By Joshua Berlinger, CNN
(CNN)Canada’s got its own reality TV star vying for the nation’s top job.
Kevin O’Leary, the business man-turned-reality TV star, announced Wednesday that he will stand in the now 14-person race to lead Canada’s Conservative party.
The winner will likely challenge current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the country’s 2019 federal elections.
“Canadians need a Prime Minister with a smart plan to kick start the economy; a Prime Minister who supports small businesses, who will fight for hard working Canadians and will stop wasting our money,” O’Leary said in a statement on why he’s running.
Canada’s Trump?
The similarities between Trump and O’Leary, who is now the chairman of O’Shares Exchange Traded Funds, are undeniable on the surface.
Both Trump and O’Leary are businessmen who starred in reality TV shows (produced by Mark Burnett). O’Leary is a judge on “Shark Tank,” a TV show in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to successful tycoons. If judges like the ideas, they’ll invest. It’s based on the British show “Dragon’s Den.”
Both are bombastic and plain-spoken — “Archie Bunker with an MBA,” as David Moscrop, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, put it.
They’re both fiscal conservatives with no actual political experience, who each argue that an outsider with business acumen is needed to put their respective governments in order.
And both face (or faced, in Trump’s case) a large field of competitors.
But the similarities start to fade after that.
O’Leary and Trump are speaking to very different audiences and have very different policies outside of taxes and the economy, Moscrop says.
When Trump kicked off his campaign, he called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals.” Building a border wall was one of his signature policy proposals.
“I’m the son of an immigrant from Ireland and from Lebanon,” O’Leary told CTV News. “There are no walls in my world.”
O’Leary supports access to abortion, which Trump proposed punishing women for at one point on the campaign trail (though he walked it back) and marijuana legalization.
