With reports that Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada, will be announcing his bid to become Liberal leader and the next prime minister of Canada, The Hub’s publisher and co-founder Rudyard Griffiths sits down with Crestview Strategy partner and Hub contributor Ginny Roth to discuss what this means for the race, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, and the impending Canadian federal election.
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RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Fortunate this week to have in studio Ginny Roth, she’s a regular contributor. We love your stuff for us, Vice President, partner at Crestview strategy. Well, Ginny, we got to talk about Mark Carney today. Big news later today, every expectation that he will be announcing in Edmonton. How are conservatives reacting to this. What is the kind of feeling about the potential threat that a Mark Carney represents as a possible future leader of the Liberal Party?
GINNY ROTH: Threat might be a strong word, but yeah. I mean, the Conservatives are pretty confident, I think, in their ability to cut liberal leaders down a couple notches. They have some experience doing that fairly well, and they, from what I’ve seen, they are very intent on making sure that they define what happens to these liberal leadership contenders. You could argue the Conservatives played a significant role in Christy Clark stepping back. They really sort of drove home that she was not entirely honest about the role she played in the Conservative Party recently, and they’re taking the same approach to Carney. So the real area they’re zoning in on is making sure people understand that when he says he’s an outsider, he’s not. And, you know, there’s a lot of evidence I saw. I think it was today, Campbell Clark at the Globe and Mail, who’s not exactly a right wing columnist, basically rejected the premise that Carney is not an insider, because there’s all kinds of evidence that he’s been advising this government for years, directly to the Prime Minister.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, I believe one of Chrystia Freeland’s Children is lucky enough to have Mark Carney as their godfather. So the ancestors, You took the words right out of my mouth, but James, you were a big part of pure poly AB leadership campaign, if you were advising Mark Carney. I mean, this is a tough job for him, because he has had a long standing association with this Prime Minister’s different ways that Trudeau tried to unsuccessfully drag him in. How would he separate himself out? Does he have to do something big today, I don’t know, renounce the carbon tax, something that really shows that he is going to be a player here, and he’s going to do what it takes, what this situation demands.
GINNY ROTH: I think it’s got to be on policy. Because, like, not only is there strong evidence that he’s technically been an insider and that he’s been advising the current government and Prime Minister, there’s also this sense, you know, I think his book title recently was values, s in brackets, meaning, like the value oriented global economy, social impact, like all this whole trend of the last decade that so many voters are rejecting. And so, I think his bigger problem is that he’s tied to a whole set of policy experiments that have kind of failed, the pinnacle of which is the carbon tax in many ways. And so I think he needs a hard break on the carbon tax, for sure, but he also needs to signal, I think, something on crime and social disorder. I think that’s an area where the public is just saying, like, back to common sense. Enough, we can’t keep releasing repeat criminals and expecting they won’t commit crimes. Some of that sort of like common sense, bread and butter policy that the Liberals have so got fallen out of step with public opinion on, I think he’d have to be so bold on some of those things. And frankly, I’m not sure he’s willing to. I guess we’ll find out.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yeah, those are issues really, that he doesn’t seem to have much public standing or record of engaging with. Let’s talk about some of the buzz that is around what could happen if Carney becomes leader. Because many people are wondering, why would someone like this put himself forward only to be Prime Minister for two to three weeks, to just be either pulled down on the throne speech or a supply vote. You know, sometime late March, early April, there’s some fears out there. I consider them fears that, you know, what Carney is trying to do here is revive the liberal polls enough that the NDP could be pulled back into, you know, the liberals orbit maybe through some kind of formal coalition, how seriously should we take those concerns?
GINNY ROTH: So I think that there are basically two contenders for the leadership at this point. It’s Christy Freeland and Mark Carney. I think those fears are better placed, or I think that scenario is more likely that the Liberals might try to hold on to power, particularly with the support of the NDP that you’ve talked about on your podcast, that Sean, your co founder, articulated, well, well argued in one of his columns recently. I think that’s more likely under a Freeland leadership. Interesting, because I think she wants to take on the mantle of Prime Minister in Parliament. She has a seat in Parliament, so it’s much easier for her to do that, and she’s been in this cabinet, she cannot shake the fact that she’s an insider, and I don’t even think she’ll try. So if you’re going to do that, you want to say, like, we’re going to get the job done, maybe we’ll see we’ll complete PharmaCare, and that’s that’s what you give the NDP to try to get their support. That seems very plausible to me. Carney, I think he kind of seemed to be alluding to this in an Interview, his daily show, interview with Jon Stewart, that he he seemed to imply that it was up to the liberals or the governing party when the next election was going to be, or it was likely to be, which kind of hints to me that maybe he would want to call it on his own terms. And that’s kind of a power move like I think I would respect that if he, if he were to win the leadership and say, we’re not even going back to the house, I’m going to the GG, and I need confidence. And then I think you’ve got to make it about Trump. And somehow he would have to sort of stitch together a really strong argument that, you know, he’s been a global leader. He understands markets, whatever, whatever his talking points are, and that he’s the only one who can can fight Trump, and he needs every election to do it.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: And what do you think he would, he would do in terms of, of trying to convince the Canadian public after winning the leadership? I mean, what are his assets? Barring another financial crisis, let’s hope we don’t have one between now and and May. But I’m trying to understand what the proposition is, if you, again, if you were advising me on not simply the leadership, but the bigger proposition for the country to become Prime Minister, what is it?
GINNY ROTH: Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, he will talk about markets, and he’s someone who is very defensive. I find of a narrative about the role that big business plays in the economy, the role that banks play in the economy, his role as a central banker, and he has, I don’t think he’s, found a way to articulate that in a way that kind of meets the moment, frankly, a populist moment that says, No, we’ve been let down by banks and markets, whether it was the financial crisis or through Central Bank spending in COVID and monetary policy mistakes that central bankers made, you know, inflation, inflation, yeah, that being the biggest, you know, he can. He can put out a statement that you know, Stephen Harper recognized him when he after he was the head of our bank here, but I think that’s gonna fall on death ears, especially if the type of language he used and the style he uses, what we’ve seen so far, which sounds like it’s from, you know, 2014 it just sounds like it’s from a different era. And so maybe he’ll pull a rabbit out of a hat and start to pivot on that. But when people start to understand what it’s going to take to fight back against Trump like strong retaliatory tariffs in key Congress, congressional districts where Trump fears you might lose his next Congress vote if he doesn’t fall in line. I just don’t see Carney pulling that up. Doesn’t seem like the guy who’s going to do that to me.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, we’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we? Mario Draghi, another central banker. In this case, the European Central Bank became the head of Italy. Effectively, it was a few elections later, but Georgia Meloni, the populist, eventually arrived. Final question, what do you think the conservative strategy should be towards Carney? Should we? Should the party be backing off during this liberal leadership and, in a sense, allow what’s going to happen. To happen is there a danger of elevating Carney too much by attacking him, by making him the focus? Let’s say of Pierre Poilievre’s, you know, social media feed. I mean, what would your advice be there?
GINNY ROTH: I think what you’ll see is more of what you’ve already seen. I mean, don’t forget, this is Pierre Poilievre, and the people around him during the leadership campaign, people couldn’t understand why, if he was leading, why was he going after Patrick Brown and Josh Charest? Well, he won by a lot more. I think in part because he did. He defined them before they defined themselves. It’s, frankly, it’s what the same people did to Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion. And so if you’re them, you think like it works, right? Yeah, you might, you might give a bit of a name recognition boost, but the weight of Pierre Poilievre as audience and some of his surrogates have big audiences too, but you can’t replicate that audience unless you sort of go hard on a key message and the weight of that audience to define those leadership candidates before they can be defined, and they’re not defined in the public consciousness today. I don’t think Mark Carney is not Freeland is maybe to a greater extent, but maybe to a fault, as being tied to the current government. And so that’s, I think, how they’re going to behave and to their credits work for them.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I lied. That wasn’t my last question. Odds of Mark Carney winning this liberal leadership is it? Is it his to lose?
GINNY ROTH: Well, I’ll say first, campaigns matter, and these are the kinds of campaigns matter, especially in leadership campaigns based on the rules, it’s a pretty tight race that was a high buy in. The cutoff is quick, so that benefits establishment candidates. Let’s put it that way. It looks like Karina Gould might get in. She will not be, I think an establishment candidate. I think it’s a tougher Hill for her to climb. So I think it comes down to Freeland and Carney. I think Freeland has the advantage today, but I think Carney, you know, within the context of current liberal members and voters, I kind of think he’s winning the week he everyone was talking about his American interview, even if it was critical, they were talking about him, they were making him really relevant. And I think his message cut through that he sort of held his own, and whatever he wanted to convey to liberals, and I don’t know that Freeland has had that success, so I look forward to seeing how they spar with each other, if at all. They may try to avoid that, because that’s probably not great for their party, but I think he can increase his odds. Let’s put it that way, and it’s certainly winnable for him. I think it’s first to lose today, but I think he can, he can pull it off.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, Ginny Roth, thank you so much for coming into The Hub studios. We look forward to your byline in the hub and viewers can follow you and all your work at Crestview, where you’re a vice president and partner. So thanks again for being here today.