Special Dispatch: In shocking twist, Carney pulls off come-from-behind squeaker

Kidding! It was a blowout. And man, was it ever a blowout for poor Freeland.

Hello folks!

As promised, we here at The Line waited with bated breath on Sunday night to hear the outcome of the Liberal leadership race and … no surprises were had! We didn’t need to wait. Mark Carney won the race with 85.9 per cent of the “points” on the first ballot. (The Liberals used a formula to give each riding a fairer say, but the “points” awarded tracked fairly closely with the actual percentage of votes cast.)

We admit that that was a bit of a surprise. The outcome of the race seemed pretty clear to us after the potential leaders announced their fundraising totals, which, showed Carney with a decisive lead no matter which way the dollars were tabulated. But to see second-place candidate and long-time minister-of-everything Chrystia Freeland earn only roughly 11,000 of the more than 151,000 ballots cast was a bit of a shock. That’s an astonishingly poor showing with someone of Freeland’s profile — in fact, while we acknowledge reports that the Liberals’ online voting system was a bit of a nightmare, we have to admit that the total number of votes strikes us as rather low, considering this was a contest to select the PM-designate of a governing party.

By comparison, more than 400,000 people voted in the last federal Conservative race — a race that required a paid membership, unlike the Liberals.

Apples to apples? Perhaps not. The Liberals were running a race with a truncated timeline, and it is also possible that their own internal online system spooked a lot of would-be voters.

Regardless, Carney is now rightly enshrined as the head of the party and, by default, also the prime minister-designate, we guess. And, yes, it’s extremely unusual for someone who is not a sitting MP, has never won a general election, and never served in politics to take on that particular role. It’s not improper under our system, but it is weird. We don’t know what to say beyond: these are weird times, and the voters, by all accounts, will soon have a chance to decide how much any of that matters to them.

At a minimum, from the numbers we can descry both genuine enthusiasm for Carney among Liberals and a collective understanding by party stalwarts that a page turn from the Trudeau era is painfully overdue.

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And that brings us to the first of several reactions we had to Carney’s speech. Right off the top, it was a perfectly good speech, ably delivered. Political rhetorical masterclass? No — but that would be an unrealistic bar for a man with Carney’s credentials to reach on his first outing as prime minister-designate. But was he a shambolic disaster? Far from it.

Carney presents himself well; a sensible, adult technocrat who seems to be refreshingly serious about the country and its problems. Given recent global events, we suspect that a lot of Canadians will be reaching for this. Donald Trump is a tonic for populist impulses, and given the nature of the existential threat the president poses to this country, we have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of Canadians — even Canadians who broadly agree with Pierre Poilievre — are going to see in Carney a sober antidote and a reassuring throwback to the best of Canada’s yesteryears.

To be honest, we even felt the pull of that appeal ourselves. For a man with no real frontline political experience, we have to give Carney (or the remnants of Team Trudeau managing him) credit: this is an individual who understands what the ballot question of the next election is going to be. If he leans into that and stays focused on his message, and if Trump continues to behave the way he has, we don’t rule out that Carney could win. We aren’t betting the farm on it, but he has a better shot than Trudeau — and that is, after all, the point of all this, isn’t it?

With respect to the Conservatives, in the year of our lord 2025, voters aren’t going to marking the X for the party that can Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, and Stop the Crime. They’re going to be voting for the leader who can make the most credible case that he’s best equipped to handle Donald Trump, and the threat Trump represents to Canada.

Right now, we at The Line really don’t know how the voters will answer that ballot question. The Liberal party is spent. The Conservatives still have the money and the mo. We certainly don’t rule out the importance of an election campaign — nor do we put our bets on Carney over Poilievre, a seasoned rhetorician, in a live debate. We also don’t think that Carney, for all his carping about the Conservatives’ lack of a plan, has come up with anything particularly detailed, solid or compelling.

But what we are starting to see is that one of these men has a very clear grasp of what the ballot question is going to be — while the other one consistently struggles to rise to the moment, and as a result comes off as comparatively petty and, well, small. We suspect Canadians need to see Pierre Poilievre chomp an apple in the face of Donald Trump. And the fact that the Conservative leader seems happy to trade in utter contempt for everyone except the U.S. President is a problem, whether the Conservatives want to admit it to themselves or not.

As an aside, we at The Line have always rolled our eyes at conspiracy theories about Poilievre’s lack of security clearance — and we still don’t think there’s anything more to this decision than Poilievre’s stated claim that he believes this clearance has been weaponized to muzzle criticism of the government. That strikes us as reasonable, given how this government operates in all areas of national security. But the decision can be reasonably interpreted by the non-conspiratorial as petulant and, we think, increasingly undermines the perception of Poilievre as a serious individual. Conspiracies aside, this hit is starting to connect.

Compounding the problem is that Carney is positioning himself as an ideological pivot from the Trudeau era. In his speech on Sunday night, he spoke of ending the “consumer-facing” carbon tax (yes, we noted the precise language) and reversing the capital gains tax hike — lines that generated a hilarious shower of applause from the Liberal partisans who would gladly have condemned any of us as monstrous climate change deniers and shills for the rich for espousing those positions like 45 minutes before the results were announced. Politics is a drug, man.

Carney spoke of moving quickly to build things, create new trade relationships with reliable partners, reduce spending and even, get this, positioning Canada as an “energy superpower,” albeit one that champions both green and petrochemical resources. Tap tap. Stephen Harper? Are you still lurking?

In other words, Carney is taking the Liberals from an increasingly unpopular progressive party to something that sounds suspiciously, um, traditionally Conservative.

The CPC has spent several years locked in an internal factional fight in its quest to win over an electorate while not falling prey to median voter theory; in other words, to abandon the quest to convince voters to pick them by presenting an ever-more watered down version of Conservatism palatable to the country’s aging cadre of political columnists. A significant chunk of the CPC base, and especially party operatives, grew tired of being lambasted as extremists and losing elections while parading entirely moderate policy and playacting as Liberals in blue coats. “The hell with that,” they decided years ago, “let’s be damned for what we are.” The ascension of Pierre Poilievre was the climax of that internal process.

Team “Hard Right” or “True Blue” or whatever you want to call it may have won that battle internally, but at the risk of losing the greater war to Liberal opponents who are now morphing from woke lefties into soft conservatives right in front of them.

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That doesn’t mean that Carney’s speech didn’t also have a few clangers. The weakest sections actually hit when the PM-designate tried to take shots at Pierre Poilievre, lambasting his opponent as an extreme free-market idealist.

Carney spun much straw about Poilievre’s lifetime in politics, noting that he’d never had to make a payroll. Which is true — except, as far as we can tell, Carney’s never had to make a payroll in any meaningful sense, either. Without attempting to diminish the role of the governor of various national banks, Carney’s never had to stress about laying off all the single mothers in his employ because his company didn’t sell enough widgets this quarter.

Carney also criticized Poilievre for trying to undermine the independence of the Bank of Canada — a shot that might land if Carney hadn’t radically undermined the appearance of said independence by, uh, parlaying his credentials as governor of said bank almost directly into an explicitly partisan role.

In short, we don’t think Mark Carney actually has a very good measure of Poilievre. The power move, in our opinion, would have been to avoid mention of the man at all; to focus on big-picture problems facing the country while his opponent weaves himself into a trap of perpetual opposition.

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One more note on Carney. We’ve already made the points in his favour above — we think he could win this, if he plays his cards right and if the Tories refuse to adapt to the new ballot question.

But it’s worth reiterating now, before we really get rolling into the Carney era, just how untested a politician is Mark Carney. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But can we offer this neutral observation: it is a hell of a risk, and it’ll be fascinating.

In a recent chat with some political operative friends, one of your Line editors observed that Carney had actually only had one well-received moment: his The Daily Show interview. His chat with host Jon Stewart was indeed widely seen as successful — a pleasant surprise! We don’t think it’s unfair to say that that set an early, hopeful tone for Carney supporters.

The campaign that followed, though, was … unremarkable? No shots on Carney intended. He won! And he didn’t really have any fumbles or disasters. That ain’t nothing, in politics. But we couldn’t actually think of another good moment for Carney. After The Daily Show, he ran a pretty safe and steady frontrunner campaign, raised a ton of money, performed adequately in both debates, was largely kept away from the media by his handlers during the race, and then … yeah. Boom! Prime minister-designate. To the extent he was tested by events or damaging coverage or Conservative attacks, Carney’s responses were, if anything, a bit on the underwhelming side. Not epic duds, but pretty meh.

And yet! An 86-per-cent mandate from Liberal voters is a shockingly strong endorsement for a man with only a few weeks of actual political experience, most of which was solidly decent, and nothing more. And at the risk of sounding churlish, we didn’t even think his Stewart interview was fantastic. It was good! But nothing more than that.

A man who began his life in politics barely two months ago with a good interview, followed by a quiet campaign and a couple of decent debates but very little actual testing by the media, is now overwhelmingly the choice of the Liberal party to take over as prime minister at a moment of high national peril and lead their fight in the next election against a well-funded, battle-tested political opponent. That’s a hell of a gamble. We genuinely have no idea as to how he’ll perform once fully immersed in politics, with his team unable to shield him from the media to the same extent.

But neither do the Liberals who just threw him the keys. We will see how that works out. And in any eventuality, it’ll be fascinating to watch.

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In closing, an observation, but we hope not an unkind one. We'll try to lead with grace here. The Line recognizes the burdens of public service and a life in the public eye. We'd never, ever choose that life for ourselves for a lot of reasons, but that very much includes not wanting to put ourselves through that hell. Even when we strongly disagree with what a politician is doing, or even their conduct, we try and be mature about these things, and stop our analyses and comments from ever getting personal. It's up to our readers to determine how good a job we do at that. But we try.

This is all to say that we felt genuine sympathy for Chrystia Freeland on Sunday night. Line editor Gurney recounted to his fellow editor during the latest The Line Podcast episode that there had been quiet whispers in Toronto that Freeland had more strength than people expected. That if the race dragged out a few ballots, she might even have a shot. Gurney dismissed this as just sheer, crass politics — attempts to build some buzz both to motivate one's own troops and also maybe pry a few undecideds over. He didn't think there was much to it.

And there wasn't. Freeland got barely seven per cent of the vote, which translated into eight points under the Liberals’ weighting system. It's pretty hard to surprise your Line editors but that result is pathetic. It's actually even more wild when you look at the number of votes. Freeland's 7.3 per cent on the first ballot came thanks to 11,144 votes out of 151,899. We've been rolling her vote tally around, back and forth, in our heads since last night, trying to figure out how to properly convey the scale of that shellacking.

Here are a few ways that have occurred to us:

• Freeland got fewer votes to serve as Liberal leader than the NDP also-ran won in University-Rosedale, Freeland's riding, in the last federal election.

• Freeland got only half as many votes as Roman Baber, the last-place finisher in the last Conservative leadership race (Baber’s vote share was smaller, because more Conservatives voted, but he still doubled her in raw votes).

• Freeland's roughly 11,000 votes mean she earned approximately 1,000 Liberal leadership votes during each of her 11 years as an elected MP, the vast majority of which time she was a senior, prominent member of the federal cabinet and Trudeau's second-in-command.

• More people will read this article than Liberals voted for Freeland, and it won’t even be close.

Yeesh. Right?

None of the above is offered with any intended cruelty, though we understand that for Freeland, it might seem like we’re twisting the knife. That’s not our goal. Our goal is, in a weird way, to express some sympathy for her — the party owed her better than that, no?

We guess not! Was it because she was the king slayer? It was Freeland, after all, who ultimately brought Trudeau down with her shock resignation letter, and that's not often forgotten by partisans. Maybe? We could buy that as an explanation for Freeland losing, but it seems hard to extrapolate anger at her having put the knife into the boss's back into a defeat of this scale.

Is this a recognition that, as we've often written, Freeland was a remarkably poor retail politician? Whatever her merits as a minister, and we've noted them before, we could buy the Liberal party membership, in their collective wisdom, knowing better than to put someone with her particular skill set — yes, that's how we'll put it — out against Pierre Poilievre in a general election.

Was it something else? Internal rivalries inside the party? A lousy ground game? We don't know. We expected her to lose, but not like this.

Freeland is an accomplished woman. She was successful and accomplished before she ever ran for office. She didn't need this. And no one can deny that she gave the Liberals more than 11 years of dedicated work, in a highly visible role, during very difficult times for the country and the government. She was, as the saying goes, a good soldier, ‘til (almost) the very end.

After Sunday night's brutal repudiation, she must be wondering what the point of it all was. Freeland has said she plans to run again and would be open to serving in a Carney cabinet. To whatever extent — and we suspect it's minuscule — that our opinion matters to Freeland, we say this: you don't owe them any more than you've given them already, ma'am. You can walk away and go do something else. You'll be happier for it. Your family will be, too.

Go. People will understand. The people that should matter to you, anyway.

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Alright, everyone. That’s it. We’ll have lots of say about all of this in the days to come, including (maybe especially) about the end of the Justin Trudeau era in Canadian politics and the legacy he will leave. But for now, enjoy, and we hope you have a great start to the week.

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The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com