Carney is the snooze button that change-averse Canadians crave: Selley

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For months, the Canadian commentariat has been seized with Pierre Poilievre’s chances in a Donald Trump world. Would a second Trump presidency hurt the Conservative leader, because people would see him Poilievre as an unwanted Trump-ian figure? Or might it actually benefit Poilievre, as Canadians tested the Liberals’ pathetically lazy framing of him as “Maple MAGA” against what he actually says and does, and realized how very stupid that framing is?

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I was more inclined to believe the latter scenario, but the former scenario, so far, seems to be playing out. Philippe J. Fournier’s cumulative poll tracker 338canada.com has the Conservatives at around 39 per cent, down six points from January — while the Liberals are up 13 points since then, at 33 per cent. (That’s the vote share the Liberals won in 2021.) Team Red seems to have stolen intended voters from Team Blue and barely-treading-water Team Orange in equal measure.

Ironically I suspect what Poilievre is up against is one of the most basic and powerful forces in Canadian politics: conservatism, but in one of its purest forms, namely suspicion of change — especially in a crisis. Recall that Canada saw 10 elections during the pandemic — one federal and nine provincial. The incumbent parties won eight of them, in some cases even as their health-care and long-term care systems collapsed on their heads and their “pandemic preparedness” folders turned out to contain nothing but some old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.

No question, there are problems here specific to Poilievre and the Conservatives. The Royal Order of Laurentian Elites nearly fainted when Poilievre started saying  “Canada is broken,” but people seemed to calm down about it and engage with it once it became clear most Canadians agreed: 70 per cent, according to a Postmedia-Leger poll last year.

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Saying “Canada is broken” nowadays is likely to get you branded a traitor by a mob of people who think Beaver Tails, Tim Horton’s, Molson advertisements and a Tragically Hip playlist comprise a national identity. Canada can be broken and Trump can be a lunatic at the same time, but nationalist outbursts have little time for such nuance.

Like COVID, Trump’s demands have exposed massive weaknesses on our part that we should want to fix for our own sake

Especially with the polls as they are — which will tempt whoever wins the Liberal leadership race on Sunday to trigger an election in short order — it might behoove Poilievre to start putting more meat on his policy bones. (One example: What exactly does he intend to do with CBC’s English and French operations?)

It’s also not Poilievre’s fault that some of his supporters also support Trump, or at least tell pollsters they do. Movement conservatives tend to support other movement conservatives, even if their policies aren’t identifiably conservative. I’m old enough to remember when progressive pundits were dismayed that so many conservative-voting Canadians supported George W. Bush.

Poilievre couldn’t really be speaking out any more forcefully against Trump than he is right now — he’s demanding more retaliation than the Liberal government has thus far implemented — and at considerable risk of pushing the hardcore nihilist/burn-it-all-down wing of the party toward Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party (or just convincing them not to vote).

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Meanwhile, as we saw during the pandemic, the rally-around-the-flag effect is probably even enough to pump some air into Justin Trudeau’s sad balloon. Some of us regard with despair the news that Trudeau got into a heated and profane exchange with Trump over dairy-industry protectionism — i.e., in defence of more expensive groceries for Canadians. Others, I suspect, metaphorically punched the air. Fight, fight, fight!

Change is unavoidable in the forthcoming election, of course. And by rights, Canadians should want it: Like COVID, Trump’s demands on border security and military spending, and his obviously sincere belief in the power of tariffs — as untethered from reality and sense as these demands are — have exposed massive weaknesses on our part that we should want to fix for our own sake. Poilievre should speak more to us about those fixes.

Mark Carney never made any sense to me as a potential saviour for the Liberals. The most obvious recent event they needed to replicate was Kathleen Wynne’s jaw-dropping majority win in 2014 for the Ontario Liberals, after Dalton McGuinty had driven the party into a pond and left it there to drown. Wynne was a proven, veteran campaigner. Carney is … well, certainly not an “outsider,” but this is his first go at politics, and it certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

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But Carney seems set to win the party’s leadership race on Sunday, anyway. He’s boring, and he’s a technocrat, and Trudeau is neither. And neither is Poilievre. A boring technocrat might well look like a safe harbour for a lot of Canadians. Poilievre needs to put a more positive spin on the changes we so desperately need.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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