All the polls show the same thing. The race has tightened up. The big Conservative lead has vanished. The Liberals are competitive again.
Could Mark Carney win? Of course he could. Ten reasons.
1. Trudeau is gone. Towards the end, Justin Trudeau wasn’t just his party’s leader. He had become a political death sentence — for them. The Liberals had become very, very unpopular, and Trudeau wasn’t the only reason. But he was the main one. When he was forced out — by Chrystia Freeland, by his caucus, by reality — Liberals who had parked their vote with the Conservatives or the NDP were always going to come back. They have.
2. Conservatives didn’t have a Plan B. In politics, you always have to plan for change. The Tories didn’t. Justin Trudeau is a narcissist, they’d say, and they were right. But they had convinced themselves that his narcissism would persuade him to stay. That’s not how narcissism works. Narcissists always leave so that someone else can clean up their messes. The Conservatives – arrogantly, stupidly – didn’t plan for Trudeau’s departure. It shows.
3. Liberals overwhelmingly support Carney. There’s a name for winning 90% of the vote: A landslide. Carney won his party’s leadership by a landslide. Conservatives can bleat about the number of Liberals who ultimately voted, or weave conspiracies about marginal candidates like Ruby Dhalla. But the bottom line is that Carney won, big. And Tories are now doing what they did three times in a row with Trudeau: underestimating the Liberal leader.
4. Carney is likeable. In politics, you don’t need to be the most likable person on Earth. You just need to be more likable than the alternative. And the fact is, a growing number of Canadians don’t find Pierre Poilievre particularly likable. For a long time, Poilievre’s angry man shtick worked – because a majority of Canadians were mad at Trudeau, too. With Trudeau gone, their anger has disappeared, like air out of a balloon. Donald Trump has cornered the market on anger, and voters want something different from him. They want someone who loves Canada, like they do. Not a perpetually angry guy who says that Canada is “broken.”
5. Carney’s CV inspires confidence. Bankers foreclose on mortgages. Bankers refuse loans. Bankers are miserly. That’s why you see so few bankers succeed in politics. Carney has bucked that trend because he is lucky – he is in the right place at precisely the right time. At a time when Canadians fear for their country’s economy, Mark Carney is an economist. He is a bland, boring banker at precisely the moment Canadians went looking for one. The irony, of course, is that the fight with Trump has nothing to do with economics – it’s all about power and territory, just like Trudeau said. But voters think it’s about money, and Carney is a money guy.
6. The Conservatives disappeared. Getting noticed when the other guys have a leadership race underway is tough. Getting noticed when the other guys are the government, and are locked in a battle for the country’s existence? Even tougher. So, why didn’t the Conservatives – who have more money than God – run attack ad campaigns against Carney, like they did with Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff? Why didn’t they define him before he could define himself? Both good questions. The answers remain elusive.
7. The polls point in one direction. The most prized commodity in politics is momentum, and the Liberals have it. For week after week, the Grits have been moving up and the Tories have been moving down. The media like it, because the media like covering contests, not cakewalks. Voters, meanwhile, are gravitating towards the centre — which is what voters everywhere do in a crisis. The Liberals haven’t really earned the momentum they’re enjoying, true. But momentum they have. Truly.
8. Unpredictability favours the predictable. At a time when we are under continual attack by a U.S. president who seems mentally unstable — and who is famously unpredictable — Canadians were always going to go looking for the sane-sounding guy who is as predictable as sunrise. Bland works, sometimes, and bland is working now — for Carney.
9. Trump hurts Poilievre. Pierre Poilievre is everything Donald Trump is not — intelligent, strategic, disciplined. But too much of Poilievre’s style and persona remind voters of Trump: The puerile slogans, the angry social media, the total inability to smile and say: “This country is great, right now. I love this place and the people in it.” Trump could never say that. Poilievre hasn’t yet.
10. Conservatives are Trumpy. They are, they are. Polls show it, but Canadians know it — in their guts. Voters know that the party that is most likely to favour Donald Trump is, overwhelmingly, the Conservative Party of Canada. That’s just the reality. And, for that reason more than any other, the Poilievre Conservatives are losing ground, fast.
Next up: Ten reasons why Pierre Poilievre could still win.