By: Leo Kristal-Polci
Edited by: Emilia MacDonald
For the better part of the past two years, one question has engrossed Canada’s political fortune tellers more than any other: “Just how bad is the Liberal Party’s problem?”. Polls have consistently placed the Liberals as far as 25 points off Conservatives heading into the next federal election, and the Tories seemed sure to win their first mandate since Stephen Harper’s defeat in 2015, most likely with a comfortable majority. Nearly a decade of Liberal governance with Justin Trudeau at the helm had ignited a restlessness among Canadians that it seemed only Pierre Poilievre could satiate. That was, of course, until new life was breathed into the Liberal Party by none other than Donald Trump. News of Trump’s plans to levy large-scale tariffs against Canadian goods swept headlines across the country, and the attention that had formerly been paid to affordability, housing, and the carbon tax was quickly replaced by talk of how best to confront the looming danger to the south. Shortly after Trump’s first threats, the political pot was stirred again when, after much speculation, Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning as Prime Minister, throwing the Liberals into a leadership race in the midst of a trade war. The conditions were now set for a new player to enter the scene.
As the former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and the man often credited with guiding Canada’s banking industry through the 2008 financial crisis, Mark Carney’s name has been floated as a potential Liberal leader for years. Mid-January, rumours became reality when the ex-central banker officially announced his candidacy in the leadership race, and his campaign quickly built momentum as high-profile endorsement after high-profile endorsement came flooding in. A recent Leger poll showed that he had garnered 68% support among Liberal voters compared to the 14% claimed by his closest competition, former finance minister Chrystia Freeland. How this popular approval translates to the Liberal election remains to be seen, but it is not a stretch to call Carney the frontrunner at this point in the race. With Carney in the driver’s seat, Leger predicts that the Liberals would secure 37% of Canadians’ support, putting them on exactly equal footing with the Conservatives going into the 2025 federal election. The explanation behind such a dramatic turnaround? Carney’s perceived ability to navigate Canada-US relations in the new age of Trump tariffs.
If Carney is indeed elected as the next Liberal leader, and thus Canada’s next Prime Minister, he will be in the very interesting, but not unprecedented, position of taking over a mandate won by another politician right before heading into a general election. This situation is tricky political terrain to navigate and has often led to the untimely demise of prime ministerial careers. Whether Carney will join the ranks of the fallen or successfully capitalize on his momentum will likely come down to whether or not he is able to learn from the mistakes of those who have come before him. On this note, two particular electoral defeats serve as case studies of how not to proceed: John Turner’s 1984 loss to Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell’s 1993 loss to Jean Chretien. In both cases, the defeated leaders had taken over their respective parties from long-serving Prime Ministers facing flagging popularity shortly before elections were due. Both also saw dramatic upticks in their own support after taking over as leader, and both nevertheless met their ends on Election Day. Given how closely Carney’s situation resembles those of Turner and Campbell, lessons from their tenures and campaigns could prove invaluable to his own.
A first lesson to be learned from Turner in particular is the importance of establishing distance from the leader being replaced. In 1984, John Turner took over the Liberal Party from Pierre Trudeau. Once the object of “Trudeaumania”, the Quebecer’s popularity was waning after 15 (albeit non-consecutive) years of leadership, and John Turner seemed to be the man of the hour when Trudeau resigned. After Turner’s ascension, Liberal approval rose to nearly 50% of decided voters, prompting him to call an early election in the hopes of turning that approval into a new mandate (Mintz 72). On the campaign trail, he sought to distance himself from the legacy of the unpopular Trudeau, in particular expressing his interest in changing course on fiscal policy. The extent to which this distancing worked, however, was seriously hampered by the fact that Turner’s cabinet was a near identical copy of Trudeau’s in both personnel and portfolios, and — even more condemning — by the fact that Turner had failed to cancel the nearly 200 patronage appointments that Trudeau had requested, even adding his own to the mix (Mintz 72). Brian Mulroney famously excoriated Turner on the latter point in a televised debate that many saw as a turning point in the campaign. These events clearly signalled that to satisfy the Canadian public, the distance a new Prime Minister puts between themself and their predecessor must be substantial, not just words and promises.
In contrast, Carney has a natural head start in the distancing game, having never served under Justin Trudeau (or anyone else for that matter) as a Member of Parliament. Policy-wise, the candidate has promised to repeal Trudeau’s notoriously controversial Carbon Tax and has indicated his support for a more aggressive approach to putting Canada on track to hit its NATO spending commitments as soon as possible. That being said, several former Trudeau staff have become involved in the Carney campaign, so the possibility of becoming entrenched in the current ideals of the party is a very real risk. For now, however, everything is speculative; whether or not Carney walks the walk can only be tested once he’s in a position to do so — in other words, the Prime Minister’s Office.
Another takeaway comes from both Campbell and Turner: standards are higher when you’re Prime Minister. It might seem obvious that as the most publicly scrutinized person in the nation, the standards to which your actions are held are different than they would have been as a minister or MP, but both Turner and Campbell’s campaigns were plagued by a series of avoidable PR blunders that led to serious costs in the long run. Turner, for example, repeatedly referred to job creation programs as “make work projects”, a term that had been left in the 70s for its patronizing connotations. What would have been a fairly innocuous mistake during his time as finance minister instead attracted attention from both the public and the media as evidence that Turner’s politics were outdated.
Kim Campbell was prone to this style of political faux-pas too. In a 1993 statement to reporters, she forecasted that unemployment would remain high until the year 2000. The prediction left Canadians feeling that the Tory government’s policy on unemployment was inadequate, and, when paired with an evasive response to a question about social programs, led many people to believe that Campbell planned on culling social programming if elected. The nail in the Campbell campaign’s proverbial coffin came in a separate incident when the Conservatives ran an attack ad that seemed to make fun of Jean Chretien’s partial facial paralysis as a result of Bell’s palsy. Public backlash was immediate and the ad was pulled, but the damage had already been done. Chretien jumped on the moment and quipped, “It’s true, that I speak on one side of my mouth. I’m not a Tory, I don’t speak on both sides of my mouth.” This proved to be a strong response to a desperate attack, and electoral fortunes were all but sealed in the wake of the incident. When Campbell took over from Brian Mulroney in June, she was one of the most popular prime ministers of the past thirty years. By October, the Conservatives had lost official party status, a defeat they would never recover from.
While it might appear that the lesson to be gained from these examples simply amounts to “Don’t make mistakes”, this would be an oversimplified and largely useless conclusion — every politician is bound to make mistakes at some point in their career. The more useful takeaway is that newly minted Prime Ministers seeking reelection have tended not to recognize the gravity of every one of their remarks and actions. Suddenly speaking on behalf of their party rather than just themselves or their department, each word that leaves their mouths has the potential to be taken as a policy commitment or an indication of party priorities. When John Turner spoke of “make work projects”, he was inadvertently speaking of political stagnation in the Liberal Party. When Kim Campbell talked of continued unemployment, she unwittingly talked of a Conservative party that was not committed to addressing one of Canada’s biggest concerns. These were not simple mistakes, they were symptoms of a lack of intentionality in vision and language that ultimately proved fatal on Election Day.
A good place to conclude this article is in passing a final verdict that underlies the first two: when approaching an election with the political circumstances in question, the significance of the campaign cannot be overstated. As both Turner and Campbell found out, preliminary polling meant nothing without a clean and compelling campaign. In the absence of an established track record from which to form opinions, the electorate placed a much stronger emphasis on campaign performance, a fact that can be at once daunting and hugely promising. If Mark Carney does become Canada’s 24th Prime Minister and the Liberal contender in 2025, a quick glance to the past suggests that his best chances lie in outlining a distinct and substantial view of Canada’s path forward and running a campaign whose every move is made with that view in mind.
References
Image Source: Bank of England. (2013). Mark Carney, Governor. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bankofengland/9183578150/in/photolist-eZweQj-2pdhquB-eFsRmY-eZweUd-eFsWjq-8VJt99-2p4iHTg-2gqYozA-2pdmQ8E-6rKLE2-2gqYCsM-MDmXWW-eZp5sV-amWUim-eZph4T-eZAq2u-eZApi1-eZAptu-eZp5og-eZApC3-eZAppy-oSPL1y-9PiqQF-fDk8uD-2gqYCSj-oHiSMs-
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