Chris Selley: The spectre of Trudeau overshadows Carney’s French debate

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre landed a few pretty solid blows against Liberal leader Mark Carney during the French-language debate in Montreal on Wednesday night. Whether those blows will matter to Quebecers, who will have comprised the vast majority of the audience for the debate, it would be foolish to prognosticate.

But they were pretty good burns.

“Your Liberal government for 10 years has the worst track record on immigration, on housing, on immigration, on crime,” Poilievre said Carney. “Doesn’t it embarrass you to ask for a fourth term of office?”

“I’ve just become leader. I’ve been prime minister for one month,” Carney rebutted, noting his trade outreach efforts both domestically and internationally.

In the very unlikely event I had been advising Carney on how to assume the Liberal leadership, which he had very clearly been contemplating for quite some time, I would have advised him to take his time to assemble a campaign team that put some distance between him and Justin Trudeau — precisely to fend off accusations like Poilievre’s.

Instead, Carney launched his campaign with Tom Pitfield as the campaign’s executive director — Pitfield being a longtime friend of and campaigner for Trudeau, husband of former party president and current Montreal MP Anna Gainey, and guest on Trudeau’s infamous jaunt to the Aga Khan’s island in 2014. Nothing at all about Carney’s campaign screams “change,” with respect to how the next government might operate.

Carney fronts an altogether spent force of a party seeking a fourth term in government — a government that would include several ex- and presumably potential future ministers who hastily un-resigned from politics once they saw the polls suddenly shifting in Liberal favour. By rights, the Liberals should be sent to their room to think about what they have done over the past decade or so.

Being sent to their room is more or less what rightly happened to Stephen Harper’s government after roughly a decade, and what rightly happened to the Jean Chrétien/Paul Martin Liberals after quite a bit more than a decade. It’s healthy, especially in a country where the two leading parties don’t really disagree passionately on all that much, least of all the central question posed by Wednesday night’s debate, which was what to do about Donald Trump.

Answer: Fight! Borrow money and give it to people! Buy Canadian! Etcetera! Unanimous!

Carney’s “it’s my first day” protestations are all well and good, but he had clearly been thinking about taking this plunge for a very long time. How is it possible he didn’t assemble a better team — a team that might be more aware of his glaring weaknesses?

“You don’t want change,” Poilievre alleged of Carney, who attempted a rejoinder — by arguing this election is all about who can stand up to Donald Trump — and then Yves-Francois Blanchet pounced:

“It the same party, the same ministers, the same focus, the same ideology,” the Bloc Québécois leader charged. Changing the party leader doesn’t change all that when everything else remains the same, he said. And he’s right. Carney, like former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff before him, doesn’t even seem to be in charge of his own campaign.

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