Let him have it

Mark Carney should be too busy to play games with Pierre Poilievre

Stornoway. Nice house.

One danger for Mark Carney is that he will be taught how to be a terrible politician by terrible politicians. A low-stakes test case is at hand. In this as in all things, a decent guiding principle should be: Don’t be like your opponent, and don’t be like your predecessor.

The test at hand is the uncomfortable predicament of Pierre Poilievre, who used to be a Member of Parliament and may want to be one again. In the meantime he is still the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Poilievre lost his seat in Carleton on Monday night. This is not entirely his fault. Liberal campaign teams from neighbouring ridings were invited to spend part of their time door-knocking in Poilievre’s riding. But candidates should try to win even when their opponents work hard to defeat them. I bet this thought has occurred to Poilievre since Monday.

The usual route to the Commons, for a leader who is not yet an MP, is to run in a by-election. Often new leaders find a sitting MP somewhere to vacate their seat and enable a by-election. Brian Mulroney ran in Central Nova in 1983, Jean Chrétien in Beauséjour in New Brunswick in 1990, Stephen Harper in Calgary Southwest in 2002.

Assume Poilievre can find some Conservative MP-elect willing to abandon a seat they just won so Poilievre can try his chance (again). How should Carney react?

It’s really a question in three parts. Should a by-election be held quickly or much later? Should the Liberals run a candidate? Should the Poilievre family keep living at Stornoway, the Opposition leader’s official residence, in the meantime?

I’m hearing from a lot of people who say Carney should wait as long as the law permits — up to a half year after a seat opens — before calling the by-election; that the Liberals should definitely run a candidate; and that Poilievre and his family should be evicted from their current fancy abode.

I spent part of Wednesday debating these questions with readers on Substack Notes. Most of the people offering this advice — let him twist, then hit him hard — pointed out that if Poilievre had a say about an adversary’s career plans, he would do everything in his power to make that adversary hurt.

I think it’s bad advice. It manages to be bad tactics and bad for the soul. The two considerations don’t always line up, but here they do.

Carney should call a by-election as soon as possible after a sitting MP resigns — 11 days after the notice of vacancy is received, the minimum permitted in law. If asked, he should prefer that the Poilievre family stay at Stornoway in the meantime. And while the third question is less clear, I’d argue that the Liberals should refrain from running a candidate in the by-election.

This plan would have Poilievre back in the Commons as soon as possible, with minimal risk and discomfort. He’ll be lucky to receive such generous treatment and, while I’m less confident than ever that I know how he thinks, what he should feel is gratitude. I suspect the feeling would confuse him.

The timing of a by-election is a simple matter. Only a prime minister can call a by-election (strictly speaking, he advises the governor general to call it, but who are we kidding), and he can do it at any point between 11 and 180 days after notice of a riding vacancy is received. Whether to call the vote early or after long delay is an inherently political decision. The later Carney waits, the more obviously he is simply toying with Poilievre.

Toying with Poilievre would be fun! And therefore worth doing, if the prime minister of Canada had quite literally nothing else to think about! But I’m told he’s also facing a trade war with the authoritarian eccentric in Washington, and a series of high-stakes decisions and negotiations in consequence. In that world, if you’re a serious person who’s properly focused on the task at hand, and some sloppy former MP shoves a distraction onto your plate, you want to get that distraction off your plate as fast as possible. So you make the required decision quickly so you can get back to serious work. Carney could even say so. “This is a stupid mess and I’m glad I’m not the guy who caused it, but let’s get it over with.”

As a great big bonus, moving quickly is not what Justin Trudeau would do. The last Liberal PM made a habit of delaying by-election calls as he grew to dread the results. He waited until nearly August last year to call a by-election to replace David Lametti, who resigned his seat in January. In fact he waited until the last day permitted by law. Hey, new guy: Don’t do that.

The Stornoway question is trickier. The fancy Rockcliffe house is traditionally loaned out to “The Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons.” Right now that’s not Poilievre, because he’s currently not permitted on the floor of the House of Commons. So some people are arguing he shouldn’t live at Stornoway. It’s being debated both ways.

I’m not even sure whose decision this is. I suspect it’s one of those magical Ottawa decisions nobody owns. Probably the National Capital Commission will claim it’s absolutely not the prime minister’s decision. I bet it is absolutely his decision. But even if he’s simply asked — whether by a reporter or some official — he should say: Let the current tenants stay where they are. Moving them out and moving somebody else in, perhaps only to reverse that process a couple of months later, is hassle and expense nobody needs.

The use of official residences is already stupidly over-politicized in Ottawa. One result is that the Carneys have been holed up for months behind layers of temporary traffic barriers on a corner of the Rideau Hall grounds, because 24 Sussex is uninhabitable and Rideau Cottage needed more modest renovations after the Trudeaus used it. One way to cool the whole official-residence file down is to answer any question about the Poilievres and Stornoway with: It could not possibly matter less. Whatever.

Finally there’s this odd notion I’ve introduced, that the Liberals might not even run a candidate against Poilievre in a by-election. There’s precedent.

For a long time, a sort of honour-among-thieves arrangement held that Liberals and Conservatives would refrain from running candidates in by-elections held to let new leaders from the other party into the Commons.

It was never a hard rule. The Liberals ran a candidate against Brian Mulroney when he ran in Central Nova in a 1983 by-election. The Progressive Conservatives, on the other hand, didn’t run anyone against Jean Chrétien in 1990 in Beauséjour. Liberals and Progressive Conservatives didn’t run against Stephen Harper in 2002 in Calgary Southwest when he was the new leader of the Canadian Alliance. But the Liberals and Conservatives did both ran candidates against Jagmeet Singh in the 2019 Burnaby South by-election. This is not a rule. It’s an option.

It’s not clear that this shaky tradition, as framed by precedent, even applies to Poilievre. He isn’t a new leader, unlike Mulroney, Chrétien, Harper or Singh in the examples I gave. He’s just a clumsy leader who lost his seat after 20 years because he got excited. So I’m less sure here. But I’d at least consider not running a Liberal candidate against him. Wherever he chooses to run, the people there just had a chance to vote for a Liberal, and a plurality will have declined. So their rights won’t be grievously infringed by a lack of choice in odd circumstances a couple of months later.

Three considerations drive all my choices here. One is speed. Pierre Poilievre’s fate is the most ridiculous self-inflicted political injury in Canada right now. So don’t revel in it. Mark Carney doesn’t really have time for hobbies right now. Letting an adversary twist is a strange hobby.

The second consideration is that if you don’t like your opponent, you should work to be a different sort of person. If Liberals don’t like petty score-settling, they should try behaving some other way.

The third consideration is that the route back to Parliament will be plenty humiliating for Poilievre anyway. Somewhere there’s an MP who just worked their behind off for the right to represent their neighbours in Parliament. Somewhere there’s an electorate that thought they knew who they were sending to Ottawa. Somewhere — a leafy Rockcliffe side street, in point of fact — there’s subsidized government housing of the sort the Conservative leader claims to disdain. If the only way for him to get back to Parliament is for other people to do him a stack of favours, nothing is gained by denying him the favours. The favours are the punishment.