The election set for April 28 will be one of the most consequential in Canadian history. Whichever party forms government will have to steer the country past U.S. President Donald Trump’s unjustified tariffs and threats of annexation, and ensure that Canada is still a strong and free nation four years from now.
Given those stakes, why then did the two party leaders with a plausible shot at becoming Canada’s next prime minister have nothing new or inspiring to say on Sunday, when they launched their respective campaigns?
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre framed the vote around the same well-rehearsed message he has been delivering for two years: that Canada can’t afford to give the Liberals a fourth term. He listed all the usual negatives – the housing crisis, the affordability crisis, the immigration crisis, etc. – and tried to place them squarely on the shoulders of Liberal Leader Mark Carney. “A Liberal is a Liberal,” he said.
Mr. Carney argued that there are Liberals, and then there are other Liberals. As proof, he said that in the nine short days that he served as prime minister, he ended the unloved Liberal carbon fuel charge (technically, reducing it to zero for now) and stopped an unpopular Liberal increase in the capital gains tax from coming into force – two policies pilfered from the Conservatives.
See? No old Liberals here (although Mr. Carney is proposing to expand industrial carbon pricing).
The former central banker and businessman also took a jab at Mr. Poilievre, a career politician. “It’s easy to be negative about everything when you’ve never fixed anything,” Mr. Carney said, without naming his opponent. “It’s easy to be negative about everything when you’ve never built anything. When you’ve never had to make a payroll.”
Rejecting a disastrous Liberal record that had the Conservatives leading the Liberals by more than 20 points in the polls last fall, or choosing a new Liberal leader with global business experience so buoyed by Mr. Trump’s outrageous attacks on Canada that the race is now a dead heat: those are the options as those two party leaders define them.
Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, meanwhile said on Sunday what NDP leaders always say: that the Liberals and Conservatives only care about the wealthy and that only the NDP will fight for working people caught in the crossfire of American tariffs. Again, neither surprising or inspiring.
Mr. Carney and Mr. Poilievre also tried to position themselves as Mr. Trump’s nemesis but mostly just seemed to agree on the terms of engagement: that the President has to recognize Canada’s sovereignty and stop referring to it as the 51st state before meaningful discussions can take place.
But this critical election has to be about so much more than that. Yes, it will matter who voters think is best suited to dealing with Mr. Trump, but the far more important question will be which party is ready to seize the moment and truly transform Canada.
Canadians want their leaders to be bold. Quebeckers, for instance, were once opposed to cross-country pipelines that would open new markets for western crude and natural gas but are suddenly warming to the idea, according to Premier François Legault.
Voters understand that the best way to beat Mr. Trump is to reduce the country’s reliance on the U.S. for trade and defence so that his crude threats, or those of a successor, no longer carry the same existential power.
Doing so will mean exploiting its natural resources by building pipelines and speeding up approvals processes, making Canada more inviting to investors by lowering taxes, removing interprovincial trade barriers, balancing the books, rebuilding the military and forging new alliances.
Getting that done will require a singular focus from the next federal government. Voters don’t need another election campaign in which parties release policies in competing dribs and drabs each day – a tax cut here, a new benefit there.
They instead need a campaign in which they can choose between sweeping proposals for the future of the country at the very moment that they are ready for – are even hungry for – a new Canada to emerge.
Canadians have one demand: they want their country to be stronger and freer, and they are ready for a leader with the boldness to deliver that. So where on Sunday was the uniting and inspiring vision of a new, independent, powerful Canada? So far, none of the party leaders has met the moment.