Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to construction workers as he tours a housing development in Ottawa on Thursday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Somehow, Mark Carney’s first budget – his grand game plan for the country, written in his economist mother tongue – was maybe the least exciting thing this week in Canadian politics.
That could have been a serious problem for the Prime Minister, given how much was riding on his budget delivering in both economic and political credibility terms.
But the self-satisfied purring of the Liberals right now and the panic alarm – so shrill it can barely be heard by human ears – that’s emanating from Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives makes the good week/bad week verdict obvious.
On Wednesday, the morning after his fiscal blueprint was tabled, Mr. Carney visited an Ottawa transit yard to tout his government’s “bold response” to the $50-billion hole in the economy caused by the U.S. tariffs.
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The Prime Minister faced questions about whether he’d overhyped the budget and how this or that measure would play out. But many of the queries were about how many other Conservatives he was hiding under a trench coat, for standing behind Mr. Carney was Chris d’Entremont, the newest member of the Liberal caucus.
“Can I finish my press conference and then we’ll have the more interesting press conference after?” Mr. Carney said with a laugh when someone asked a question directly to the MP.
When it was his turn at the mic, Mr. d’Entremont said that over the past few months he’d been feeling out of step with Mr. Poilievre’s message. He’d gotten to know many Liberals and had asked them lots of questions that led to a recent epiphany.
“Understanding the point that we are in in Canadian history, where we are, where it’s time to actually try to lead a country to try to make it better and not try to knock it down, not to continue to be negative,” he said.
Mr. d’Entremont said there were other Tories considering the same, but he’d let them say so. The Liberals were three seats short of a majority after the April election, and their new recruit had shaved that down to two.
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By the time they arrived for their caucus meeting on Parliament Hill a short time later, the Liberals were behaving like a person who spends weeks shopping for an outfit and hours on their hair and makeup, and then when someone tells them they look nice, they say breezily, “What, this old thing?”
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly admitted she’d been talking to Mr. d’Entremont for “years” to try to coax him over. But most of her colleagues were absurdly coy about recruitment efforts, acting like they just awoke one morning to find a stray Tory on the front porch.
“This isn’t a numbers game, as far as I’m concerned. Sure, Chris turns us from 169 to 170, but this is about people, and people have to make their own decisions based on their own circumstances,” said caucus chair James Maloney.
Sadly, no one in the press pen laughed out loud at that, but someone asked skeptically, “So this isn’t about getting a majority?” whereupon Mr. Maloney conceded that of course they’d like that, but again: people!
Kody Blois, from a neighbouring Nova Scotia riding to Mr. d’Entremont’s, mused that the Prime Minister’s centrist “big-tent” approach must be pretty appealing to Red Tories.
“If you are a moderate, conservative type of member of parliament, and you want to see fiscal discipline, but at the same time, see a Prime Minister that is balanced, that is focused on the economy, that is showing the maturity that this country needs right now, I have to hope and assume that we are looking like a desirable choice,” Mr. Blois said.
Mr. Carney arrived last at the caucus meeting, descending the stairs from his office with Mr. d’Entremont at his side. The Prime Minister looked like a cat who’d swallowed a particularly delicious canary, while Mr. d’Entremont wore the happy-but-overwhelmed expression of someone arriving home after a long day to find a surprise party exploding from behind their couch.
Mr. Carney walks with MP Chris d'Entremont, who crossed the floor from Conservative caucus to join the Liberals, to a meeting of the Liberal caucus on Parliament Hill on Wednesday.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The doors stayed open and a news camera followed as they entered the caucus room, so that no one would miss the applause, cheering and hugs that greeted the newest Liberal.
Thursday evening brought a bombshell of a different sort, when Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux – one of the consistent names featured in the floor crossing rumours – abruptly announced he was resigning.
In a statement, Mr. Jeneroux said he’d hoped before the last election that Canadians would put their faith in Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives and he “wanted desperately to play a role in that vision.” But Mr. Jeneroux offered no reason for his resignation.
An hour or so later, Mr. Poilievre wrote a social-media post thanking the MP, wishing him and his family “all the best following your decision to step down as a Member of Parliament next spring.”
That was odd, because Mr. Jeneroux’s original statement mentioned no such timeline. The MP then wrote a Facebook post saying that his decision was a long time coming, and about spending more time with his family.
“I want to be clear that there was no coercion involved in my decision to resign,” Mr. Jeneroux wrote. That feels a bit like a photograph of someone in a cinderblock room holding today’s newspaper and wearing a frozen smile, while the whites of their eyes do all the talking.
Mr. Poilievre himself – the very definition of a career politician, a creature engineered in a lab for this life he’s chosen – has looked wildly off-kilter this week.
At one point in the House on Wednesday, he was so lost in his own head that when the entire assembly rose around him in tribute to a fallen Second World War soldier, it took him several beats to notice and join them. Then he delivered a long speech criticizing the budget, but forgot to move an amendment, ceding the procedural upper hand to the Bloc Québécois.
To hear the triumphant Liberals tell it all week, Mr. d’Entremont crossed the floor because their budget is a widely appealing, serious plan, and because people are fed up with Mr. Poilievre taking a tire iron to everything in his path.
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It’s the second of those two reasons that’s so politically toxic for the Conservative Leader and creating a feeding frenzy right now. That problem is about him and nothing else – and that story is not new.
It’s the same pattern that’s emerged over and over during his leadership: in low public opinions from voters who just can’t take his tone, in stories of fingers being spitefully twisted in back rooms, in MPs controlled like remedial children, in him fulfilling the role of opposition leader in the smallest, meanest way possible, no matter what advice he gets to the contrary.
There are two different types of accusations that are deadly in politics. There’s the kind that makes you look like a fraud, because it paints you as someone wildly different than who you always claimed to be.
And then there’s the kind like this, which strikes bone because it’s an indictment of exactly who everyone has watched you be all along.