Make no mistake, Mark Carney will win the Liberal leadership on March 9, one month from now, and become prime minister, at least for a few months.
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I know Chrystia Freeland is also running. And Freeland deserves credit for performing one of the most merciful acts in Canadian political history — sticking the shiv into Justin Trudeau so that he finally, mercifully, took the hint and announced his resignation.
But no other Liberal leadership candidate has Carney’s momentum. Much of the party establishment and the central Canadian media have drunk deep off the hype that Carney is some sort of public policy genius — a “rock star banker” — who can with the little pinky on one hand lift both his party and the country out of the devastation left by nearly 10 years of Justin Trudeau and his woke, economically illiterate, high-inflation policies.
The irony is, this “ultimate outsider” (Carney) is surrounded by nearly all of the insiders who foisted Trudeau on Canadians and kept him there for 9 1/2 years. Most of Trudeau’s staff, much of his cabinet and the bulk of his caucus have signed on to Team Carney.
Most of these people are now running full speed away from the Trudeau legacy. The carbon tax, the blocking of pipelines, the criminal neglect of our military, the open-door immigration, the crumbling of our economic infrastructure and productivity, the embarrassing foreign policy.
Yet, like some bad movie sequel, the Carney campaign could be advertised as “Brought to you by the same creative team who gave you Justin Trudeau!”
Carney, for instance, is in favour of a carbon tax (albeit by another name), so much so that Trudeau’s radical environmental minister Steven Guilbeault is one of the current cabinet members who signed on with Carney.
“If you loved the EV mandates, the net-zero power grids and the hundreds of billions in investment scared away by the Trudeau-Guilbeault “green” cult, you’re going to love Carney-Guilbeault: The Next Frontier.”
It’s true the Liberals have risen in the polls since Trudeau’s postdated resignation. The latest Ipsos poll, released this week has the government party at 28 per cent to the Conservatives’ 41 per cent.
Forty-one still gets the Conservatives a comfortable majority. But it saves the butts of a lot of Liberal backbenchers, especially in Ontario, who faced certain defeat in the election this year had Trudeau stayed on.
You can sense the giddiness in Liberal circles and at outlets such as the CBC, over the possibility of a Carney-driven resurrection in the popular vote.
But remember what happened to Kamala Harris in last year’s U.S. presidential election.
The Liberals and their media pals are unhinged at the prospect of Pierre Poilievre winning. So they are trying to use the impending crowning of Carney and the phoney threat of U.S. President Donald Trump trying to take over Canada as twin levers to save their grip on politics, government, culture and the national elite.
The atmosphere was the same last summer in the U.S. after Joe Biden (as much of an albatross on his party as Trudeau) withdrew from the presidential election.
Amid all the glowing, euphoric, fawning (and sickeningly biased) coverage of Harris taking over, there was a sudden polling spike in favour of the Democrats. They surged ahead of Trump and stayed ahead for the remainder of the election. Indeed, polls taken the day before and the day of the U.S. election continued to show Harris ahead by between two and five per cent.
She lost by a point and a half.
I suspect the run-up to this fall’s Canadian election will follow a similar pattern. Jagmeet Singh will continue to prop up the Libs until this fall. Liberal fortunes will appear to rise, before ultimately falling short of re-electing the Liberals or even holding the Conservatives to a minority.
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