As Mark Carney is poised to be sworn in as Canada’s next prime minister and possibly trigger a federal election as early as next week, The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer spoke with Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs and one of the country’s leading pollsters, about his decisive victory in the Liberal leadership race, the implications for an upcoming election, and the challenges that Carney may face as prime minister.
SEAN SPEER: How should we interpret Mark Carney’s decisive leadership win? Is this a case of the so-called “Blue Liberals” pulling their party back to the centre of the political spectrum, or would it be a stretch to make such a judgement out of the race?
Darrell Bricker: It would be a stretch. Basically, it was the apparatchik that was around Justin Trudeau unifying behind one particular candidate who obviously became the frontrunner in the race. The behaviour of the Liberal caucus and cabinet [in terms of their endorsements] pretty much told you that they knew what they wanted and what was going to happen. The people in the Liberal Party can look at a poll after all. This is a party that is still about power and about obtaining power and using that power to achieve the Liberal Party’s ends. That hasn’t changed. In this case, they saw Carney as the best runner, and they picked him.
SEAN SPEER: As Carney is sworn in as prime minister, he has a series of important decisions to make in the next week or so, including about election timing, candidate selection, his policy platform, and so on. Talk about what he and his team should be thinking about as they prepare for a forthcoming election campaign.
DARRELL BRICKER: The Liberals should be preparing for the simplest possible campaign possible which involves building on his momentum from his win of the Liberal leadership and going after Pierre Poilievre and making him into a mini-Trump.
It’s interesting. We recently put out a poll where on a number of the key issues, including who is best to unite Canada or come up with policies that would mitigate some of the effects of what the U.S. is doing, Pierre Poilievre actually polls ahead of Carney. But Carney leads on a key question: which of the major party leaders is more or less likely to roll over for Donald Trump?
There’s a fair number of people in the media or the commentariat who are reading into Mark Carney what they think Canadians are thinking. But I don’t know whether they’re either aware of who he is or what he’s about. What they’re more concerned about is Pierre Poilievre potentially being someone who’s too close to Trump in terms of, not necessarily his personal affiliations or anything like that, but as somebody who’s kind of reflective of what Donald Trump is about and if you can trust somebody like that to represent Canada’s interests in negotiations. Fair or unfair, that’s just the way it is.
The other thing that Mark Carney has to do is just clearly distance himself from the Trudeau government. I think events have done that for him. I think that he has to worry less about that than I think punditry would suggest. People have moved into the here and now and the near-term future, and they’re really looking at that as the policy agenda, as opposed to the things that happened in the past. As a result, it puts him in a position where he is in just about every poll you look at right now, at least pretty close to tied with the Conservatives. The Liberal Party is back in the game.
SEAN SPEER: Reports are that Carney will advise the Governor General to dissolve Parliament before it’s set to return on March 24 and in turn precipitate an election. How do you think he holds up to the rigour and scrutiny of a multi-week campaign? Is there anything that you’ve seen from the leadership race, or Carney’s track record that gives us any insight into that question?
DARRELL BRICKER: My view on this is a bit contrarian. I actually think that his best campaign is the act of governing. It’s showing that he can govern well. From what we’ve seen from him so far, he’s not an impressive politician. He’s not somebody who can speak effectively in sound bites. He’s not somebody who can whip up a crowd. He’s not he’s not somebody who exudes a level of personal charisma and warmth, the way that Justin Trudeau did.
His real strong suit in my view is to be able to say “I’m actually who I said I was, and what others say about me.” That he’s a person who’s reasonable and mature and who can govern the country, maybe not inspirationally, but well in very difficult circumstances.
I know that there’s an assumption that he’s going to trigger an election soon. But as I said, I think is best campaign is the act of governing. It’s where he can demonstrate the strengths that he claims, and it’s something that Pierre Poilievre cannot do. So there’s a counterfactual or maybe a thought experiment that you could do where instead of immediately going to the polls, he governs for a while. The NDP aren’t going to vote him down. They’re just going to roll over for him. That scenario might actually be good for Carney and the Liberals.
SEAN SPEER: What should we make of his handling of the Brookfield issue? What does it tell us about Carney’s political acumen?
DARRELL BRICKER: He’s a guy who you can tell does great boardroom. There are a lot of hand steeples. He’s very thoughtful, but his explanations are long. You saw it in his answer on Brookfield.
His answer was just so disappointing because it was an opportunity to break free from that tradition that you saw develop over the last decade with the Trudeau Liberals, which was that they could never actually confront the idea that they might have been wrong or that something was questionable.
His answer was not “If I had to do that over again, maybe I wouldn’t, but at the time, I wasn’t really considering that I was going to be running for the leadership of the Liberal Party, and in hindsight, I should have probably done something different.”
That’s the kind of answer that people could engage with, rather than “I wasn’t precise enough,” which sounds like you’re basically saying, “You’re too stupid—I didn’t make this simple enough,” which is reminiscent of “Some people experience things differently,” or, “This is a learning experience for us all,” or, “You must be a racist or a misogynist,” or whatever the bad motives that would justify asking Justin Trudeau questions about why he did what he did.
That was a real problem for the prime minister and his government. Skirting around the issues is something that people really learn to loathe. They learned to loathe it in Justin Trudeau, and here’s this guy walking right into the same type of situation. I think this could be a moment that comes back. If Carney finds himself sliding in the future, we’ll point back to this particular instance as an interesting tell about why he was going to run into trouble
SEAN SPEER: How do you think Carney performs on the hustings?
DARRELL BRICKER: Well, as I said, he’s not demonstrated that he’s a very good politician. We’ve got enough experience with him now. They’re playing peekaboo with him and the press. This isn’t someone who is confident on his skates. You can see it.
He’s also not used to dealing with somebody like Pierre Poilievre who is going to stand up and say not just that “I disagree with you” but “You’re a jerk and you’re evil.” Nobody has done that to Mark Carney before. How’s he going to deal with it? We haven’t seen that yet. They’re probably rehearsing now. They’re trying to get ready. I’m wondering who they’re going to get to play Pierre Poilievre in the debate prep.
The point is that there’s a lot that can happen in a campaign. We haven’t seen him deal with it. And it’s not his natural environment.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
