All the polls show the same thing. The race has tightened up. The big Conservative lead has vanished. The Liberals are competitive again.

Could Mark Carney win? Of course he could. Ten reasons.

1. Trudeau is gone. Towards the end, Justin Trudeau wasn’t just his party’s leader. He had become a political death sentence – for them. The Liberals had become very, very unpopular, and Trudeau wasn’t the only reason. But he was the main one. When he was forced out – by Chrystia Freeland, by his caucus, by reality – Liberals who had parked their vote with the Conservatives or the NDP were always going to come back. They have.

2. Conservatives didn’t have a Plan B. In politics, you always have to plan for change. The Tories didn’t. Justin Trudeau is a narcissist, they’d say, and they were right. But they had convinced themselves that his narcissism would persuade him to stay. That’s not how narcissism works. Narcissists always leave so that someone else can clean up their messes. The Conservatives – arrogantly, stupidly – didn’t plan for Trudeau’s departure. It shows.

3. Liberals overwhelmingly support Carney. There’s a name for winning 90 per cent of the vote: a landslide. Mark Carney won his party’s leadership by a landslide. Conservatives can bleat about the number of Liberals who ultimately voted, or weave conspiracies about marginal candidates like Ruby Dhalla. But the bottom line is that Mark Carney won, big. And Tories are now doing what they did three times in a row with Justin Trudeau: underestimating the Liberal leader.

4. Carney is likeable. In politics, you don’t need to be the most likable person on Earth. You just need to be more likable than the alternative. And the fact is, a growing number of Canadians don’t find Pierre Poilievre particularly likable. For a long time, Poilievre’s angry man shtick worked – because a majority of Canadians were mad at Justin Trudeau, too. With Trudeau gone, their anger has disappeared, like air out of a balloon. Donald Trump has cornered the market on anger, and voters want something different from him. They want someone who loves Canada, like they do. Not a perpetually angry guy who says that Canada is “broken.”

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Tough act to follow.

Jean Chretien, that is. Following Canada’s best-living speech-maker is a pretty tall order. Newly-minted Liberal Party leader Mark Carney was never going to beat Chretien at the podium.

And, actually, now that we are on the subject, Carney’s daughter Cleo was actually a bit better than her old man, too. She was charming and fun.

Mark Carney? He ain’t going to set the world on fire with his speechifyin’, Virginia. Personally, I’ve been more excited by bowls of Cream of Wheat. I didn’t fall asleep during Carney’s victory lap, but I gave it some serious consideration.

But we all knew that already about Carney, the former Governor of both the Banks of Canada and England. He got hired to do those jobs – and he did them well, by all accounts – precisely because he was not a flame-breathing ideologue. He was a banker. So, let’s be honest with ourselves: when you go in to the bank to talk about your mortgage, do you want the person on the other side of the desk to sound and look like Kid Rock in the midst of two-week bender in Vegas? Nope.

In other words, Mark Carney’s bland, boring banker persona is not his weakness: paradoxically, it is actually his secret power. At a time when the world is quite literally on fire, and when we are facing a threat to our very existence, being dull is arguably a big asset, not a liability.

So, there are three main reasons why the Carney Grits have obliterated Pierre Poilievre’s 30-point lead. One, Justin Trudeau left, and the country was quite happy about that. Two, voters suspect that the Conservatives secretly (and some, not-so-secretly) love Donald Trump.

Three, Carney is a typical Canadian: he is calm, collected and courteous. He is the polar opposite of the ugly American – in this case, Donald Trump. Carney reminds us of our better selves. We don’t want a Prime Minister who acts like the guy we despise.

But there is a risk in all that, of course. The Canadian who has given Donald Trump pause – more than any other – is Doug Ford. Ford has been anything but polite about Trump. He has been very direct and very tough about the American president – threatening to cut off his power, removing American booze from the shelves, going on Fox to growl about betrayal. Ford has metaphorically taken Trump into the boards, many times, and Canadians have cheered every single time.

That, then, is the danger that Mark Carney faces. And it is the worry that many Canadians will have, too: that the new Grit leader will be the typical Canadian. And, when Donald Trump treads on his loafers, Carney will be the one who says he’s sorry. As some Canadians are wont to do.

Right now, we want a fighter – like Ford, like Chretien, like Don Cherry. We don’t want to become the doormat of North America. Knowing this, and towards the end of his speech, Carney talked about dropping his gloves in a hockey fight. But literally no one can picture Mark Carney dropping his gloves for a fight. (He was a backup goalie, after all.)

In the leaders’ debates, the aforementioned Poilievre and the Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet are going to make mincemeat of Carney. But as my Postmedia colleague Tasha Kheiriddin said to me on my podcast this week, that still may not matter. Sometimes, voters want a leader like Ontario’s Brampton Bill Davis – someone also calm, cool and collected. Not Bob Probert.

Who will be the one who fights best for Canada? That’s what elections are for. We are going to decide that. And the election, if the Liberals are smart – and not all of them are dumb – will happen very soon. Conservatives may think it is wise to keep demanding an election right away, but I don’t think they are.

What if Trump abruptly calms down? What if someone medicates him? The best asset of the Liberal Party, right now, is the rabid, crazier-than-an-shithouse-rat Donald Trump. Why do Tories think having an election now is in their interest? Why not wait until the Fall, when Trump has inevitably moved on to some other issue?

Liberals won’t wait. They’ve benefited from Justin Trudeau’s departure, yes. They aren’t going to wait for Donald Trump to move on to his next chew toy.

They are going to go now – because, even with a bland banker at the helm, they might just pull this off, the biggest political comeback in recent Canadian political history.

And Jean Chretien, who I know rather well, would smile about that.

Comments (30)

Comments (30)