Liberal Leader Mark Carney makes an announcement during a federal election campaign stop in Niagara Falls, Ont., on April 18.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
On Good Friday, Mark Carney stood on a rooftop hotel patio overlooking Niagara Falls, where the wind threatened to blow him into the river below, all so he could remind Canadian voters of the existential threat of Donald Trump.
The wind was up to the task of taking him out, too. It was vicious and violent and constant, rattling the TV lights and speakers on their tripods and flipping several wooden tables into an empty swimming pool. Shortly before the event started, a staffer with a wide roll of electrical tape reinforced the Canada Strong banner on the lectern so it wouldn’t fly away.
Friday was the first day of advance voting and the day after the English leaders’ debate, so the campaigns were all revving up for the final stretch, after a quiet week in which campaigning was curtailed by debate practice.
Shortly before the announcement, as Mr. Carney holed up with his staff in a conference room next to the rooftop terrace, a woman leading a Japanese tour group through the conference centre asked if they could go down the hall to see “him.” The answer from the person guarding the corridor was a curt no.
Campaign sausage-making is not a subtle art, but more like a children’s storybook where it’s a satisfying experience for all if the words and pictures match exactly. And so, on a day when Mr. Carney wanted to underline the need to buttress Canada against a volatile United States, there was Niagara Falls roaring away below him and the Rainbow Bridge between Ontario and New York State just over his right shoulder, with long lines of cars beetling their way toward U.S. border checkpoints.
“President Trump is trying to fundamentally restructure, reorder the international trading system,” the Liberal Leader said. “And in the process, he is rupturing – literally rupturing – the global economy, and he’s putting in jeopardy the livelihoods of millions of Canadians, including in communities such as Niagara Falls here.”
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The key question in this election is who is “best placed” to stand up to Mr. Trump, defend Canadians and build something better out of “this chaos that’s coming into our lives,” he said. And Mr. Carney had an answer to that key question.
“Now I, for better or worse, have managed crises almost all my professional life,” he said. “I helped us manage through the 2008 financial crisis. I helped guide the U.K. through the Brexit turmoil. I think I know not just what it takes to survive a crisis, to get through a crisis, but what it takes to emerge stronger than before.”
The wind just went on attacking as he spoke. It made the Liberal Leader’s eyes water and he blinked forcefully a few times, but even as tears began to slide down his nose, at no point did he look or sound even slightly perturbed by the gale.
The underlying reality is this: Mr. Carney is riding high in the polls because Mr. Trump terrified and enraged Canadians, and they’ve decided en masse that the Liberal Leader is the best person to manage the man-made emergency. In this campaign, Mr. Carney might as well have showed up wearing a T-shirt with “Adult In The Room” emblazoned across the chest (though he would never, because can you imagine how that would look with the banker’s suit?).
As long as the U.S. President remains a screaming crisis, everything Canadians are reacting positively to in Mr. Carney stays relevant. If Mr. Trump’s threats become like Niagara Falls after you stand beside it for a while – roaring away in the background, so loud and wild and constant that you just stop noticing it – that could dial up the appetite for change that Canadians were feeling so sharply just a few months ago.
After Mr. Carney’s remarks, he took questions, and a local reporter asked what he had to say to the Niagara Falls community, where people’s lives are built on international trade and everyone is wondering if things will ever go back to normal. When the reporter gestured to the U.S. just on the other side of the still snow-clogged river, Mr. Carney turned toward the American entry point and made a motion like he was Spider-Man flinging a web at Mr. Trump.
“Our focus is on building at home and building a new relationship, a new economic-security relationship with the United States,” he said. “It will be better than it is now, but it won’t go back to what it was before.”
When the event finished, Mr. Carney spent a few brief moments glad-handing with the local candidates, and he stopped to greet nine-year-old Adeline – whose grandparents own the hotel – wishing her a happy Easter and complimenting her rainbow pompon headband and sequin jacket.
As Mr. Carney went to leave the rooftop, someone commented that the savage wind had finally settled down.
“See? I gave a speech and now the wind has stopped,” he said with a laugh. “Everything’s calm, everything’s under control.”
The crass, perverse political truth is that calm winds are not what will make for friendly sailing for Mr. Carney, with 10 days to go in the election campaign.