Liberal leader Mark Carney speaks briefly with media as he makes his way to a caucus meeting on March 10, in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The advance word on Mark Carney’s entry into Canadian politics was that he would run as an aloof technocrat. While Pierre Poilievre was promising “powerful paycheques” and wielding the knife against his opponent, the erudite former central banker would entertain the public with lengthy lectures on the interest-elasticity of the demand for money. Certainly this was what a lot of Tories told themselves.
Well now, here we are, scant weeks later, and it seems the globalist egghead has discovered a taste for politics, of the most brass-knuckle kind. A spell-binding speaker he is not, but Mr. Carney has shown he can peddle meaningless bromides, push out impressive-sounding but watery promises, dodge questions and slander the other side with the best of them.
Anyone who has tried to tease out meaning from Mr. Carney’s policy proposals during what we were encouraged to call the Liberal “leadership race” will have come away with the familiar feeling of helplessness: the more one delved, the more one felt one had been enveloped in gelatinous goo.
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His proposal to scrap the consumer carbon tax, while beefing up the industrial version – whose costs he claimed would not be passed on to consumers – could have been drafted by the most cynical demagogue. His prevarications over his involvement in the decision by Brookfield Asset Management, a company whose board he chaired, to move its head office to the United States, were in the grand political tradition.
Needless to say, it worked. Mr. Carney sailed through the race without a scratch, en route to Sunday’s crushing victory. Still, his victory speech was striking in its combativeness, both as it regarded his own opponent, Mr. Poilievre, and the country’s, in the form of Donald Trump.
Fair enough, up to a point. The threat to our existence, or certainly our prosperity, is real: the country is looking for a fighter, someone who can stand up to Mr. Trump and inspire the rest of us to follow his lead. And one way to establish your bona fides as the Trump-fighter is by your willingness to scrap it out with your domestic rival.
Even so, his choice of words was … arresting. That a party leader in Canada, in 2025, would attack the President of the United States in highly personal terms was a given: Mr. Trump has made himself a deserving target. But what was notable, and disturbing, about Mr. Carney’s speech was how much of his attack was directed, not at Mr. Trump, but at the country, and the people, he leads.
We will keep the tariffs lately applied to U.S. goods, he said, “until the Americans show us respect.” It was “the Americans,” not Mr. Trump, that he warned were after “our resources, our water, our land, our country.” These were “dark days,” he said at another point, brought on by “a country we can no longer trust.”
Contrast this approach with that of the famously blunt Doug Ford, whose interventions are invariably prefaced with declarations of Canadians’ enduring love of Americans, as distinguished from the “one man” at the root of the conflict.
As for Mr. Poilievre, though he has not been shy about attacking Mr. Carney – on Monday, he claimed Mr. Carney would “sell out Canada for his personal profit” – I imagine even he might think twice about suggesting his opponent “would kneel before” Mr. Trump rather than stand up to him. That humiliating image, like the dark language about “the Americans,” is designed to appeal to some pretty base emotions.
This is the gift that Mr. Trump has given Mr. Carney, and the Liberals. They can campaign on a full-throated appeal to this country’s latent anti-Americanism – an old trope in Canadian politics, only this time no one’s going to call them on it. After all, Mr. Trump is an existential threat, the kind we were always warned about.
But then why say “the Americans,” rather than Mr. Trump? I think the intent was to amp up the fear factor. Mr. Trump can always be replaced. But “the Americans” is something larger and more inescapable.
And why is that useful? To scare the dickens out of New Democrat-leaning voters. The strategy, it appears, is to tack left and right at the same time: to appeal to centre-right voters on policy – hence the language about focusing on the economy and cutting taxes – and to left-of-centre voters as the only party that can defeat Mr. Poilievre, Mr. Trump and America.
That’s politics, especially these days. The point is not to single out Mr. Carney. The point is that if you thought this was going to be an election pitting the high-brow against the low blow, think again. It is going to be a desperate, brutal, dirty fight, on both sides.