The Carney-Poilievre subway series I

The next federal election campaign started Friday in Toronto. First at bat: Poilievre

If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to keep writing about Pierre Poilievre as though he could be the prime minister of Canada in three months, because while I have no way to measure the likelihood of that happening, it’s not zero.

The Conservative leader was at the Hilton Toronto on Friday for a lunch meeting of the Economic Club of Canada. The man he wishes would get out of the way, Mark Carney, addressed a lunch meeting of Canadian Club Toronto, two blocks away. (I was in neither room. I’m catching up to both appearances via online video.) The two events had similar formats — speech followed by on-stage Q&A with congenial interrogators. They happened at the same highly-charged moment, days after the first federal budget in a year and a half.

I suspect, again without being certain, that the way each man talks about the economy will do more to determine the outcome of the next election than anything Chris d’Entremont did last week. Only The Logic has directly compared the two appearances so far. I think there’s room for further comparison. I was going to summarize both leaders’ arguments today, but in the end I’ve written 1,500-odd words on Poilievre’s appearance alone. Here it is. I’ll get to Carney tomorrow.

Poilievre decided to skip the pissy little digs at Toronto business audiences that he indulged two years ago at the C.D. Howe Institute. “Too often,” he said then, “corporate Canada has focused on printing glossy ESG (environmental, social, governance) brochures and seeking lunches with politicians at the Rideau Club to tell us what we should be doing.”

These days he’s in awe at corporate Canada, or at least that segment of it whose executives introduce him to lunchtime speeches at the Economic Club of Canada. Canaccord Genuity, he realizes now after its CEO signed a campaign ad endorsing the Conservatives, “is the story of great Canadian enterprise — not just Canadian business, but enterprise of all kinds,” he said. “It’s the story of someone who has an idea, takes a risk, mortgages his house, works all day and all night… to make it possible for factories, mines, pipelines, high tech enterprises to get the upfront money that is needed to start.” So here’s to the realization that capitalism requires capitalists.