Terrebonne, Byelections, And Carney’s Solid Majority

On The Liberal Byelection Sweep

Mark Carney won his majority government tonight in Toronto, with resounding wins in both University Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest. Both Danielle Martin and Doly Begum will make great caucus members, and their work to get elected has been incredible. Both should be proud of their accomplishments tonight, and we should not forget that their performances represent clear proof that the Liberals are still on the up compared to last year’s general election, despite replacing high profile cabinet ministers. (Martin is essentially flat with Freeland’s vote, but managing that considering she’s replacing a former Deputy PM means the party brand is better off since 2025.)

I’m leading with those two for a reason - they cannot be forgotten in tonight’s story, and I know everyone will ignore them if I shove them in the middle. But tonight is not about Toronto, as sad as the centre of the universe will be about that, but a small seat northeast of Montreal. Terrebonne is the story of the night, and the Liberals just expanded their margin in a seat that so many claimed was a fluke Liberal win. And I’m just thinking about how there truly are two Quebecs - the one that people who actually understand Quebec see, and the insanely offensive caricature that so many paint Quebec as.

After tonight, let’s hope at least some people ditch the caricature.

..

“I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow”

Longtime readers know Motion Pictures (For Carrie) is a longtime love of mine, and that one singular word - somehow - has always been a great inspiration for me, and a calling. That one word, wrapped in so much meaning, has an incredible impact on me, because it’s so emblematic of how so many people treat things. The idea that they’ll figure it out somehow, without a plan or strategy, the idea that people will just be what they are somehow, and the idea that Quebec is what it is somehow, and not because Quebecers made collective decisions in its best interests.

So much of the media fucking suck at covering Quebec because they adopt views of Quebec that are stuck before I was born. I know I’m an asshole who makes this point constantly, but until such point as the media starts to cover Quebec better, I’m gonna keep saying it. The English majority in this country treats Quebec like the child it can’t control, who are too stupid to know what they want and who can be controlled by the electoral equivalent of dangling keys in front of their eyes.

Quebecers have proven, once again, that they are serious people prepared for the serious times we’re in. This shouldn’t be news to anybody, given that all Canadians have shown this in various ways and in various times, but English Canadians often treat Quebecers more like zoo animals than fellow humans, and I for one am glad for this result because it ends the fiction that Quebecers are as dumb as some Anglos want them to be.

Carney’s central premise, whether to millionaires in Rosedale, working class voters in Scarborough, or soft nationalists-but-not-sovereigntists in Terrebonne, is that government is a force for good and that he is the right person to do the job right now to fix the problems both of Donald Trump’s insanities and Justin Trudeau’s woke excesses. He doesn’t say that explicitly, mainly because we want the contrast to Trudeau to be implicit, but Carney’s whole pitch is that he is the right person to lead in this time of chaos. For someone who served under Harper as Bank of Canada governor, his rhetorical pitch is basically Harperite - he could call Canada an island of stability in a sea of chaos tomorrow and it wouldn’t be out of place.

But the fact that his rhetorical pitch is Harper’s doesn’t mean his policy pitch is conservative. Carney is running as a progressive, just not an excessive one. Trudeau went too far on some of the most controversial issues, and Carney has a mandate to pare those back. But he also has not merely a mandate but an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our values. Terrebonne voted for that agenda - one of course correction and tweaks, not of wholesale reform or destroying the system entirely.

The reason Carney doesn’t anger me like he does some progressives is because I understand that for all the good vibes of the Trudeau playbook, he ran a government that was in many ways unacceptably flawed. His immigration policy suppressed wages, fucked the housing market, and caused a spike in youth unemployment, all because he didn’t have the balls to tell Lululemon no when they wanted cheap labour. While I’m grateful for many parts of that government’s agenda, Carney is here because Trudeau-ism was a failure, and the country knew it.

The dumber parts of this country’s commentariat will spend all of Tuesday deliberately missing the point, but Carney is not continuity Trudeau, and that’s what Terrebonne just voted for. They aren’t too stupid to see the failures of the Liberals, they’re smart enough to see the difference between two very different types of Liberals. Far from an indictment of the people, it is the greatest compliment we can pay them that they didn’t succumb to the intellectual laziness of assuming that just because the party name is the same, everything else is. Mark Carney’s life in political office has been a bet on the idea that the Canadian people deserve more credit than the commentariat, and the most feeble-minded of their expectations, think they do.

That Carney can’t speak French very well is the clearest example, but Carney’s success in Quebec is because Quebecers are serious people ready to step up in a serious time. As a Canadian, I’m proud of Quebecers for not being what others assume of them. As a Liberal, I’m immensely proud of the team in Montreal. And as a writer, I’m once again reminded that so many people’s justifications of their assumptions about Quebec begin and end with that one word - somehow - whether they’re smart enough to know it or not.

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