1 week Ago By Kelly McParland
Article content Elections are supposed to help voters differentiate between candidates so they can decide who to support. The idea is to get a clear grip on what the rival contestants are all about. But two weeks into the federal election campaign, differences between the two front-runners are less apparent than they once seemed.
In style and personality they may be worlds apart, in their plans for running Canada there’s less substance than either might claim. Liberal Leader Mark Carney entered the contest with a marked advantage. Canadians who had soured on former prime minister Justin Trudeau but weren’t wholly enraptured with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre realized they didn’t have to vote for either one.
There was a third option. It didn’t hurt that while both the others carried baggage, Carney was only vaguely known. He had a resume and a reputation.
People had a general impression he was a bright fellow with a respectable record, but didn’t know much beyond that. He lacked the negatives weighing down the other options, which in politics is a good place to start. Carney then got a boost from U.
S. President Donald Trump, who shook his mighty fist, giving Canadian leaders a chance to shake theirs back. Poilievre failed to do so.
He kind of waved, but not too fiercely. Carney seized the opportunity to project defiance, and gained points for doing so. This week he gave some back.
Nothing was more arresting than observing Carney at his “Canada Strong” podium boasting about having axed the carbon tax — the signal policy of nine years of Trudeau Liberalism, a measure Carney supported from the get-go and one he hailed in a 600-page treatise as an achievement the rest of the world should emulate. “You’ll soon be paying up to 18 cents less per litre than you did yesterday to fill up your tank,” declared the ex-United Nations envoy on all things green, the warrior against climate change, the man who predicted businesses that missed the chance to go green would go dead instead. Woo-ha.
But he wasn’t finished. A few days after castigating Poilievre for refusing to get security clearance, theoretically missing the chance to hear about foreign interference in Canadian elections, Carney announced there was no way he’d dump Liberal candidate Paul Chiang, who had urged his supporters to drag a Conservative candidate off to the Chinese consulate — which didn’t like his attitude towards Beijing’s crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy — and collect a reward in return. Sure, the suggestion was “deeply offensive” and lacked judgment, Carney said, but Chiang had apologized, and “he’s going to continue his candidacy.
” Even when a howl of protest went up from Hong Kong rights activists, Carney stuck by his decision, and was saved from himself only when Chiang had the sense to step aside on his own. Carney’s bad week would have been a gift to Poilievre if the Conservative leader hadn’t been busy rejecting some good advice he was getting. Having observed seven full days of campaigning, media onlookers reached the shared conclusion that the Tories were blowing it.
Articles popped up all over, like stinkweed in spring, reporting discordant rumblings in the ranks. Conservative candidates weren’t happy about their plunge in the polls. Analysts, pollsters, commentators — the whole Ottawa bubble bandwagon — agreed the campaign was a mess.
Unnamed sources, which appear to be the only kind these days, “are describing a ‘dysfunctional’ campaign with too much centralized power and belittling and aggressive treatment of staff,” reported the CBC, which doesn’t have much time for Conservatives anyway. Kory Teneycke, a former aid to Prime Minister Stephen Harper who’s now working for Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who only recently talked to Poilievre for the first time, popped up all over warning of disaster ahead. Poilievre “looks too much like Trump.
He sounds too much like Trump. He uses the lexicon of Trump,” Teneycke said (without mentioning that Liberals used to say similar things about Ford). The consensus opinion was that Poilievre should ditch his pitch — which had been meticulously prepared to target Liberal failures and voters’ domestic concerns — and go full-throttle on a rampage against Trump.
But Poilievre demurred. The Trump threat, he argued , validates his argument that Canada needs to look to itself to remedy the economic damage left by a decade of Liberal misrule. He announced that a Poilievre government would seek an early date to renegotiate trade ties — matching a Carney plan from a week earlier — but he intended otherwise to continue with bread-and-butter issues dealing with housing, affordability, infrastructure and “the lost Liberal decade.
” The opening days of the campaign saw several Liberals who had announced their retirement suddenly jump back into the race. Former cabinet minister Anita Anand said she changed her mind not because her chances of re-election went from two per cent to 94 per cent once Trudeau resigned — oh heavens no — but because Carney promised that, unlike his predecessor, he’d be “open to considering the viewpoints of his caucus and cabinet in a serious way.” Not a bad reason overall, but since becoming prime minister Carney has been anything but enthusiastic about sharing.
He balked at offering details of his personal finances, his corporate ties or his role in a plan that helped business operations avoid taxes by registering in Bermuda, and refused to shift his view on Chiang, even when it became obvious that the candidate had to go. Poilievre, for his part, styles himself as determined to repair Canada’s Trudeau-battered finances while announcing a series of pricey new spending programs and a tax cut that would cost twice as much as something similar pledged by Carney. If anything, their tactics seem to consist of stealing ideas wholesale from one another.
Both men are promising tax cuts. Both pledge fewer inter-provincial trade barriers. Both tout cross-Canada corridors to boost the economy, though Poilievre’s is a straightforward “energy corridor” while Carney’s is a “trade diversification corridor fund” that mentions ports, railroads, airports and highways, but not pipelines.
Carney stole Tory plans on carbon taxes and capital gains; Poilievre matched Carney’s promise of new talks on trade. Both vow to stand firm against Washington. Neither likes each other much, or flinches from snide jabs at the other.
“A resume is not a plan,” Poilievre says of Carney’s background; “Slogans are not solutions,” Carney retorts of Poilievre’s favoured incantations. Both can get snippy when pressed by journalists. If there’s an honest chasm separating them it’s over over energy and climate.
Carney says he’d speed up permitting of resource projects, cut duplication and look favourably on pipelines, but he’d keep a tax on big emitters and maintain the Liberals’ controversial Bill C-69, sometimes derided as the “no-pipelines law.” To meet global emissions goals, he’s written that , “More than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground.” Poilievre, in contrast, insists the energy industry is vital to reversing Canada’s economic slide.
On Tuesday he agreed to meet five requests put forward by industry executives: cancel C-69 and the ban on oil tankers off British Columbia’s coast; set a six-month target on decisions for new resource applications; end a carbon charge on industrial emitters; scrap the “pollution cap ” on oil and gas companies; and set up a corporation led by Indigenous people to offer loan guarantees to Indigenous communities. Carney and Poilievre come across increasingly as two stubborn men who resist being questioned on their inclinations. Much of what they propose is similar.
Much of what they evade is likewise. Carney has begun taking on some tarnish. Poilievre has much ground to regain.
On balance, clarity is not a feature of this campaign. National Post.
