“I am an outsider,” Mark Carney told Daily Show host Jon Stewart. Laying a claim to some kind of outsider-ness seems to be critical to running for the Liberal leadership.
Just what Mr. Carney is outside takes some defining. He’s not a stranger to the circles of power, where he has laboured, after an investment banking career at Goldman Sachs, as a senior official in the finance department, as governor of the Bank of Canada and as governor of the Bank of England.
His only real claim to outsider status comes from remaining outside Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, and in the current race for the Liberal leadership, that matters.
Ask the long list of Liberal cabinet ministers who were once absolutely going to run for the leadership but now are running away.
Twenty months ago, at the 2023 Liberal convention in Ottawa, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne was darting around to party members, vigorously shaking hands with anyone he could corner. Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly was posing with Liberals for selfies. And Transport Minister Anita Anand was about to be demoted from defence minister to Treasury Board president in part because she campaigned too aggressively for the leadership.
Now they are all out. Mr. Champagne said Tuesday he will instead work to save Canada from the threat of U.S. tariffs; Ms. Joly and Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc have both said something similar. Ms. Anand isn’t even going to run for her Oakville seat in the next election.
The polls make the chances of a Liberal win in the next election look pretty slim, so some will hope there’ll be another race in a few years.
But at this moment, the prospects look far worse for a politician closely tied to Mr. Trudeau. Distance from him, and his record, has already shaped the field for the leadership race.
It appears that the only member of Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet mounting a bid will be Government House Leader Karina Gould, who can run as the only millennial, next-generation candidate against 50-something contenders with phones full of bankers.
Former B.C. premier Christy Clark had been planning for months to run as the outsider candidate, but she had gone so far outside the Liberal Party in 2022 that she had joined the Conservatives, inexplicably told an interviewer she hadn’t, then later she admitted she had – all of which was followed by the sound of her campaign imploding.
Ms. Clark pulled out of the race Tuesday, saying there just wasn’t enough to time to mount a campaign or learn French. Which seemed odd, because surely Mr. Trudeau had left his resignation as late as he possibly could.
Even former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland has seen her bid fuelled by an outsider moment, boosted by goodwill from Liberals who believe she deserves the Order of Canada for finally forcing Mr. Trudeau’s hand with her resignation.
Suddenly, a politician who spent nine years in Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet and five years as his deputy has some separation from him. Some of Mr. Trudeau’s staffers are backing Mr. Carney to stop her. But her biggest weakness remains the fact that as leader she would not be able to pivot away from defending the most unpopular aspects of Mr. Trudeau’s record.
That leaves Mr. Carney as the candidate who stayed out of Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, and the Liberal caucus – which took some willpower because the PM asked him at least three times. He’s never done electoral politics at all, in fact, and has to hope that distance from Mr. Trudeau’s record will be more important than his inexperience as a political campaigner.
But his claim to outsider status can’t be stretched any further. He had policy-making power in office and spent years talking to world leaders and CEOs. Mr. Trudeau took his calls. And Mr. Trudeau’s former strategist Gerald Butts is a key figure in Mr. Carney’s campaign.
If he wins, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will be making a lot of those things. But then, Mr. Poilievre has been an MP since he was 25. Don’t expect to see an outsider leading a major party in the next election.
But in the Liberal leadership race, distance from Mr. Trudeau is already a big issue.