Mark Carney hits the ice as hockey and politics renew robust relationship

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He looked small and inadequately protected for someone daring to join a morning skate with a National Hockey League team. He wore a team cap instead of a helmet, and no shoulder pads to give at least the illusion of hidden strength.

He wore No. 24, as befitting the 24th Prime Minister of Canada.

Mark Carney turned 60 on Sunday; on Thursday, he was skating with the Edmonton Oilers; on Friday, he was being pilloried.

“Infuriating!” complained popular Ottawa radio talk show host Bill Carroll on the local CTV outlet. Carroll saw the publicity stunt as an unnecessary “expense,” “showboating” and “a terrible look.”

Social media was quick to post videos of the brand-new prime minister skating in from the blueline and firing a shot that missed the empty net. Whoops!

It was a scene instantly familiar to those Canadians old enough to remember the spring election of 1974, when then Conservative leader Robert Stanfield – often referred to as “the best prime minister Canada never had” – appeared on the front page of this newspaper awkwardly fumbling a football.

This was back, significantly, in the days when the Conservative Party allowed the media, photographers included, to ride along on their campaign planes and buses – something that will not happen in the spring election of 2025, expected to be called Sunday.

CP photographer Doug Ball happened to be one of those taking up a media seat on the Stanfield plane, which refueled in North Bay on its way from Halifax to a rally in Saskatoon.

To kill time, a party staffer brought out a football and began tossing it around on the tarmac. Stanfield joined in. Ball, a much-respected photographer, shot a full roll of shots, several of them showing Stanfield ably catching the ball. He then dutifully filed to his office. He had no say in the decision, but the shot that became part of the election story was, no surprise, one showing the leader dropping the ball.

Ball would later write that he only learned what shot had made the papers next morning, as the media again boarded the Tory plane. Southam columnist Charles Lynch turned to him and announced, “Trudeau just won the election.” Which he would.

This, remember, was decades before the assassin powers of social media.

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Before Thursday’s morning skate with the NHL team he grew up worshipping, Carney was expected in several polls to either win the upcoming election or, at the very least, keep today’s Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre from the majority government he had been expected to win only short weeks earlier.

Yes, Carney did miss the empty net, but he also showed a deft skate kick of a puck to his stick that suggested he did once play the game. In fact, he played well enough to make the Harvard University hockey team as a goaltender alongside future Oilers general manager Peter Chiarelli in the era when goalies were usually the smallest kid on a team and hardly the behemoths of today’s NHL.

It is also worth noting that while football had nothing to do with that 1974 election campaign, hockey seems very much a part of this curious and baffling 2025 Canadian federal election.

Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump announced his hissy-fit tariffs against Canada and other nations, hockey has come to symbolize the pushback Canadians feel about what has been happening the two North American neighbours.

The Team Canada victory over Team USA in the wildly successful 4 Nations Face-Off was as much metaphor as sporting event.

The booing of the American national anthem at NHL hockey games played in Canada has become as common as the razzing of bad calls by the officials.

The Canadian battle cry against Trump and his tariffs has become “Elbows Up!” – a tribute to the late Gordie Howe and the manner in which Howe would skate into corners and do whatever was necessary to come out of those corners with the puck.

Hockey and politics are hardly strangers to each other in this country.

NHL Hall-of-Famer Frank Mahovlich became a Canadian senator. Another former Toronto Maple Leafs star, Red Kelly, won eight Stanley Cups and also spent three years as a Liberal Member of Parliament while still playing in the NHL. Hall-of-Fame goaltender Ken Dryden served in prime minister Paul Martin’s Liberal cabinet after retiring from the game. Syl Apps, yet another Leaf, was an MPP and cabinet minister in the Ontario legislature.

Thursday just also happened to be Bobby Orr’s 77th birthday, and it was once rumoured that the great Boston Bruins defenceman, a friend of then-prime minister Brian Mulroney, might run for the Conservatives in the 1984 federal election. The sitting Conservative member for Parry Sound-Muskoka, Stan Darling – think of the cartoon Mr. Magoo made human – was quick to shoot back: “If he wants to go into the corners with me, let him take his chances.” Orr chose not to seek the nomination.

Orr, MAGA worshippers and haters will recall, openly endorsed Donald Trump in the 2020 election by taking out a full-page ad in a New Hampshire newspaper, calling Trump, “the kind of teammate I want.”

Four years later, the Canadian hockey star cozying up to Trump turned out to be Orr’s main rival when it comes to being named the greatest player of all-time: Wayne Gretzky.

So let us all agree then – hockey and politics are, like it or not, joined at the hip pad.

“Best sport in the world,” Carney said as he dressed in his Oilers gear. “Best team in the world, best country in the world.”

That evening, his beloved Oilers fell 4-3 in overtime to the Winnipeg Jets, with star captain Connor McDavid forced to leave the game with a lower-body injury.

“Carney’s Curse,” shouted the Sun papers, reviving long-dormant memories of “Stanfield’s Slip.”

Or will it, instead, show the cerebral, establishment Carney as a more regular Canadian, clearly in love with the game that matters more than politics?

Let the writ and puck drop.