Carney, Election Timing, And Guessing Uncertain Futures

Why There’s No Way To Know For Certain

Twitter and the commentariat are abuzz with speculation of when the next election will be, an understandable and somewhat reasonable question in our current state, but the problem is a lot of the discourse around it is fundamentally flawed in many ways.

Mark Carney will win the leadership, assuming he does, March 9th. I am convinced, though I cannot currently find it, that there was one article claiming that Carney would call the election the weekend before Parliament comes back (scheduled for March 24th) to capitalize on momentum. I haven’t talked to anybody in Carney’s circle about election timing, hut I’m sure they’re considering that. But I think the election timing speculation is nonsensical, for one very specific reason - we know fucking nothing of the world on March 9th.

There is a tariff deadline on March 6th, given Donald Trump’s 30 day extension, and there’s going to be something like 20 national opinion polls between now and then. If the government negotiates another extension on the tariffs, the Trump admin is placated by the (entirely fake) steps Trudeau agreed to, and the Liberals are polling at 33% and in a spot to challenge for a win, sure, Carney will probably go in March. If there’s no extension and the country’s in chaos, he probably won’t.

That sounds banal and utterly obvious, but I’ve had a pretty good track record of shooting down dumb and bad arguments about when an election would be so far this Parliament, so let’s have some fun. I think the case for Carney going long is currently underrated by the emerging consensus, and it’s more persuasive than some think.

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Let’s dispense first with the idea the NDP will be a problem - if they’re truly stupid enough to vote down the government at the first opportunity like they claim, they’re signing their own death warrants and enabling Carney to claim he wanted to fix problems but was stopped by politics. That would be an in-kind contribution to the Liberals, because it allows them to pretend that they could be solving problems if not for the evil Opposition and blame them for any policy issues that come up during the campaign. But I don’t think they’re stupid enough to force a campaign when official party status is essentially lineball, so I think the Liberals will be fine if they’re gonna want to go long.

The question is whether that makes sense. The best argument for going short is that going long gives the Conservatives time for their best advantage - their significantly greater fundraising apparatus and their spending edge - to flood the airwaves and define Carney without the need for niceties like campaign spending rules. It’s a persuasive argument, and certainly something worth worrying about if you’re a Liberal. But it’s also not everything.

If you’re Carney, you want to go to an election as a Different Kind Of Liberal, and a crucial part of that is ditching some of the fiscal policy elements of this government. If you want to be believed by people that you want to abolish the Carbon Tax or whatever else, isn’t using Parliament to do that a better option than saying to the electorate “sorry, I called an election instead of doing anything about the promises I made in the leadership”?

If you’re Carney, how are you not putting a one sentence bill to delay the carbon tax rise on April 1st on the floor on March 25th and essentially daring the Conservatives to vote against you? If they vote with you, they’re stuck voting for a confidence motion, and if they vote against, they just voted to sustain the Carbon Tax. It’s that kind of opportunity that only Parliament can create that the Liberals should take advantage of.

Those opportunities lend credence to the other possibility, which would be a compromise position of a late May or early June polling day. Something like four weeks of parliamentary sittings to pass an Estimates package, a carbon tax repeal, present a new budget, and maybe one or two more ideas before laying down a budget and racing to the Governor General. The upsides here could be immense, given the ability to strategically wedge the Tories into deeply uncomfortable votes.

The downside of a middle path would be the TV ad spending, but the damage you take from an extra month of ads is offset by the ability to use that time to wedge the Tories and to eliminate a core plank of the Conservative manifesto by getting a carbon tax repeal through. It would also give Nate Erskine-Smith more time to do things on Housing and to make himself more of a national presence, which could be useful to the Liberals’ hopes of winning back disaffected young voters.

I also don’t think it will be that hard for Carney to raise the money to match the Tories for a few weeks pre-writ. He’s a wealthy banker with a lot of rich friends but he’s also animated a ton of Liberals to his cause. I plainly don’t think this will be that hard for Carney to raise enough once he wins that the airwaves would be one sided if they go for a month.

The other point that is worth reiterating is that none of us know the world we’ll be in. A month ago today I was making the case for Mark Carney skipping this leadership race because he had no chance of actually winning a general election and he shouldn’t waste it. Today, I’m wondering whether he’ll have Pierre Poilievre in minority territory once Abacus releases again. A month has proven to have more news than some years already in 2025 - pretending we know what Carney will walk into on March 9th is a fool’s errand.

There is little utility in guessing what Carney will or should do about the timing of the 2025 election. Waiting a month and seeing the lay of the land he inherits will decide the timing. Until then, there’s enough nonsense to entertain all of us that isn’t just guessing about uncertain futures.

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