I don’t have anything against Mark Carney personally, or economists or central bankers as a group, or indeed very rich people in general. And I have to say, I liked Carney a bit more having watched his appearance Monday night on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart than I did beforehand.
The conversation touched on what you would expect: President-elect Donald Trump’s tariff (and other) threats and how to deal with them; Canada-U.S. relations in general; how to fight climate change when the nominal leader of the free world isn’t much interested; and the socioeconomic challenges Canada faces regardless of what’s going on in Washington. “Wages have not kept up with inflation. People are falling behind,” said Carney.
As is his style, Stewart more or less dominated the conversation. But by the standards of Canadian politics, certainly, Carney came off as witty, quick on his feet and — unlike certain people we might mention — somewhat self-aware.
If I were in the market for a patrician technocrat as my next prime minister, I suppose I might have been quite impressed. As it stands I would be happy to choke down a can of Budweiser with him.
‘I am an outsider’: Carney rips Poilievre, makes Liberal leadership case on The Daily Show
There were a few problems with Carney’s Daily Show appearance, however, and they had much less to do with what he said than where and to whom he said it.
One problem: The Daily Show is not a Canadian show, but rather an American one. Mark Carney wants to lead the Liberal Party of Canada; word is he’ll announce his candidacy for real in Edmonton later this week. Furthermore, The Daily Show is a comedy show, and there isn’t much that’s particularly funny about Canada’s current situation right now — least of all vis-à-vis our relationship with the U.S.
Stewart is a miles-above-average comedian, but he traffics in the same dreary “why is Canada so perfect and why can’t we Americans be so very perfect?” schtick that sells by the barrel on the U.S. comedy exchanges. It’s a minor miracle the word “polite” only came up once.
Another problem: Who’s watching? The Daily Show airs on Comedy Central, which can be found on what my generation and older know as “cable television.” An Angus Reid Institute poll in 2022 found that among 18-to-34s, only 41 per cent subscribed to cable television — half the number of 55-and-overs. That number will not have rebounded significantly in the time since. Among non-cable-subscribing 18-to-34s, 26 per cent said they used to have cable but then cut the cord, and one-third said they had never had cable. The number of 65-and-overs who reported never having had cable: three per cent.
Having cut the cord myself many years back, I struggled to find somewhere I could stream the interview as it was airing. It involved a VPN, an American resident friend’s Paramount Plus credentials and sorcery.
Don’t get me wrong: Cable television subscribers are the Liberal Party of Canada’s core demographic. The party has little else left. And if Carney wants a chance to fix all our unfunny problems, he’ll need to win the party leadership as a first step. I suspect the sort of people who jump feet-first into Liberal leadership races watch The Daily Show religiously. It reminds them of 2008, when hope and change were all the rage.
But had Carney stayed home, no one would have asked him, “Hey, Mark Carney, why didn’t you go on The Daily Show three days before you announced your candidacy?” No one is going to ask Chrystia Freeland that if she doesn’t follow suit (though it would frankly surprise me if she didn’t).
Problem: Canadians who are as deadly serious about Canada’s problems as Carney claims to be might notice a prospective Canadian prime minister letting an American comedian make unfunny fun of our almost-certainly-next-Conservative-prime minister at a time of universally acknowledged peril between our two countries.
“Poilievre seems like a villain in a Karate Kid movie. There’s something very off-putting,” Stewart remarked at one point. “What is he like in person?
“Ehhh, you’re not far off,” Carney responded to weirdly over-the-top hooting and hollering from the audience. (Are there central-banker groupies?)
A lot of people Carney ultimately needs to win over with his “serious gentleman” brand might not have been too impressed by this. As I say, he essentially gave over the narrative to Stewart. Carney’s role was to chuckle and mildly protest. If the interview served Carney’s interests, it served only his interests. And that’s not, I suspect, what Canadians are looking for nowadays.
One final point: At one moment in the interview, Stewart half-jokingly asked Carney what had finally convinced Justin Trudeau to resign. Was he trying to give the Liberals a chance? (Carney agreed that was the basic idea.) Or did Nancy Pelosi call Trudeau up and threaten him with violence, Stewart suggested? Or did one of Canada’s “satirical comedy shows” skewer Trudeau so mercilessly that he collapsed in a heap?
It was an unintentionally funny line for Canadians, in a very dark way, just not in remotely the way Stewart intended it. Not only do we not have funny satirical comedy shows; we don’t even have talk shows. (By “we” I mean anglophone Canadians.) If for some reason a British politician wanted to launch a leadership bid on a humorous light-entertainment television program, he might try to book himself on BBC’s superb Graham Norton Show, or with Jonathan Ross on ITV. American politicians have the pick of any number of shows and podcasts, across the political and genre spectrums. Here in Canada, Carney will surely turn up at some point on SRC’s serious interview show Tout le monde en parle, and millions of Quebecers will watch, as usual.
English-speaking Canada gets Jon Stewart, take it or leave it. For the record, CBC didn’t come up in the interview.
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