In the National Post, Chris Selley explains the attraction of a Mark Carney-led Liberal Party to mainstream Canadians:
Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Ironically I suspect what Poilievre is up against is one of the most basic and powerful forces in Canadian politics: conservatism, but in one of its purest forms, namely suspicion of change — especially in a crisis. Recall that Canada saw 10 elections during the pandemic — one federal and nine provincial. The incumbent parties won eight of them, in some cases even as their health-care and long-term care systems collapsed on their heads and their “pandemic preparedness” folders turned out to contain nothing but some old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
No question, there are problems here specific to Poilievre and the Conservatives. The Royal Order of Laurentian Elites nearly fainted when Poilievre started saying “Canada is broken”, but people seemed to calm down about it and engage with it once it became clear most Canadians agreed: 70 per cent, according to a Postmedia-Leger poll last year.
Saying “Canada is broken” nowadays is likely to get you branded a traitor by a mob of people who think Beaver Tails, Tim Horton’s, Molson advertisements and a Tragically Hip playlist comprise a national identity. Canada can be broken and Trump can be a lunatic at the same time, but nationalist outbursts have little time for such nuance.
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Change is unavoidable in the forthcoming election, of course. And by rights, Canadians should want it: Like COVID, Trump’s demands on border security and military spending, and his obviously sincere belief in the power of tariffs — as untethered from reality and sense as these demands are — have exposed massive weaknesses on our part that we should want to fix for our own sake. Poilievre should speak more to us about those fixes.
Mark Carney never made any sense to me as a potential saviour for the Liberals. The most obvious recent event they needed to replicate was Kathleen Wynne’s jaw-dropping majority win in 2014 for the Ontario Liberals, after Dalton McGuinty had driven the party into a pond and left it there to drown. Wynne was a proven, veteran campaigner. Carney is … well, certainly not an “outsider”, but this is his first go at politics, and it certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing.
But Carney seems set to win the party’s leadership race on Sunday, anyway. He’s boring, and he’s a technocrat, and Trudeau is neither. And neither is Poilievre. A boring technocrat might well look like a safe harbour for a lot of Canadians. Poilievre needs to put a more positive spin on the changes we so desperately need.
