Matt Gurney: Carney's change conundrum

The Liberals have heartily embraced Carney as their change agent, but have no explanation for why they tolerated, or championed, what apparently needed changing.

Canadian Press photo.

By: Matt Gurney

As we finally reach the end of this strange campaign, The Line will honour an old newspaper tradition — no political content or endorsements on election day, at least until the polls close. On Monday, you get some peace and quiet to decide.

For my final comment before you shuffle off to a church basement or community centre near you, I want to talk about the central problem of Mark Carney's appeal to the voters. If you'll indulge me a little alliteration, let's call it Carney's Conundrum. Carney is offering himself as a change agent, despite leading the incumbent party, because he is the change. I'm not accusing him of any vanity there. That is the literal pitch — "Justin Trudeau is gone, I am Mark Carney, and that's change enough."

But that requires voters to accept one of two things. And each of those choices brings its own problem.

But before we get to the options, let's talk about the notion of Carney as a change agent. A lot of the time, the offer was implicit — the Liberals have walked a fine line between abandoning some Trudeau-era baggage without directly attacking the old boss. This sometimes created some truly absurd moments, such as when voters were presented with Liberals celebrating the end of the carbon tax, even though those very same Liberals had very recently been defending said tax.

But it wasn’t always implicit. Carney's message of "I alone am change enough" was explicit more than once. The moment of the campaign that really crystallized this for me was when a reporter asked Carney why voters should believe him when he made a promise, specifically about expanding national parks, that the Liberals had made before and hadn't delivered on. And Carney replied,"It's not an old promise if I make it. ‘Kay? It's a promise. It is a new promise. And it's different."

Carney got mocked for that. But I think that it accurately articulated what Carney is offering the voters: “Forget the last 10 years of Liberal government and all the accumulated baggage because I am here, and I am change enough.”

I don't accuse the man of arrogance or vainglory, to be clear. I'm just trying to underscore that that is necessarily the core of Carney’s offer. He's leading the Liberal party that Justin Trudeau was leading three months ago. The cabinet is smaller but still Trudeau's cabinet. The outlook and worldview are still fundamentally Trudeau's. And though there's been some changes at the senior level of the PMO, the staffing cadre that would run a Carney government is basically the same as the one that ran Trudeau's. If you’re buying that Carney represents change, you’re necessarily buying that Carney himself is that change.

Okay. But. Coupla points.

To accept the notion of Carney + Trudeau's government = Change, you have to accept one of two things. First, that Carney's an unusually gifted leader, personally capable of fixing whatever ailed Trudeau's government so much that even Liberals gave up on it. Or second, you have to accept that Trudeau himself was holding back a government that was otherwise ready, willing and able to deliver change.

Neither option works.

Let's look first at the notion of Carney as unusually gifted. He's clearly an intelligent man, and I genuinely respect the resume and accomplishments. But his foray into politics thus far has been not particularly brilliant. Even my Liberal friends agree, with relief, that Carney was able to turn in a decent campaign. To the extent it ever deviated much from a baseline level of acceptability, it was probably to the downside, with weird gaffes or flops. Nothing you wouldn't expect from a rookie, mind you, but that's the point, isn't it? Carney generally performed … fine. It’s hard to think of a widely agreed-upon moment of excellence. His best-received moment seems to have been his Jon Stewart interview.

It was a fine interview. But it shouldn’t have set the gold standard. So yeah. It's hard to buy any suggestion that Carney himself is a natural political prodigy based on what we've seen so far. Because what we've seen so far is solidly okay. He's seemed like a genuinely bright and serious guy learning a new gig on the fly. And that about fits, doesn't it?

So that brings us to option two. If we accept that Carney isn't some unusually gifted political talent, and since Carney is bringing Trudeau's team along with him, the only remaining variable here is that something was wrong with Trudeau. That Trudeau was himself, probably in company with his key staff, The Problem, full stop. Carney's implicit message to the voters, in effect, is "Trudeau couldn't or wouldn't, but I can and will."

I don’t believe that. But even if we accept the premise, that brings us to the crux of Carney's second major problem here. If Justin Trudeau was himself the totality of the failure — and again, that's the essence of Carney's pitch to voters — then, my friends, that was an extremely solvable problem, one that rather conspicuously went unsolved.

Buying into this theory requires us to do more than just dump all the anger and frustration millions of Canadians have been feeling for years onto Trudeau and Katie Telford and a few others. It requires us to accept that for the last few years, while the country was aching for change, the Liberal party — Carney's party, recall — could have fixed things by just ... dumping Trudeau.

And dumping Trudeau wasn't impossible. They just didn’t have the garumba. There were a few furtive efforts to kick him to the curb, all put down rapidly by Trudeau's PMO. There were whispers and leaks to the press about how everyone wanted him gone. There was a wave of Liberals suddenly remembering they had families they should spend more time with when it became clear that Trudeau wanted to stick it out.

But in the end, getting rid of Trudeau proved shockingly easy. Chrystia Freeland did it with a letter, a copy of which she tweeted. The process of Trudeau actually quitting took some weeks to play out, but it was all over for him the moment Freeland published the letter in December.

Freeland is an intelligent woman, of course, but she is no political giant. Indeed, if anything, politics has been where she least excelled. But she still took out Trudeau with a mere letter. She could have done that six months before. Or a year earlier, or years earlier. And so could have others. The Liberal caucus, those gormless weasels, could have put on a proper coup at basically any time. Cabinet could have quit en masse.

It would have worked. And the ultimate speed of Trudeau's collapse proves all this — he wasn't a giant. He wasn't invulnerable. He just didn't face any real opposition or internal accountability.

And that's the real flashing danger sign. The Liberals have heartily embraced Carney as their change agent, but have no explanation for why they were all so damned willing to go along with, and even champion, what they apparently agreed needed to be changed. See again those Liberals who pivoted instantly from defending the carbon tax to bragging about how much they’d saved you at the pump once it was gone.

These aren’t serious people. They could have been the change. They could have forced the change. But they just sat there, like unfortunate customers taken hostage during a bank robbery, waiting to be rescued, as the country got angrier and angrier at the accumulating failures and hardships their government had no plan to address.

And when the rescuer finally came, he wasn't a superhero or a commander or a supernatural being. It was a banker who doesn't really like answering questions and is prone to the occasional weird gaffe.

If that's all it took to put the Liberal party back on track, that's not a credit to Carney. That's an astonishing indictment of the Liberal party, who clearly could have done better and just ... didn't? Couldn't? Hadn't quite gotten around to it?

Or what? What’s the version of this that makes them look good and deserving of even more power?

So there we have it. Carney's conundrum. The only way to buy him as a change agent is to accept one of two things, neither of which has much evidence in favour of it — that he is spectacularly competent, or that he's just a pretty normal guy learning the ropes in a new job, and that job just happens to be leading a thoroughly broken party that could have saved itself, but didn't.

We've been told over and over again, including by Mark Carney himself, that this is an important election. And I agree with him. I just wish I had more faith that Canadians will actually get any of the change we broadly seemed to agree we needed. Because I just don't see how this man can lead that party without it looking, sounding and feeling a lot like what had Canadians so angry as recently as a few months ago.

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter. Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.