Justin Trudeau speaks during the Liberal Leadership event in Ottawa.Cole Burston/Reuters
The Liberal Party’s leadership announcement on Sunday night kicked off with a brief video chronicling “157 years of history” for the party. It travelled from grainy long-ago moments rendered in black and white to a sleeves-rolled-up Justin Trudeau reaching out to a surging crowd, which itself feels like a million political years ago.
Already, the Prime Minister belonged to the party’s history books, not to its present.
The strangeness of the whole evening – some combination of wistful, triumphant, tentative and amnesiac – showed itself immediately in the way the crowd reacted to this instant-nostalgia of their outgoing leader.
The Prime Minister, who precipitated the Liberal leadership race by announcing in January that he would be stepping down upon the selection of his successor, spoke of Canadians pulling together.
The Canadian Press
Mr. Trudeau had become so toxically unpopular that he was dragging his party into the polling basement, to the point that the entire fall was occupied by his caucus trying to shove him out the door in slow motion, before Chrystia Freeland forced the issue with her resignation as finance minister just before Christmas.
But on Sunday, when Mr. Trudeau’s image flashed on the screen, the Liberals who had packed the convention hall roared in loving appreciation.
The whole tone and purpose of the event had shifted wildly, too. Until three months ago, the leadership race to succeed the Prime Minister would have been selecting a new captain for the Titanic when her stern was already pointed at the sky.
But now, some combination of Mr. Trudeau resigning, Donald Trump’s constant predatory attacks on Canada and the possibility of a new Liberal leader in Mark Carney has upended the public opinion landscape so that the winner named Sunday night may not simply be presiding over a Liberal bloodbath.
When Mr. Trudeau took the stage, he thanked everyone who had carried him and his party over the past dozen years of his leadership, and said that as much as he would like to offer them all a rest, one wouldn’t be coming because the country needed them.
“Make no mistake, this is a nation-defining moment. Democracy is not a given. Freedom is not a given. Even Canada is not a given,” he said. “None of those happen by accident, none of them will continue without effort. It takes courage, it takes sacrifice. It takes hope and hard work.” That last line, delivered with a crooked grin, drew huge cheers for calling back to one of Mr. Trudeau’s original political slogans, a postcard from another time.
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Former prime minister Jean Chrétien took the stage next, greeted at full rock-star volume. His speech paid tribute to all that Canada has going for it, which he positioned as a rebuke to both Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s “Canada is broken” message and to Mr. Trump’s imperialist ambitions.
The lengthy speech also felt very much like a valedictory address for a towering figure of Canadian politics who just celebrated his 91st birthday in January.
“I can tell you that my parents were not millionaires from New York,” Mr. Chrétien said, as the crowd roared in appreciative laughter. “They were workers from Shawinigan, but my mother taught us good manners. She would have been ashamed of me if I had treated anyone the way that the President treated my Prime Minister and the President in Ukraine in the last few weeks.”
A short while later, when Liberal Party president Sachit Mehra finally began to read out the voting results, the crowd turned into a forest of phones held aloft to record the moment.
A candidate needed to take at least 50 per cent of the points to win, and once it became clear that Montreal businessman Frank Baylis, former cabinet minister Karina Gould and Ms. Freeland had each finished with relatively tiny vote hauls, there was an audible “whoa!” on the floor as people tried to work out the mental math. The announcement of Mr. Carney’s huge margin of victory – a hair short of 86 per cent – was drowned out by a roar.
When he took the stage, the new leader thanked his competitors for the energy and ideas they’d chipped in, and he paid tribute to the cabinet ministers who had remained in their posts “to serve Canada directly during this great crisis.” He spoke of the need for the next prime minister to build a sense of unity and common good among Canadians.
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His pitch to the country at large was painted on an almost wartime scale.
“Right now, all Canadians are being asked to serve in their own ways,” Mr. Carney said. “We’re all being called to stand up for each other and for the Canadian way of life.”
Mark Carney, who won the Liberal leadership to replace Justin Trudeau, spoke of the differences between Canadians and Americans in his acceptance speech.
Reuters
Mr. Trump loomed over the proceedings like a giant, menacing Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
Mr. Carney invoked his previous roles as governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England when he talked about his “long experience in crises” and how he learned about the need to focus on what you can change – strengthening and unifying the Canadian economy – as opposed to what you can’t control, which is the man in the White House.
“I know that these are dark days – dark days brought by a country we can no longer trust. We are getting over the shock, but let us never forget the lessons,” Mr. Carney said. “We have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other.”
His speech stretched on about one-third too long and started to double back on itself, eventually leaking some of the air out of the room.
Luckily for him, there was a lot more air in that room to begin with than there would have been a few short months ago.