Mark Carney has Canada’s Conservatives running scared

The race to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and Canada’s prime minister won’t officially conclude until March 9. Based on the way some people are reacting, though, it might already be over. After yet another round of high-profile endorsements for Mark Carney — this time from industry minister and Quebec political heavyweight François-Philippe Champagne, Transport Minister Anita Anand and Housing Minister Nate Erskine-Smith — it seems clear the former central banker is the preferred choice for most elected Liberals. 

The biggest tell here, though, is coming from his potential opponents. Conservative politicians and pundits have spent the last week mooting their arguments against his candidacy with a growing sense of urgency — and desperation. They’ve even taken to crashing his events in an attempt to divert the growing spotlight on him. This isn’t the behaviour of a party that’s confident in its position as presumptive front-runner.

No wonder: a pair of recent polls shows a substantial rebound in Liberal fortunes, with both putting the Liberals back in the game in the key battleground of Ontario. And with Conservatives still visibly divided over whether to respond to US President Donald Trump’s threats by defending the country or just its oil and gas industry, there could easily be even worse polls yet to come. 

First things first, though: in our time of ever-more-juvenile politicking, they clearly need to land on their childish nickname of choice. Is it “Carbon Tax Carney,” as Poilievre has called him? Michelle Rempel-Garner, the MP for Calgary-Oklahoma, seems to have a preference for “Canapé Carney,” while National Post senior editor Terry Newman boldly eschewed the alliterative trend with her reference to “Redistribution Carney.” Pick a lane, folks. 

They’ll also have to settle on a line of attack. So far, in the various anti-Carney columns written by Newman and her Postmedia colleagues Don Braid, Brian Lilley, David Staples, and Conrad Black, they seem most triggered by the fact that he cares too much about climate policy. “The former Bank of Canada governor is a climate activist of the most devoted and determined sort,” Braid wrote. “He has done more thinking and writing about climate change than the rest of the Trudeau caucus combined.” 

The horror.

What makes matters worse, apparently, is his work with organizations like Brookfield Asset Management, Bloomberg, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. “He’s brilliant at one thing — getting governments and private businesses to fall in line with [Greta] Thunberg’s climate change agenda,” the Edmonton  Journal’s David Staples writes. He cites former Obama administration official Steve Koonin, who wrote in his own book that Carney “is probably the single most influential figure in driving investors and financial institutions around the world to focus on changes in climate and human influences upon it.” 

And?  

If anything, this supposed weakness might actually end up being Carney’s biggest strength. His relationships with large global organizations and leading role in pushing the banking world into the fight against climate change will activate the most tinfoil-laden parts of Poilievre’s Conservative coalition. It will draw out Poilievre’s own inclination towards conspiracy-laden thinking and bring his party into closer orbit with Trumpism. And it will help contrast Carney’s competent centrism and Poilievre’s paranoid populism glaringly enough that all but the most blinkered partisan will see it. 

We won’t have that carbon tax election, in other words, much to Poilievre and his team’s obvious chagrin. That’s in part because Carney will almost certainly axe the consumer portion of the carbon tax himself and replace it with something that’s harder to gin up populist outrage against. But it’s also because Canadian voters are already far less focused on the past than they were even a few weeks ago. When they cast their ballots, they’ll be thinking far more about the future — theirs and their country’s — and who can best navigate the threat posed by Trump. 

Do we want to join the United States on its latest trip through the populist looking glass, one that revolves around discouraging immigration, attacking minorities, and doubling down on fossil fuels? Or do we want to stand up for more Canadian values like pluralism, diversity, and openness, and exploit the economic and cultural opportunities that America’s retreat might create? That’s the choice that voters will have to make in the next election. 

They may still decide to throw the Liberal bums out. After a decade with them in government, and especially the last decade, that’s still by far the most likely outcome. But the sheer volume of Conservative criticism directed at Carney of late reveals how nervous they are about him — and how little they actually have to work with.