TORONTO (AP) — Embattled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will shuffle his Cabinet Friday, two senior officials familiar with the matter said Thursday.
The officials confirmed the shuffle and spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Trudeau is facing rising discontent over his leadership, and the abrupt departure of his finance minister on Monday could be something he can’t recover from.
A rising number of Liberal lawmakers are calling on Trudeau to resign but new Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Thursday Trudeau has the “full support of his Cabinet."
LeBlanc said he respects the views of Liberal lawmakers who want Trudeau to resign.
“That's a view they are expressing. The prime minister listened carefully when that view was expressed to him,” LeBlanc said. “He listened, in some cases responded to specific things that were raised, and he said he would reflect carefully.”
LeBlanc said the government will remain focused on work and addressing the threat by President-elect Donald Trump to impose a 25% tariff on all Canadian products when he is inaugurated next month.
“We shouldn’t be looking inward. We shouldn’t be worrying about ourselves,” LeBlanc said.
LeBlanc said he will meet with Tom Homan, Trump's incoming “border czar," after Christmas to discuss Canada's plan to secure the border as part of a bid to avoid the tariffs.
Trudeau has led the country for nearly a decade, but has become widely unpopular in recent years over a wide range of issues, including the high cost of living and rising inflation.
There is no mechanism for Trudeau’s party to force him out in the short term. He could resign, or his Liberal party could be forced from power by a “no confidence” vote in Parliament that would trigger an election that would very likely favor the opposing Conservative Party.
As rising numbers of Liberal lawmakers called for Trudeau to resign this week, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said, “We all need to give him a little time to reflect.”
Concerns about Trudeau’s leadership were exacerbated Monday when Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau's finance minister and deputy prime minister, resigned from the Cabinet. Freeland was highly critical of Trudeau’s handling of the economy in the face of steep tariffs threatened by Trump. Shortly before Freeland announced her decision, the housing minister also quit.
Because Trudeau's Liberals don’t hold an outright majority in the Parliament, they have for years depended on the support of the leftist New Democratic Party to pass legislation and stay in power. But that support has all but vanished — the NDP’s leader has called on Trudeau to resign — and that might clear the way for Parliament to vote “no confidence.”
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, however, would not commit to bringing down the government at the first opportunity in part because Trump could impose crippling tariffs and Parliament might need to respond with tariffs in retaliation.
Parliament is now shut for the holidays until late next month, and a “no confidence” vote could be scheduled sometime thereafter.
LeBlanc also said Mark Carney won't be joining Cabinet. Trudeau has been trying to recruit Carney, the former head of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, to join his government. Carney has long been interested in entering politics and becoming the leader of the Liberal Party.
“Mr. Carney isn't about to become Canada's finance minister in the short term,” LeBlanc said. “The prime minister asked me to start that work and to get ready for a budget in the spring."
FILE - Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pictured through glass as he speaks with members of his caucus in Ottawa, Ontario, Dec. 16, 2024. (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.
The 1% growth rate this year was the highest it has been since 2001, and it was a marked contrast to the record low of 0.2% set in 2021 at the height of pandemic restrictions on travel to the United States, according to the annual population estimates.
Immigration this year increased by almost 2.8 million people, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase between 2023 and 2024.
Births outnumbered deaths in the United States by almost 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, which was an improvement over the historic low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.
Immigration had a meaningful impact not only nationally but also for individual states, accounting for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population from residents moving out-of-state or from deaths outpacing births, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.
“While some of the surge may be attributed to border crossings of asylees and humanitarian migrants in an unusual year, these numbers also show how immigration can be an important contributor to population gains in a large swath of the nation that would otherwise be experiencing slow growth or declines,” Frey said.
As it has been throughout the 2020s, the South was the fastest growing region in the United States in 2024, adding more new residents — 1.8 million people — than all the other regions combined. Texas added the most people at 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the nation's fastest growth rate at 2.2%.
Three states — Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia — lost population this year, though by tiny amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.
The group of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the U.S. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.
Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally.
The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people. With the revised method, last year's immigration figures are now recalculated by the Census Bureau at 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.
Because the Census Bureau survey used to estimate foreign-born immigration only captured people living in households, it overlooked large numbers of immigrants who had come for humanitarian reasons this decade since it often takes them a few years to get a stable home, said Jennifer Van Hook, a Penn State demographer who worked on the change at the bureau.
“What has happened over time is that immigration has changed,” Van Hook said. “You have numbers of people coming in who are claiming asylum and being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border from across the globe.”
The population estimates provide the official population counts each year between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.
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FILE - New United States citizens wave American flags during a naturalization ceremony during halftime at an NFL football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Jets, Dec. 15, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File)
