Even in a warehouse full of battery-powered buses, Carney’s speech proved to be the furthest thing from electric
Even in a warehouse full of battery-powered buses, Carney’s speech proved to be the furthest thing from electric
VAUGHAN, ONT. — Liberal Leader Mark Carney strolled into an election campaign event on Monday past a ghostly figure.
In a hallway near the main entrance of a Toronto-area trades college, a newspaper front page is framed on the wall. It features a photo of former prime minister Justin Trudeau visiting the school, sporting a grey hard hat and rapturously engaged in what the former leader said he loved most: campaigning.
Say what you will about Trudeau, but even Liberals who were organizing to bring him down late last year would sometimes stop to acknowledge that despite his historically bad polling numbers, the scandals, the caucus unrest and everything else, the man knew how to campaign.
It’s a stark contrast to his successor.
Carney, who was sworn in as prime minister last month without ever holding elected office, could stay in the job for a few more weeks, or a few more years, but it already seems safe to say his tenure will be followed by no wistful odes to the man’s campaigning abilities.
When the time comes to endure the usual silliness of a campaign event, Carney wears an expression like a man whose board meeting has just been interrupted by a cringeworthy ice-breaker activity, and the best he can do is grudgingly play along.
And so he does, knowing the chance to continue being prime minister runs through just a few weeks of corny photo opportunities that risk embarrassment at every turn.
On Monday, Carney ambled around the sprawling floor of the College of Carpenters and Applied Trades in Vaughan, Ont. before stopping, with some trepidation, in front of a table saw.
The Liberal leader waggled his fingers at a reporter’s video camera, showing the 10 digits he hoped to keep intact despite the whirring metal teeth before him. After a quick demonstration from an instructor, Carney’s turn came to shove a piece of lumber into the blade. His first attempt didn’t budge it. Another shove made the situation worse. Carney frowned. Soon, with the instructor’s help, he had made an inch-wide slice of wood.
Carney seems to know the campaign glad-handing isn’t quite his thing. He brags about not being a politician, but he also acknowledges that he’s not quite prepared for this particular part of the job that Trudeau excelled at.
“I did manage to cut the piece of wood on the second try. I was under expert guidance,” Carney later told the crowd there for his home-building policy announcement.
That policy speech was his comfort zone — delivered in his classic boardroom style. Calm and dry and, to a more cynical listener, more than a little bit boring.
There are cynics aplenty, in fact.
An employee at the college laughed when asked if Carney’s speech had convinced him one way or the other about voting Liberal.
“I’m out on politics right now,” the employee said, because everything had gotten “stupid” in the political discourse. He had one tip, though.
“Somebody should tell Carney to stop saying ‘joiner,” he said, referring to Carney’s use of a mostly-British term for a woodworker. “It’s an outdated term.”
A group of young students who had been lined up as the backdrop for the cameras covering Carney’s appearance fled the event quickly. Caught by a journalist afterward, they laughed at the same question — less out of cynicism, more from surprise the leader’s speech was meant to persuade them of anything.
Carney’s pitch that day was that he would create a government developer to build more affordable housing. Housing is certainly a key issue that vexes young Canadians. But the Liberal leader’s speech was not a gen-Z friendly event. The fact that it name-checked William Lyon Mackenzie King was one clue. And it referred to the housing crisis as “an amazing opportunity,” which must sound only tone-deaf to anyone struggling to even qualify for a mortgage.
But zoom out from the school in Vaughan to the sprawling suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, the cities of Atlantic Canada and even the urban core of Winnipeg, and you’ll hear the same story with a more positive spin. Voters over 55 years old, especially women, are feeling the unfeelingness — for them, Carney’s blandness is a feature, not a bug.
Running contrary to the dreary rhythm of the Carney campaign are also the national polls. It’s been non-stop good news for the Liberals ever since the former Bank of Canada governor won the leadership. They now hold a clear lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives with the April 28 election a little more than three weeks away. Polling analyst Eric Grenier said the Liberals could nab 200 seats if the election were held today.
With a volatile U.S. President Donald Trump lobbing trade missiles and tweet grenades over the border, the image of drab competence is proving just the thing for worried older voters who have things to protect. They’re not like the kids at the carpentry school who still have things to build.
Polling this week from Postmedia-Leger shows Carney’s Liberals with 52 per cent of support among voters 55 years old and older, to the Conservatives’ 34 per cent, while the Tories are in the lead among all ages younger than that. But the older voters matter more because they vote reliably. Only 47 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 24 voted in the 2021 federal election compared to 75 per cent of Canadians aged 65 to 74. And so Carney’s path to victory is paved in grey. And boring is the point.
“In the same way that Carney probably didn’t fit in 2024, for many Canadians at this point he feels like what is needed in 2025,” said David Coletto, the CEO of pollster Abacus Data. “In our survey when we ask people who do you think is best able to captain a ship during a rough storm, Carney’s ahead of Poilievre by seven points. I think that’s a metaphor for this election.”
There’s a disturbing feeling of déjà vu here for Conservatives, who desperately wanted to contest a change campaign in 2021 but ran headlong into a pandemic election that favoured the incumbent Liberal government. Six months ago, Poilievre was ahead by 20 points promising an overhaul after nine years of increasingly unpopular Liberal government; now he’s an underdog on a new ballot question.
“Donald Trump has turned this election into a referendum on leadership style as much as policy. Carney exudes technocratic calm; a clear contrast to the volatility and chaos coming from the White House,” said Dan Robertson, who was chief strategist for the Conservative party during the 2021 election.
For the Liberals, that means keeping the campaign relatively simple and focused on the big issue, which they also happen to own — not least because Carney is the incumbent prime minister in charge of responding to Trump.
On Wednesday, as the country awaited news on Trump’s sweeping April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs, Carney rerouted his campaign to Ottawa, cancelling plans for events near Montreal. He met with the prime minister’s council on Canada-U.S. relations, followed by an evening meeting of the cabinet committee on the same subject. No officlal media events were held. Still, reporters were hanging on his every word.
At moments like this, whether or not he pivots his campaign to be more Trump-focused (as some Conservatives think he should), Poilievre can only struggle to stay relevant.
“It’s trickier for Poilievre,” said Robertson. “He shouldn’t try to out-dull Carney. It would be fake. He has to thread the needle: highlighting the traditional conservative virtues of strong leadership without veering into caricature. Stylistic cues like ‘Canada First’ (Poilievre’s slogan in response to Trump’s ‘America First’) and MAGA-adjacent rhetoric don’t help, in fact they hurt.”
At least there’s very little chance of the Conservative leader out-dulling Carney.
Even in a warehouse full of battery-powered buses in Winnipeg on Tuesday, the former central banker’s speech was the furthest thing from electric. The volume on the microphone, adjusted too low for people even near the speakers to hear, almost seemed intentionally set to perfectly capture the low energy.
Fifteen minutes in, the factory employees assembled behind his podium as the human backdrop were noticeably fidgeting, shuffling, glancing around. Taking reporters’ questions afterward, Carney repeated his habit of boring his eyes into the questioner, rather than facing the camera. It’s not something media trainers recommend and it could be connected to his tendency to take the questions too personally.
As his campaign bus rolled off next to a meeting with Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, there was some confusion among the assembled journalists about whether Carney was meeting Kinew as the prime minister of Canada or the campaigning Liberal leader. Those blurred lines no doubt suit the Carney team just fine.
It’s trickier for Poilievre. He shouldn’t try to out-dull Carney. It would be fake
The one-day visit to Winnipeg wrapped up with a rally downtown where Liberal campaign operators managed to squeeze nearly 2,000 people into a large, overheated convention centre meeting room. A musical soundtrack blared familiar Canadian-content blasts from the past: Tom Cochrane, Crash Test Dummies, Sloan.
Many of the attendees said they were at their first political rally ever. And it wasn’t hopeful optimism that brought them out.
Kristy Waldman, who has lived in Winnipeg for 20 years, said she was motivated to get involved in politics for the first time because, to her, it feels like the end of the world. She wants a steady hand on the tiller at a moment of crisis for Canada.
“There’s no shtick to Carney. There is a very clear and calm competence,” said Waldman. “He’s an adult in the room.”
Waldman was at the event with her friend Karen Ross, who was also attending her first political rally. Ross said Carney’s reputation of solving “big, world problems” as a central banker makes him an easy choice.
Later, when Carney’s wife Diana introduces him (she admits its her first time speaking at a rally), the crowd improbably erupts at her line about his “depth and breadth of experience” being “second to none.”
The enthusiasm is there, but it’s like an upside-down version of what Trudeau harnessed in his early campaigns, when a then idealistic and youthful-sounding Liberal leader aroused a huge number of hopeful young voters. The Liberals today are relying heavily on a wave of greying voters nursing a sharp sense of dread.
Polls show today’s young voters looking to change the world are breaking to Poilievre, but Carney comes across as a man who won’t change much. He’ll be talking to their parents.
National Post
stthomson@postmedia.com
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.