The Shadow knows

Where's Mark Carney? What's he stand for? Good luck fighting a shadow

Here’s the Facebook ad library for Mark Carney’s page as a candidate for the federal Liberal Party leadership. Facebook actually provides a decent amount of information about who buys ads, which ads they’re placing, and how much success they’re having. Let us see what we can see.

At this writing, and for the last several days, Carney has had no active ads on Facebook. He seems to have come out of the gate with a quick ad blitz, a modest spend — $127,000 total so far — and some conspicuous success. This is the campaign’s runaway hit: a gnomic little spot that ran for 10 hours, two weeks ago, and garnered more than 700,000 views. It’s also the video pinned to his X account.

It tells us little. His parents were teachers, he played goalie, he “won a scholarship to the U.S.,” which apparently is how we’re pronouncing Harvard this season. “Markets don’t have values,” he says. “People do.” So he left “finance,” which apparently is how we’re pronouncing Goldman Sachs, “to ensure our economy supports the things Canadians value. Like health care, security, and a life we can afford.”

He helped a Liberal prime minister (Paul Martin) “fix our massive government debt,” and a Conservative prime minister (Stephen Harper) “protect Canadian homes.” He “got it done,” ensuring Canada’s recovery from the 2008 banking crisis, and “got it done again,” navigating Britain through Brexit. There’s a shot of a graph showing Canada’s GDP moving up. No shot to represent Britain’s post-Brexit economy. Carney is happy to accept credit for everything that worked.

“I can tell you from experience, this country is — not — broken,” he says. Here’s the pivot. “But it does need experienced leadership —” Here there’s a shot of Carney with another prime minister…

“—and a real plan to ensure that all Canadians benefit in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.”

So this is where he shows us the plan? Oh, you minx. “You can’t stand up to Trump when you’re working from his playbook,” Carney says, as though nobody just mentioned a plan, and certainly not him. “Pierre Poilievre has been a politician his entire life. And in all that time he hasn’t fixed a thing. He just complains, misleads and blames everything on someone else.”

And what about Carney? “I’m not a politician but I’ve always been a Liberal. Because Liberals believe that people are free to make their own choices. And your government should protect your right to live the life that you want to live. But we also believe that good governments empower their citizens to build great things.”

If that spiel leaves you with a list of questions a mile long, you’re just like me. Let’s both ask Carney those questions as soon as he pops by to do an interview with either of us. Except he keeps forgetting to pop by. Instead he’s high-kicking at the Carnaval de Québec and doing a Zoom call with “Liberals from across Newfoundland and Labrador,” one of several regional group chats he’s participated in since this short leadership campaign began.

He’s a Romulan, uncloaking just long enough to take a shot before vanishing again. His campaign has already made short work of one opponent, Chrystia “Remember Her?” Freeland, and is making real trouble for another, Pierre Poilievre.

Pollster David Coletto of Abacus data, who was at first skeptical about any suggestion of a change in public opinion, has been beating the drums hard for some polling results he’ll put out in the next couple of days. Already the mere thought of Carney is bringing much of the estranged Liberal vote home, Coletto says, along with a chunk of the NDP vote.

Can Carney actually stop Poilievre? Stop asking me to make predictions. I don’t know. I’d have thought that attitudes toward Liberals were baked in after two years of sustained Conservative success, but apparently a lot of voters think #TeamTrudeau stops being #TeamTrudeau once Trudeau announces his exit.

But the ease with which Carney has rattled the Conservative advantage should also rattle the Conservatives. Should, and apparently has: in The Hill Times, Abbas Rana is reporting about unusual measures to make an unusual splash with a big “CANADA FIRST” Poilievre rally in, unusually, Ottawa this coming Saturday. Bussing staffers in so they can pack a venue is not something that’s often done these days in Canadian politics.

Of course, Carney isn’t the only, or even the main, ingredient leading Poilievre to adjust his message. It’s mostly Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation and the general luridness of his early moves. Canadians are looking for a defender against Trump, and many are unpersuaded that Poilievre can be that person or even that he wants to. Hence yet another poll, the Nanos poll that showed a plurality of respondents prefer the devil they don’t know to the devil they do.

I’m not thrilled by some of these developments, but they are what they are. In particular I’m mystified by the notion that Trump gives a retromingent rat’s ass who’s running Canada while he’s busy carving his face into Mount Rushmore. Over the weekend he announced steel and aluminum tariffs against the entire world. In Canada, we’re debating whether he would say, “Except for Canada, because Pierre Poilievre runs their government,” or “Except for Canada, because Mark Carney runs their government.” I’m putting my money on neither. There should be a limit to our national obsession with kidding ourselves that the world hangs on the outcome of our family quarrels.

I also prefer a politician who is willing to explain his thinking, or would if I could find any, so I can’t generate real enthusiasm for Carney’s decision to campaign in haiku. This unbroken country needs a real plan, you say? Great, where is it? He was just named as chair of the Liberal leader’s task force on economic growth, and he’s got a book coming out that “charts an ambitious and urgent path forward for Canada.” You can read all about it in… May. Almost certainly after the next federal election. Real plans behind me, real plans ahead, but no real plans handy right at this moment, damnedest thing, so sorry. But isn’t it great that he was a goalie?

I have even found myself feeling a measure of sympathy for Chrystia Freeland, who actually showed up for all the fights Liberals claimed to care about over the last decade. She wasn’t the chair of Bloomberg, she wasn’t the chair of Brookfield, she was actually rolling up her sleeves and making the hard decisions and the often unlovely compromises that governing entails.

Suddenly a lot of Liberals won’t touch her with a barge pole. Liberals who were right there nodding, often literally, every time she stood there nodding, a little manically in her case to be sure. I get that what’s happening to Freeland is in part a widespread and enthusiastic payback for what we might delicately call her sometimes mercenary approach to teamwork, and in part a naked calculation of political cost: all those clips of her agreeing with Trudeau would make it hard to pivot. But to me there’s too much “Kong is angry, feed her to Kong” in it all.

Oh well. If politics were beautiful and uplifting it would be ballet. Back to Poilievre, and more irony. Liberals who have complained for three years that Poilievre stiff-arms the Ottawa press gallery and campaigns in slogans are now gleeful at the way Carney stiff-arms the gallery and campaigns in slogans.

The belief that nobody deserves an explanation for anything, if explaining might complicate the cheapest possible short-term victory, is now a doctrine of our national religion. It leads to spectacles like Justin Trudeau’s “summit” on Canada-US relations before the weekend — no guest list, no coverage, no joint communiqué, no individual communiqués from participants, no live-blogging, nor any word from any participant except what a few of them leaked to congenial reporters. It’s impressive to realize that hundreds of participants thought this was a reasonable way to handle important discussions.

But in this country, people who’d rather hide than explain themselves are the norm. Why has Carney rattled Pierre Poilievre so? I think it’s because the story people tell themselves about Carney is so heavily influenced by what some of them miss in Poilievre.

I don’t know whether Carney will last and I’m unpersuaded he should, but if he’s having a good winter, it’s because the shadow he casts on the cave wall is of a grownup. Someone who’s not apoplectic at the thought of being disagreed with. Someone whose face doesn’t do this when you ask him a simple question. (I mean, I’m guessing, because I haven’t been able to ask Carney a simple question lately.) Someone who doesn’t compulsively call everybody else a wacko incompetent loser.

I do worry that if Carney’s stealth campaign of drive-by pizza deliveries undercuts Poilievre’s bumptious insurgency just as Poilievre was putting paid to Trudeau’s theatre of compassion, then we’re really just three layers deep in play-acting, and that much further from talking to one another as though we were citizens. But I recall that two and a half years ago, I wrote here the following:

“There’s a centre in Canadian politics. Not a policy centre but a temperamental centre. It is occupied by people who don’t need to win every damned fight….

“The next election may already be lost for the Liberals before it starts. It may already be unwinnable for Poilievre because he’s so preoccupied with the need to impress his campaign manager. Or it may be a toss-up, to be decided by a few questions. Can anyone around here take serious things seriously? Can anyone reach across lines of faction and party often enough and long enough to build something that works and lasts? Is anyone interested in anything besides dunking and loving self- congratulation?”

On very limited evidence, a lot of people seem to think or hope that Carney is the missing grownup in our politics. Which means he’s hacked his way past Poilievre’s firewall, just as Poilievre breached Trudeau’s. In the Conservative leader’s place, I would ask myself how that became so easy so soon.