The contest that saw Mark Carney emerge as Liberal Party leader and soon-to-be Canada’s prime minister has turned out to be a boring fait accompli.
The drama that led inevitably, it seems, to Carney’s persuasive coronation on Sunday evening occurred late last December when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s once-reliable confidante and trusted deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, played Judas.
Her surprising resignation as finance minister tipped a wounded and unpopular prime minister – inside and outside his restive caucus – over the parliamentary edge, forcing Trudeau to admit the obvious: Canada’s prince charming was no longer a prince, nor, apparently, that charming.
Trudeau was, instead, considered a loser and a liability who had to be replaced quickly to save Liberals, if possible, from what appeared to be a historic shellacking courtesy of the Conservative Party chief, Pierre Poilievre.
If Freeland thought that her premeditated betrayal would be rewarded and vault the one-time foreign minister into the prime minister’s office, she miscalculated – badly.
She was abandoned by many of her cabinet and caucus colleagues, who flocked in eager masse to Carney’s side. Freeland’s humiliation was confirmed when she received only a little over eight percent of first-ballot votes.
Still, I suppose, Liberals will be grateful to Freeland for having triggered the domino-like events that, in the end, salvaged the party’s chances to continue to do what they believe is their almost divine right: to govern Canada, unobstructed by irritating opposition parties.
Carney’s big and anticipated victory was not a “reinvention” of the Liberal Party. It was, rather, in keeping with its ruthless tradition of disposing with yesterday’s has-beens in favour of tomorrow’s saviour to hold onto their prestigious jobs, and, more importantly, power.
Now, a new and extraordinary drama is about to unfold. It may well constitute the most consequential federal election in Canada’s relatively young history.
Shortly after he is sworn in as prime minister, Carney, a former central banker, is expected to visit Governor General Mary Simon and trigger a national vote.
The one – perhaps, the only – issue that will, barring the unexpected, dominate the campaign ought to be framed as a question: Who will save Canada from Donald Trump’s fever dream of annexing America’s resource-rich northern neighbour into, officially, the union as its 51st state?
Until the mercurial US president’s imperial designs came into shocking focus, Poilievre looked comfortably poised to become prime minister with a tsunami-like majority to boot.
With his signature coarse, go-for-the-jugular modus operandi, Poilievre had framed the upcoming election as a choice between Canada’s “broken” present – fashioned by an exhausted, out-of-touch Liberal Party – and a prosperous, even egalitarian, future where “left-behind” Canadians could share in the country’s abundant wealth and promise.
It was working.
That is, until Trump returned to the Oval Office and fixed his quixotic, stiff-tariff-imposing sights on a “junior partner” that had – despite repeated and studied warnings – forged, for generations, closer ties with the world’s most powerful economy.
Suddenly, the political calculus had changed and so had the defining quandary confronting Canadians: The question was no longer what kind of future the country would mould but whether the country had a future at all.
The seismic shift has seen the Conservative Party’s and Poilievre’s popularity plummet, while Liberals have resurrected their on-life-support fortunes by lambasting Poilievre’s “angry” “divisiveness” and painting him as incapable and unwilling to challenge his “mentor” – Trump.
Carney pressed the stinging point home in his acceptance speech.
“Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered, because a person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said.
Fair or not, Poilievre has given his critics ample ammunition to seize on and exploit this caustic line of attack.
Poilievre and his shadow cabinet have reveled in practicing the kind of charged, character-assassination rhetoric that was – save the opponents being singled out – a near-verbatim mirror of Trump’s corrosive crassness and ugliness.
The party’s prescriptions to “fix” a “broken Canada” were also a facsimile of Trump’s insular, “America first” script – take a machete to the “size and waste” of government, slash immigration, reward “hard work” while paring the “welfare state”, demonise the press, and stamp out freedom-of-speech suffocating “wokeness” and the prevailing “cancel culture”.
“Timbit Trump” – as Poilievre’s detractors have taken lately to describing him – gave tangible expression to his attraction to, and affinity for, Trumpian-style politics when he celebrated the occupation of Canada’s sedate capital, Ottawa, by a far-right mob of MAGA-flag-waving truckers and their burn-it-down confederates who held the city and nation ransom for weeks.
Try as he might, Poilievre may not be able to shake the undeniable and uncharitable associations and connections – in words, deeds, and temperament – to a president intent on forcing Canada to capitulate to his whims and demands by economic coercion.
That already prickly job has been made harder in light of a recent public opinion poll that, if accurate, reveals that rather than rejecting Trump’s adventurism, an alarming 18 percent of Tory supporters whom Poilievre leads admitted that they wanted Canada’s confederation dissolved in order to join the United States as its 51st state.
Of course, Poilievre has rejected accusations that he is Trump’s obedient poodle and the Conservatives have launched a searing counteroffensive questioning Carney’s fidelity to Canada.
Conservative-produced TV ads claim that while he was board chairman of one of Canada’s largest publicly traded companies, Brookfield Asset Management (BAM), Carney approved moving the firm’s head office from Toronto to “Donald Trump’s hometown” – New York City.
Carney has downplayed his role in that decision, insisting it was formally made by the BAM board after he resigned as chair in January.
But, reportedly, company documents show the board approved the move in October 2024, and the decision was affirmed by shareholders at a meeting in late January.
The Liberal’s momentum may have stalled.
Who will prevail will likely be determined by whether Carney or Poilievre can convince enough Canadians that they are the maple-leaf-flag-draped embodiment of Captain Canada.
Although he faces challenges, Poilievre cannot and should not be underestimated. He has devoted much of his adult life to honing his skills to convey a simple, clear message with a convincing measure of conviction and sincerity.
Carney is not a retail politician. He is, by nature and disposition, a technocrat who lacks the appealing ability to combine plain speaking with an inviting dose of accessible charisma.
Canada’s fate may rest on the outcome of a battle waged by Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney over the soul of an anxious nation worried to its core about what comes next.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.