Former Canadian Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has suggested that Mark Carney should make a deal with the Conservative Party following his election victory last night. Speaking to UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers today, Ignatieff claimed that the country’s two main parties “could actually work together in some ways to address some of these long-term challenges” as Canada continues to respond to the “national emergency” of US President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation.

Though a small proportion of votes are still being counted, at the time of writing Carney’s party is leading in 168 seats in the Canadian parliament, four short of the 172 it needs for a majority. Ignatieff told UnHerd this morning that the Prime Minister is “very close to a majority, so he may feel he can do without grand coalitions”, and instead opt for “some kind of confidence-and-supply arrangement” in order to push through his budget plan.

Ignatieff became Liberal leader in 2008 following a rapid political rise, having only been elected as an MP two years earlier — not dissimilarly to Carney, who succeeded Justin Trudeau as party leader and prime minister in March despite not being an MP or having previously held any kind of political office. In the 2011 federal election Ignatieff lost his seat as the Liberals fell to their worst ever showing, coming in third place behind the Conservatives and the Left-wing New Democratic Party.

While Ignatieff told UnHerd that “grand coalitions don’t have a long a history in Canada”, he added that “if this is a national crisis, it’s pretty important to find some way to talk to the Conservatives.” The former politician highlighted the “convergence between the Liberal and Conservative platforms” that has arisen from the response to Trump’s decision to impose 25% tariffs on imports from Canada. “All of these choices about how to get the economy going depend on maintaining the national unity of the country,” Ignatieff said, “and so you need to reach across the aisle to bring Conservative voters over to a kind of national programme.”

Though the Canadian Tories are projected to win 144 seats and over 41% of the popular vote, party leader Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat in Carleton, coming second to Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy. Speaking before the Carleton result was confirmed, Ignatieff said to UnHerd: “If, for example, Poilievre were to lose his seat, that then puts the whole of the Conservative Party in a kind of suspended animation until they can figure out what to do about the leadership problem. That would give Carney more time.”

The Liberals could also seek a deal with the separatist Bloc Québécois party, which is projected to win 23 seats. Ignatieff cautioned, however, that “when parties combine in coalitions the smaller party ends up getting eaten.”

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Rob Lownie is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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