Is Mélanie Joly the potential Trudeau successor to watch?

A New York Times profile of Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly paints her as a potential top candidate to replace Justin Trudeau. Joly is a high-profile minister who’s been at the center of Canada’s foreign affairs rifts with China and India – and who is now a central part of managing the country’s relationship with Donald Trump and the United States. That’s no small task these days.

The return of Trump is set to upend US-Canada relations, throwing all kinds of policy futures into doubt, including trade – with Trump threatening a 25% across-the-board tariff – border security, defense spending, and even freshwater management.

Joly will be directly or indirectly a part of it all, largely because of her ministerial portfolio, but also because of her place on Trudeau’s Cabinet Committee on Canada-U.S. relations, which has a full plate. Joly will be busy working with US contacts at the state and federal levels, in the White House and on Capitol Hill, as part of a strategy Canada deployed with Trump during his first term – an approach that more or less worked.

Beyond the immediate challenge of managing that relationship is the prospect of a potential leadership run in which Joly could be up against other heavyweights, including former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc.

Trudeau says he will stay on to fight the next election, but he’s down roughly 20 points in the polls, with the federal campaign due to launch no later than next fall. If Trudeau loses that election, he’ll almost certainly resign as leader of the Liberal Party, which could mean Joly would queue up to take on a new challenge – becoming the first woman to lead the Liberals.