Canadian predecessor, Dragons’ Den, in which entrepreneurs pitched ideas to him and other investors. He previously led O’Leary Funds, which was sold in 2015, and is among Canada’s foremost business television personalities with a penchant for being brash.
“Canada’s a mess, it really is,” he said in a video announcing an exploratory committee for his candidacy, where he held up a metal spatula while pledging to “scrape all that crap out” of Ottawa, the capital city. In another video released over the holidays, he wore a housecoat while using a saber to open a bottle of champagne.
He joins the leadership race the morning after a French-language debate in Quebec City, sure to fuel questions about whether his French is strong enough to lead the opposition in a bilingual country. The leadership vote will be held May 27.
Rivals invoking Trump so far include former Labor Minister Kellie Leitch, a physician running on values while criticizing elites and using a variation of Trump’s “drain the swamp” messaging. Her campaign is led by Nick Kouvalis, a strategist known best for working with Rob Ford, the former Toronto mayor who admitted to smoking crack cocaine in office.