Liberal Party of Canada leadership candidate Mark Carney speaks after being elected Liberal Party of Canada leader in Ottawa, on March 9.Spencer Colby/The Globe and Mail
Mark Carney was anointed as much as elected. Canadian politics had gathered currents that pushed Liberals to want a different kind of leader: a technocrat to steer away from Justin Trudeau and through troubled times.
The result was overwhelming. Mr. Trudeau’s former deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, was brushed aside brutally, into a second-place finish that amounted to 8 per cent of the vote. Mr. Carney won in a blow-out with 86 per cent.
The Liberals’ two-month leadership race was a quickie remodel, and the party was in a rush to tear down the Trudeau structures and put up something that looks like it can withstand the winds of Hurricane Donald Trump.
That’s what Mr. Carney talked about when he won.
He claimed to be the candidate of change by highlighting a promised to cancel two of Mr. Trudeau’s policies – the carbon levy and capital-gains tax increase – while Mr. Trudeau was sitting right in front of him. He talked about tax cuts and economic competitiveness in very un-Trudeau ways.
Then he spent much his victory speech warning Mr. Trump’s designs on Canada – “our resources, our water, our land, our country” – and offered a technocrat’s swagger about his ability to cope with them.
“I know how the world works,” he said. “And I know how it can be made to work better for all of us.”
Mr. Carney is now a man in a hurry. He will probably be sworn in as prime minister before the end of the week. He will probably trigger a snap election within two weeks.
In his leadership-campaign rallies, and in his victory speech, he has asked Liberals the same pep-talk question: “Who’s ready?” Now it’s something of a slogan for a new Liberal Leader who will struggling to mount a campaign within days.
And still, most Canadians don’t really know much about who he is.
At 59, Mr. Carney is famous, world-famous even, among that thin tranche of the world who might know who a star central banker is. But as a politician, and the next prime minister, he is largely an unknown.
He will take power as prime minister having never been elected to public office. He won a short two-month leadership campaign that included a smattering of policy, but hardly gave Canadians a feeling for his personality.
But this leadership was not a search for an inspiration.
Mr. Trudeau won the 2013 Liberal leadership promising to build common ground among Canadians. Mr. Carney’s victory was the inexorable advance of the candidate with the resumé Liberals wanted: a big-name outsider with experience as a crisis economic manager.
The Conservatives can – and have – called him “just like Justin.” But aside from policy change, Mr. Carney doesn’t come off anything like.
This leader doesn’t glow in rallies. He speaks slowly, usually in wonk-ish terms. Even celebrating victory, his speech didn’t have an excess of zing. Mr. Carney sells competence for worrying times.
The fact that polls suggested that image would put the Liberals into a neck-and-neck with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives turned that in a landslide rout.
It’s obvious that Mr. Carney will take that mandate and try to win an election campaign on the issue that helped him to that victory: the anxiety Canadians feel over Mr. Trump’s tariff threats.
Everyone who spoke at the Liberal leadership event Sunday made that the only issue. Mr. Trudeau did, in a goodbye speech that was more pep talk than retrospective. So did 91-year-old Jean Chrétien, in a speech that mixed retrospection with nationalistic blasts at Mr. Trump.
Mr. Carney, the soon-to-be prime minister, already sounds as though he will run not as the incumbent, but as opposition to Mr. Poilievre on the issue of leading the economy in the face of Mr. Trump’s trade war.
That bit of swagger about knowing how the world works came with lines about Mr. Poilievre being an ideologue who worships free markets even though he’d never made a payroll – and accusing the Conservative Leader of sharing Mr. Trump’s views.
“A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Mr. Carney said.
That is the job Liberals hired him for. Like most Canadians, they don’t know a lot about Mr. Carney. They might know a few of his proposals, but they don’t really have a sense of the instincts that would drive him in leading the country.
But he couldn’t be stopped. Liberals hired his resumé to make the case he can deal with Mr. Trump – and win an election on it.
Mark Carney, who won the Liberal leadership to replace Justin Trudeau, spoke of the differences between Canadians and Americans in his acceptance speech.
Reuters