Liberal leader Mark Carney gestures, as he boards an aircraft, after calling for an election, in Ottawa, on March 23.Blair Gable/Reuters
They say that in politics, timing is everything. On Sunday, as the long-awaited federal election campaign finally kicked off, there was a funhouse-mirror quality to the way everyone played with the notion of time.
Liberal Leader Mark Carney made the ritualistic visit to Rideau Hall to ask the Governor-General to kill off this Parliament and send Canadians to the polls, and then he stepped to a lectern just outside the front doors to speak to the media.
There, he offered a gauzy, nostalgic nod to the launch of his leadership campaign in an Edmonton hockey arena – exactly two months ago. He also highlighted the work of his government, including kiboshing the consumer price on carbon, measures to help workers hurt by U.S. tariffs and, newly pitched on Sunday, a tax cut aimed at middle- and low-income Canadians.
This is, of course, the standard stuff of incumbent-government campaigns: Here are all the nice things we did, perhaps you’d like some more? Less standard is the lifespan of the specific government getting the retrospective treatment here: Nine whole days since Mr. Carney was last at Rideau Hall to be sworn in as Prime Minister with his new, svelte cabinet.
“What’s important is that the government has a mandate from the Canadian people to finish the job,” he said on Sunday. “To finish the job of building that Canadian economy, to finish the job of diversifying our trading partners, and to have a strong mandate to stand up to Donald Trump and the Americans and negotiate the best deal for Canadians.”
A few kilometres away, on a terrace at the Canadian Museum of History, perched above the Ottawa River, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre started his own launch speech slightly before Mr. Carney’s, accompanied by his wife, Anaida, and their two small children.
He offered a few remarks of empathy for how “worried, angry and anxious” Canadians were feeling about Mr. Trump’s threats to tariff Canada into the ground.
And then he went back to the same argument he’s been making since he became Conservative Leader: that the Liberals have broken everything within reach, and that everything that’s wrong is their doing. It was as though Mr. Poilievre had retreated to his own time warp, one in which no one big and loud and papaya-hued had done anything major in the past few months.
“We cannot afford another lost Liberal decade,” the Conservative Leader said. “We need to put Canada first for a change with a new Conservative government to axe taxes, reward work, unleash entrepreneurs, harvest our resources, make things here, build homes for our youth, secure our borders, rebuild our military, honour our history and raise our flag.”
Maybe it was the weather that was making people’s mental clocks weird. Ottawa is currently in the devious embrace of false spring, when the sunshine and colour of the air whisper of flowers and green shoots, but the wind will shear the exposed skin right off your bones.
Once they’d both laid out their campaign cases, in fairly desultory fashion, it was clear that the Liberal and Conservative leaders agree heartily that this is an election about Canadians seeking change – they just disagree deeply on which one of them gets to wear that sash.
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Mr. Poilievre positions himself as a corrective, in both substance and tone, to everything people feel went off the rails during this past decade of Liberal rule. Mr. Carney, meanwhile, is attempting the trickier jujitsu move of being something new and distinct. This, despite wearing the same partisan sweater as a government so wildly unpopular a few months ago that the Ottawa bubble spent time in the fall contemplating whether it could even survive as a political party.
But that was then and this is now. The red and blue lines on the polling graph are no longer separated by 20 points but instead pretty much braided together – life comes at you fast.
For weeks, the widely rumoured election date was either May 5 or April 28. In the end, Mr. Carney opted for the shortest campaign permitted by Elections Canada – 36 days from the launch on Sunday – and so Canadians will vote at the end of April. Asked why he was sending people to the polls now, with Mr. Trump ready to lurch into attack mode at any moment, the Liberal Leader talked about the need to seek immediate marching orders from voters in order to deal with the existential threat.
As always in politics, there’s the outside-voice noble reason to do something and then there’s the real reason. The polls are smiling on the Liberals at the moment, so it’s no wonder that Mr. Carney, with the incumbent’s power to decide when to pull the chute, is trying to trap this moment in amber.
But here’s what’s great about wild political swings, beyond the crass entertainment value: They’re not caused by wind patterns or random-event generators. They’re fed by people who are paying attention.
Canadians might be scared or enraged or incredulous or exhausted by the aggression from the south that caused all of this. They’re probably all of those things, in fact – but they’re also clearly listening and watching closely.
What voters think and want is what’s caused this frantic blur of change across the political landscape for the past few months, and they will almost certainly set more of that into motion over the next 36 days. And then the decision is theirs.