There will be just two debates for candidates in the race to be the next Liberal leader, one in English and one in French.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
When Justin Trudeau finally announced Jan. 6 he would step down, some Liberals called for a quick anointing of former finance minister Chrystia Freeland as the party’s new leader.
But Gerald Butts, the Prime Minister’s friend and former chief strategist, argued against that on the grounds that the candidates needed to be tested in a leadership race.
“If you want to know who can play hockey, put on a hockey game,” he wrote in an article about Liberal Party infighting.
So far, it hasn’t been much of a game. You wouldn’t say it’s enough of a showcase to select Team Canada. It isn’t even telling Liberals who can really play. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get a lot better.
Mr. Butts is a supporter of another leadership contestant, Mark Carney, so you could see why he didn’t want a coronation for Ms. Freeland. But the assumption was that if there was a real race it would be Mr. Carney who would be tested.
He’s the candidate who is a political rookie. The former central banker had never campaigned for anything, and despite delivering a lot of financial speeches and writing a book called Values, Canadians don’t really know much about what he believes.
It turns out that vague has helped Mr. Carney. He has run with it. And the way this leadership race is going, he just might get to the finish line in the same style.
He kicked off his leadership race unofficially with an interview with U.S. comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show – a pop-culture coup that is never going to tell a Canadian much about whether the interviewee should be their future prime minister.
Since then, Mr. Carney has done appearances on local television but not a major national TV interview in this country. Ms. Freeland went on Radio-Canada’s big talk show Tout le monde en parle, but Mr. Carney apparently doesn’t have to bother. That must be a relief: His French-language interviews have occasionally yielded confusing answers.
Now there are just the two leadership debates, one in French and one in English, that will constitute anything like a competitive trial.
But the party has left them late, less than two weeks before the vote, and it is likely they will feature a cacophonous field of five candidates – three of whom have little chance – which doesn’t leave much time to focus on the two main contenders.
Admittedly, it’s hardly a race full of big differences on matters of policy. Distinguishing Mr. Carney’s ideology from Ms. Freeland’s is like trying to choose between paint swatches labelled off-white and eggshell.
Ms. Freeland has offered more policy proposals, but the big issue dividing the two contenders is how tied they are to Mr. Trudeau’s record and who is best to take on U.S. President Donald Trump and his tariff threats.
That new set of trade-war issues has been a political boon for Mr. Carney. Voters seem to think his CV fits the new political context.
Pollsters have reported more Canadians feel Mr. Carney would be better at handling negotiations with Mr. Trump than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre or Ms. Freeland, although results depend on the specific question.
But the paradox is that the people expressing confidence in Mr. Carney to pollsters haven’t spent a lot of time listening to him.
“Most people really don’t know who he is,” said pollster and strategist Greg Lyle, the president of Innovative Research Group.
That tells us that Canadians are willing to project good things onto Mr. Carney – but not necessarily that they will keep believing them. They are offering approval for a package without having yet been able to peek at the contents.
The suggestion that a Liberal Party led by Mr. Carney might be able give Mr. Poilievre a competitive race might already be pushing him out of the reach of any of the other leadership contenders, including Ms. Freeland. But it has been a remarkably brief and breezy campaign to pick a leader who will automatically become prime minister.
Of course, that prime minister will almost immediately have to go through a general election campaign that will be a lot rougher. As it stands now, the Liberals will pick a captain who hasn’t played in that kind of game.