Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ignored a question asking if he was worried about the outcome of the still undecided U.S. election.
As the votes continue to be counted south of the border, Trudeau gave a prepared response to the media waiting outside of Parliament Wednesday morning.
“As everyone knows, there is an electoral process underway in the United States,” he said. “We, of course, are following it carefully and we’ll continue to as the day and the days unfold.”
With that, he turned and walked inside of Parliament ignoring follow-up questions, including one reporter asking, “Are you worried?”
The U.S. election has yet to be called. While the in-person voting favoured the incumbent Donald Trump, mail-in votes tallied on Wednesday shifted the electoral map to slightly favour Democrat Joe Biden. Despite the process being incomplete, Trump held a news conference early Wednesday morning where he claimed victory in the election, disputed the legitimacy of the mail-in votes, and called for the vote count to be stopped.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said at his press conference.
Later in the day, Trump also called out the validity of votes in swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
While Trudeau isn’t weighing in on the hotly disputed political situation, Europe did.
European Commission chief spokesperson Eric Mamer said, “We are awaiting that the authorities in charge of the vote count announce the results.” Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted out that “crucial hours and days ahead for the integrity of US democracy. Let’s hope we start to hear the voices of Republicans who understand the importance of that.” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the German Minister of Defence, said that the situation was “explosive” and may result in a “constitutional crisis.”
Speaking to Sky News, Lisa Nandy, the U.K. Shadow Secretary of State, said: “I think it’s perhaps not surprising but it is deeply shocking to hear a presidential candidate in one of the, if not the most powerful, country in the world suggest that democracy will be overridden and that votes don’t count.” On Twitter, Finland’s former prime minister, Alexander Stubb, called the election a “stress test for American democracy.”
“I still want to believe in (the) resilience of its democratic institutions, but am worried about the speech that we just heard from Donald Trump.”
Not all other leaders are in favour of waiting for the process to finish—Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, a right-wing populist himself, tweeted: “It’s pretty clear that American people have elected Donald Trump and Mike Pence for four more years.”
Other heads of state—including Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and even Trump loyalists like the U.K.’s Boris Johnson and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro—have, like Trudeau, held off on discussing the election results and Trump’s behaviour.
With files from Simon Childs.
Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.