1 week Ago By Michael Higgins
All the scrutiny and questions may be getting a bit too much for Mark Carney as he suspends his campaign for a third time. Carney has clearly been irritated and put his “elbows up” after being questioned about a number of controversies swirling around him. Among the recent issues that have put Carney under a glaring spotlight have been: why Brookfield Asset Management used a Bermud a bike shop as a tax haven while he was an executive at the firm; whether his previous jobs create a conflict-of-interest for him and whether he met a pro-Beijing lobbying group in Toronto, as reported in the Globe and Mail on Thursday.
Carney said he had never heard of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC) but the Globe pointedly revealed that there were photographs on the organization’s website showing the prime minister with two of its senior members. All that heat must have left Carney in a flop sweat. On Thursday, Carney said he was suspending his campaign to return to Ottawa to convene a meeting Friday of the cabinet committee on Canada-U.
S. relations. The reason was to respond to the continuing fallout from U.
S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to the Liberals. Except, that on Wednesday Trump reversed course.
He paused his decision about reciprocal tariffs on some countries and took no additional action on Canada. What was there to urgently respond to? The immediate need for Carney to flee to the safety of an Ottawa committee room may have had more to do with taking a breather from all those troublesome questions. But it also has another benefit: it plays into the Liberals’ attempts to mythologize Carney as the only saviour of Canada from the enemy that is Trump.
Carney must be portrayed as the chosen one, the hero of the hour, the slayer of beasts and the scourge of the evildoer. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Liberals installed a Bat Signal on top of Parliament with his face on it. But it has to be this way because the Liberals have no other plank on which to stand.
The housing crisis, the food crisis, the immigration crisis, the lack of infrastructure/investment crisis, the health-care crisis, the crime and drug crisis — all caused or exacerbated by nine years of Liberal misrule. Who would vote for Carney if his platform was: Vote for Liberals because this time — pinky promise — we are going to get it right? And so Carney versus Trump is the only platform. A week ago, pundits were saying that the only “ballot question” was Trump’s tariffs and that Pierre Poilievre was wrong to concentrate on “domestic issues” – as if they don’t matter to Canadians.
Now the tariff threat has receded somewhat. It may come back, only to recede again and then come back again. Trump will be the rogue factor for the next four years.
However, all those crises that screwed Canada for the last nine years aren’t going away and they need to be dealt with. Which is why Poilievre has been so adamant about raising them time and again. On Friday, he was asked whether he had committed “campaign malpractice” by squandering a 25 point lead in the polls, the implication being that he should have spent his firepower on Trump.
But Poilievre refused to back down. “The Liberals and lobbyists want me to stop talking about the food prices,” he said . “Well, I’m not going to do that because single mothers should not be going to bed hungry worrying about how they are going to feed their kids in the morning.
“And they want me to stop talking about the doubling of housing costs during the lost Liberal decade. I’m not going to stop talking about that. “They want me to stop talking about the rampaging crime that’s overtaking our streets and the overdose crisis that the Liberals caused that has taken the lives of 50,000 people.
I will not stop talking about that either. “We can’t afford a fourth Liberal term.” Th Liberals can’t run on their record — who runs on a record of failure? Which is why we are witnessing the bizarre spectacle of Carney and his entourage of Trudeau ministers acting as if the last nine years had never happened.
Carney’s only hope of electoral success rests on him being portrayed as prime ministerial. This means that he may have to stretch the limits of the caretaker convention that call for a government to act “with restraint” during an election period. The Privy Council guidelines do allow governments to deal with matters which are “urgent and in the public interest.
” But who makes that call? Carney. And so we have an unelected prime minister and novice politician making profound and significant decisions with regard to tariffs and retaliatory measures that may well hamstring a future government. Critics might argue that the business of government must continue.
And so it must. But the appalling timing of all this is down to the Liberals, and if Carney wanted to govern on behalf of all Canadians and in a time of dire emergency, he could well have convened a wartime cabinet, and sought the confidence of the House instead of calling an election. In Britain, Carney was called the “high priest of Project Fear” because of his political attempts to dissuade people from leaving the European Union.
He has now revived those odious tactics and is playing on the anxieties of a nation, a new Project Fear, to scare Canadians and get himself elected. But as Franklin D. Roosevelt might have said, we have nothing to fear but Project Fear itself.
National Post.
