We live in extraordinary geopolitical times. You could tell as much by watching the festivities Thursday evening, as the Liberals prepared to announce their new leader — who turned out to be Mark Carney, with a whopping 86 per cent of the first-ballot votes. The three others wasted $350,000 on entry fees for pretty much nothing, I’m afraid.
Every speaker of note, from the four leadership candidates to outgoing leader Justin Trudeau to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who held the room in the palm of his hand for what felt like a day and a half, mentioned the need for Canadians to stand together, united and altogether resolute against the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs.
At the same time, of course, Liberals were insisting that the Conservatives — who have as much or more support nationwide, and until recently had a lot more — are bent on destroying all that’s good and holy about this country. That isn’t really a unifying message.
“Pierre Poilievre just doesn’t get it,” Carney averred in his victory speech. “He is the type of life-long politician … who worships at the altar of the free market without having made a payroll himself. And now … at a time of immense economic insecurity, he would undermine the Bank of Canada. Poilievre has called for the shutting down of CBC at a time when disinformation and foreign interference are on the march. He insults our mayors and ignores our First Nations.”
“A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said of Poilievre, who has been raining invective on Trump just as fast as he can in recent days — and indeed someone whom Trump himself denigrated in recent days as “not a MAGA guy.”
Oh, and Carney said “Pierre Poilievre would let our planet burn” — on the same night he promised to axe the consumer carbon tax as a first order of business.
Other than all that, though, we’re in it together. Okey-dokey.
Carney may be Canada’s first-ever prime minister to have had no prior experience in government, but he has some very traditional Liberal instincts. He’ll whisper “sunny ways” in your ear as he jams the ice pick into your spine.
Carney seemed composed and at ease in his two addresses to the Ottawa crowd — two minutes of “final words” afforded all the candidates in advance of the results being announced, and then a lengthy victory speech. He comes off like someone who wouldn’t easily be baited into losing his cool by someone like Poilievre, or indeed by Trump.
But arguably, losing your cool about Trump and Poilievre is a huge part of the job. Politicians of all stripes are likely correct when they say it will require unusual levels of national unity to remake Canada into something other than an unacknowledged American vassal state.
“We’re facing the greatest crisis of our lifetimes. We have to do extraordinary things, and together. We have to build things that we’ve never imagined we had to do, at a pace that we never would have believed possible,” Carney told the Liberals assembled in Ottawa on Thursday evening.
Poilievre, Carney then opined, would stand resolutely athwart any such ambitions. Carney didn’t show his work on that, because he can’t. At no point will Pierre Poilievre ever have (or desire) a mandate to weaken the Canadian economy in an effort to curry favour with The Donald. He has just as much incentive as the Liberal leader, past or new, to say nasty things about Trump, and all signs are that he’s willing to say those things.
Really, it’s a wash: Carney and Poilievre don’t disagree, fundamentally, at all on the question of how to deal with Trump. And most Canadians agree with them that “elbows up” is the best approach. So what Canadians deserve now is an immediate election campaign on how best to respond to this unfortunate new reality into which we have been thrust.
What’s shaping up instead is something far less edifying and reality-based. But at least it’s a race. If Poilievre can’t see off this central-banker arriviste, he shouldn’t be where he is to begin with.
National Post
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