Mark Carney is our next prime minister.
I’ll take bets on it today. Any amount.
I’m playing a trick, of course – all he has to do is win the Liberal leadership race, and that seems not in doubt.
For how long, though, who knows? The riskier bet is who wins the next election that follows within weeks of Carney’s installation as our 24th PM.
On that matter, the easy wager for about two years now has been on Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. The Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kept digging, and digging and digging themselves an inescapable hole seemingly to the other side of the planet. (Aside: that shovelling from Ottawa would surface in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, not China as the myth goes.)
But something has been afoot now for a few weeks that casts this conventional thinking into legitimate doubt. In saying “afoot,” I might be better to use the word “stampede,” because as we check our watches it is looking more and more at this moment like another minority government, which is looking more and more like rewinding the tape to another Liberal-led country.
There are today two serious impediments to a Conservative victory, and oddly enough neither of them is really Carney. One is an American president who says too much, one is Poilievre who is saying too little.
There is a German proverb that translates into: “Fear makes the wolf bigger.” U.S. President Donald Trump is that creature. He has enacted what we commonly call today a “trigger event.” Unless he shuts his gob and dials back his nonsense on annexation, the 51st state and governor Trudeau, and then comes to his senses on the friendly fire of tariffs assessed on Canadian products that will wound the American economy, he can singularly carve Carney a path to victory.
Historically, you’d think we’d want a leader most aligned with the U.S. president, but Trump 2.0 is no longer a clown car but a fire of its tires. Our largest trading partner will soon be our largest trading pain.
We were prepared for four weird years, not four dangerous ones. Polls suggest the public believes Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, with decades of business experience but none in the political ring, would be the better foe of the big, bad wolf.
And that is where Poilievre is all of a sudden yesterday’s man. His slogans – axe the tax, stop the crime, build the homes – feel of the same cheap cut of cloth of Trump’s impulsive, impetuous and imperious executive orders. We are looking for substance to combat the style, on complex tactics to combat simple barking. The Conservative leader has built his lead in large part on an effective but lightweight messaging and a demeanour that he needs to shake in this new existential crisis for the country.
Polls suggest the lapsed Liberals who abandoned Trudeau in recent years are now deserting Poilievre. Yes, Carney offers them a blander, more conventional choice to steer the economy, considering he helped navigate Canada largely away from the serious recession of 2008 and 2009, then warned against and mitigated the financial damage of Brexit after the 2016 vote.
But for the time being, it’s more about how Poilievre isn’t particularly a political figure of optimism. He is, and for some good reason considering our systems, more of a disrupter by nature. Canadians are looking for comfort, not chaos – they see what chaos is doing hour by hour below the border, and few of us want any part of it.
It seems strange as a new task for someone who built a formidable lead in the two-plus years as the Conservative chief, but Poilievre has to shift the gears within his personality to win the electorate all over again. To do that he has to swallow the smarminess and any of the surliness that pleased the populist core following, and find a credible message to retain and retrieve the wider public that rings better than Carney’s pledge to make Canada the best economy in the G7.
Setting Carney aside, Trump 2.0 is the reason Poilievre 2.0 has to emerge.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
