About those Mark Carney rumours…

A change of hood ornament isn't enough to fix the Liberal Party’s broken engine.

As a wave of sticky summer heat descended upon Ottawa this week, rumours about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepping down as Prime Minister reached a fever pitch. 

Much of this is due to Mark Carney, whose not-so-silent desire for Mr. Trudeau's job became markedly more vocal this week.

Mr. Carney – a former central banker – is well-networked within Canada's elite class. He has long let his name floated as a potential successor to Mr. Trudeau. Over the last few years, the seriousness of his pursuit has waned and waxed with almost lunar regularity; one moment, he's coyly in, and the next, he is firmly out. But this week, gossip about Carney's potential elevation seems to have hit a new "I'm in" high tide, with multiple opinion pieces speculating about the gospel-like narrative many senior Liberals who view Mr. Carney as a saviour have been privately spreading for years.

However, the question that everyone should be asking is not whether Mr. Trudeau will quit or if Mr. Carney will take his place. Rather, does either of those things matter?

Given the yawning polling gap between the governing Liberals and the opposition Conservatives, the extent to which a change in leader, specifically replacing Mr. Trudeau with Mr. Carney, would reverse the Liberal's political death spiral is up for debate. But there's nothing quite as seductive to a political party facing the loss of power as the thought of an external saviour gallantly swooping in to save the day. 

The problem is that this scenario is fantasy. 

Here's the reality facing Mr. Carney and the Liberal Party.

1.) The Liberal party's ideological compass is firmly entrenched in the far left.

I recently overheard someone quip that if ten years ago they had been told that Mr. Trudeau would decriminalize hard drugs like heroin, they would have dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. Yet, today, the outcomes of that policy can be found in tragic human form on the streets of Vancouver while the Liberal party continues to support and defend its existence.

It's no secret that partisan Liberals who came up through the Party ranks in the early days of former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien's government often long for their return. But the reality is that Mr. Trudeau's near decade of governing from the radical far left – with his supply and confidence partners in the far-left New Democratic Party – has irrevocably changed the Liberal Party. Much of this now failed ideology is intractably synonymous with both Mr. Trudeau and the Liberal brand. 

In so doing, Mr. Trudeau has irrevocably transmuted the Liberal Party into an entity wherein policies like running permanent structural deficits, borderline nationalizing entire industries, abandoning traditional diplomatic allies, toxic politics, and deconstructing the country's national identity are embraced with religious fervour among senior staff, stakeholders and caucus members. Mr. Carney must know that taking the job means inheriting the people and processes who were complicit in the Liberal Party's transmogrification into a quasi-Marxist beast.

Curiously, Mr. Carney has not shown any signs that he wants to remove that rot, choosing instead to float his name as a solution to the nation's woes. That does not bode well for old party stalwarts clinging to hope that the Liberal Party of thirty years ago will somehow be magically reincarnated under his leadership or that Mr. Carney will be willing or able to distance himself from the political cancer within the Liberal Party that has enraged millions of people who once supported the Party.

2.) Most of the current Liberal bench is decadent, unimaginative, and naïve

When Mr. Trudeau shot to power with a majority government in 2015, he pulled the Liberal Party along with him, not the other way around. So, for the last nine years, the Liberal caucus has lived off the drift of Mr. Trudeau's brand. Few have shown creativity in vision, or have had the smarts to put daylight between themselves and Mr. Trudeau’s cult of personality.

However, as Mr. Trudeau's infamously controlling Prime Minister's Office has shed senior staff, it has lost its capacity to keep the wheels from falling off its bus. The PMO no longer has the intellectual or physical capacity to continue to centralize the responsibility for things like making sure Parliamentary committees don't go haywire or that the government has a cohesive policy agenda. Liberal Members of Parliament who have never had to learn the basics of the job - things like working the procedural rules and tools of Parliament, writing statements or executing a media strategy, setting a policy agenda on a file, composing one's own social media or fundraising strategy, now have a big problem. They are now emerging from nine years of central coddling, befuddled as moles emerging from a tunnel after a long hibernation, staring down the barrel of an imminent and potentially ugly federal election. 

It's only been in the last year that Liberal caucus members have been confronted with the prospect of cultivating an electable reputation separate and distinct from Mr. Trudeau or being held to personal account for nearly a decade of blind support for his agenda. Many are openly bemused in facing once-friendly press gallery reporters who, sensing the time of Mr. Trudeau's political death may be near, are -gasp- asking them more challenging questions. Their electors - facing sky-high rents and grocery bills - are no longer satisfied with receiving stale talking points in response to their concerns. 

God bless Mr. Carney, but he has shown no previous signs of performing the political miracles needed to fix that type of atrophy.

3.) Leading a political party is a vocation, not an avocation.

In many ways, leading a political party to electoral victory does require someone to be a miracle worker.

Setting clear policy direction while bringing the general public onside with it, speaking in a way that wins both hearts and minds, learning how to deflect and throw political landmines, and managing a caucus are not skills magically downloaded into someone once they become party leader. It's hard to imagine Mr. Carney, who's never faced a difficult media scrum nor has any significant social media presence whatsoever, jumping green into the job of Prime Minister and surviving unscathed. He hasn't acquired the landing gear that can only be built by living daily cut and thrust of politics for years.

Canadian politics are littered with examples of people who thought they could jump into senior political office and have epically failed. Names like former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff and Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau come to mind. Both men failed in pre-pandemic times when social media was arguably kinder, and the Canadian public was more open to considering voting for a Liberal. There is no universe where a political neophyte like Mr. Carney wouldn't be subject to these same laws of electoral physics in present day Canada.

4.) The Liberal party's leadership race is unlikely to be a coronation, and nor should it be.

Mr. Carney should not harbour any illusions that everyone in the Liberal Party swoons at the prospect of him to waltzing into the Party's top job. Senior Liberal cabinet Ministers like François-Philippe Champagne have also been openly campaigning for the job for years and have a greater personal degree of insider knowledge and control over the Party's leadership selection process than he does. If Mr. Trudeau steps back before the next federal election, it's unlikely someone like Mr. Champagne would let the opportunity to be Prime Minister of Canada for a few months slip away without a fight.

His Liberal colleagues will vet Mr. Carney on all his political weaknesses, including the fact that he is far removed from the everyday Canadians that the Liberals have so aptly alienated over the last decade—no help from the federal Conservatives required. That branding will invariably cling to him in the federal election.

5.) The Liberal Party is out of runway, and a Trudeau-scented stink has settled into the Party's carpet

As polling results have shown, the stench of Mr. Trudeau's government is approaching 'dead mouse forgotten in the floorboards of a combine cab over the summer' levels (if you know, you know). Said differently, it won't be easy for Mr. Carney to remove that smell from the Liberal Party, nor will it be easy for him - or any successor - to convince a highly skeptical electorate that changing the hood ornament on the Liberal Party will fix its broken engine before the next federal election.

At present, the ballot question for the next federal election is shaping up to be, "do you want a change of government?". This is very bad for the Liberals. Worse, all of the Liberal party's efforts of the last year to change that to scaremongering over Mr. Poilievre haven't worked. Unless the Liberals were to do something nefarious - which would undoubtedly trigger mass public outrage - like introduce legislation to move the fixed election date to a point in 2026, Mr. Carney would be out of time to do much about the situation.

Also, there's no guarantee Mr. Carney would be Prime Minister before the next election even if he were to win a contested leadership race. Mr. Trudeau could set a leadership race length that allowed him to serve as a lame-duck Prime Minister until right before dissolving Parliament.

6.) Jagmeet Singh may not be able to whip his caucus into supporting a new Liberal leader

All of this assumes that the Liberals will be in complete control of the timing of the next federal election.

However, much of the Liberal Party's fate rests with New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, whose party entered into a "supply and confidence" agreement to support the Liberals and prevent an election until 2025. Said differently, the Liberals need the NDP's support to prevent the current minority Parliament from falling on a vote of confidence. 

To date, Mr. Singh has not demonstrated much political smartness in this arrangement, with his party arguably providing much more confidence than they or the Canadian public are receiving in terms of supply. What Mr. Singh and his caucus would do if Mr. Trudeau triggered a leadership race is unclear. If it were me, I would immediately march over to the other opposition parties and engineer a vote of confidence on which the Liberal government would fall, hoping to catch the Liberals with their political pants down. This is precisely what Mr. Singh should do - he is not gaining any support from the Canadian public for continually aiding and abetting Mr. Trudeau's Liberals in their malfeasance. In any event, this lack of certainty could severely hamper the timeframe in which Mr. Carney could attempt to hoodwink the Canadian public into believing that an unchanged except for hood ornament Liberal Party is the change the country needs.

So that's the political reality facing Mr. Carney. It's unclear if he has a true sense of the reality and gravity of these obstacles. 

Regardless, I think he'll choose to jump in anyway. He probably doesn't have much to lose. He's held high-paying jobs for decades, and the prospect of being Prime Minister for a few months before an election might be enough to numb the electoral pain the Canadian public seems to want to inflict on the Liberals in the next federal election. After all, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell came to power in much the same way, and although she led her Party off a cliff and into to a monumentally crushing defeat, her portrait still hangs outside the Chamber of the House of Commons.

All that said, the likely legacy of a truncated Mark Carney Prime Ministership will be an answer to an obscure question on Canadian political trivia games.