The Weekly Wrap: Can the Conservatives find a counter for Carney’s vibes-based appeal? 

In The Weekly Wrap, Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was. It’s vibes over policy so far in this election After the first week of the campaign, it’s become an axiom that Mark Carney would be better than Pierre Poilievre to advance the country’s interests with President Trump. Polls show a considerable majority of Canadians hold this view. It’s unclear, though, why precisely they think it. Neither Carney nor Poilievre has really said or done anything that would lead to such a conclusion. If you were given different statements that the two have made without attribution, for instance, it would be hard to judge who’s actually said what. Canadians have seemingly come to this view—one that may well determine the election’s outcome—based on intuition rather than facts. It’s mostly about vibes. This creates a big challenge for the Conservatives. How do they change people’s perceptions if they’re not quite rooted in substance. They’re dealing with something instinctive, something visceral, something that goes beyond speeches or policy pronouncements. There’s something about Carney’s biography and persona that makes a significant number of Canadians think he’d be good at handling Trump. And there’s something about Poilievre’s that makes them think he would not. They may be right or they may be wrong. In some ways, it doesn’t matter. This is what they think. And as we enter the second week of the campaign, it’s not obvious that there’s much that the Conservatives can do to change their minds. Mark Carney’s French is terrible—and that’s a good thing Canada’s last unilingual prime minister was Lester Pearson. Depending on who you ask, Mark Carney may be the next one. His command of French has been characterized as somewhere between mediocre and non-existent. Yet conservatives should resist the temptation to kick up a fuss about it. Rather than seeing it as an opportunity to exploit Carney’s weakness in the moment, they should see it as a chance to make a bigger argument about bilingualism itself. If the Liberal Party puts up a basically unilingual candidate for prime minister and Canadians ultimately vote in his favour, it could be a major challenge to the 60-year political convention that aspiring prime ministers ought to have a strong command of both official languages. Official bilingualism’s stranglehold over federal politics may implicitly be on the ballot. Carney’s candidacy could, in theory, open the door to future leaders who aren’t proficient in one of Canada’s official languages. If so, it could have a hugely democratizing effect on our politics. Keep in mind that only something like 18 percent of Canadians self-report as bilingual in English and French. A disproportionate share of this cohort is in Quebec in general and the national capital region in particular. The result is that our political leadership for several decades has derived from a narrow population subset in a narrow part of the country. Stephen Harper is the major exception. The broad acceptance of Carney’s campaign, notwithstanding his linguistic limits, should therefore be viewed as a notable step towards opening up the prospects of politics to millions of Canadians who hitherto assumed that they couldn’t aspire to a vocation of public life. Canadian news outlets are receiving subsidies during the campaign—they should disclose it As we reported on Friday, the Canadian Journalism Collective—the non-profit organization responsible for dispersing funding to Canadian news outlets on behalf of Google under the terms of the Online News Act—quietly started issuing payments earlier this month. The CJC anticipates that it will complete the first round of payments by the end of April. It then promises to publicly release the full list of recipient organizations and their funding levels within 30 days. This of course means that the CJC’s disclosure won’t happen until the election is over. But that doesn’t stop individual outlets from self-reporting. They could confirm now whether they’re receiving funding and if so, how much, at any time. They should. The Online News Act—and in turn this funding—is the subject of contestation in this election campaign. The Conservatives opposed the bill when it moved through the House of Commons and have committed to repealing it if re-elected. This, by the way, is a major problem with government subsidies (or government-mandated subsidies) for journalism. It turns the press itself into a political issue. In this particular case, there’s an onus on the recipient organizations (including the National Post, Globe and Mail, and Toronto Star) to be transparent about their funding in order to address legitimate questions about their impartiality on the subject. Recent Hub analysis for instance has shown that the major print newspapers have published a disproportionate number of articles and op-eds tilted in favour of the Online News Act. (It should be noted that the Globe and Mail‘s Andrew Coyne has been a consistent and notable exception.) If their readers are going to presented with such a one-sided defence of the subsidy regime, if these outlets are going to effectively turn themselves into platforms for self-interested advocacy, the least they could do is to be transparent about their own stake in it. One could make a sardonic point about how much journalists would surely object to such an obvious conflict-of-interest and the need for full disclosure in other instances, but it seems almost too easy. For our part, The Hub has announced that while it was eligible for a first installment of roughly $22,000 from the CJC, we’ve decided to donate our dispersal to March of Dimes Canada to support its work on behalf of Canadians with disabilities. We’d welcome it if other outlets followed suit. But at this point, we’ll take just them disclosing that they’re getting money at all.