Why Is Mark Carney Running Now?

On The Question Everybody Is Asking

(If you missed yesterday’s column on Steve MacKinnon, make sure to read it. Was very interesting to see the reactions.)

My views on Mark Carney are well litigated at this point, in a sense. I certainly stand by the idea that his record as a central banker don’t make me feel great about his fit for this moment, but I’ve litigated it. I will reiterate that Carney’s overly cautious approach to central banking scares the living shit out of me at a time when we need to be open to radical changes to save both our party and our economy, but I am theoretically interested in hearing him explain himself.

This piece, however, isn’t about whether Carney would make a good Prime Minister in a vacuum or even about promoting another candidate over him. It’s my attempt to honour this site’s mission - to say in public what everybody in Ottawa is saying in private. Or in this case, ask it, because, I’ll be honest right now, the most exciting question in this leadership race isn’t the status of certain Ministers or the rules, it’s more simpler.

How the fuck are Carney’s people letting him run for leader right now?

..

I am generally not one to particularly harp on staff decisions as particularly important. As much as I have shit on David Herle and Scott Reid in these pages over the years, I don’t actually blame them for the failures of Martin (and in Herle’s case, Wynne). Their political masters have the vast majority of the blame for their failures, as they do for the successes. But there is one person in this country I will genuinely treat with the reverence of genius. And that is Gerry Butts.

Butts’ decisions as Senior Adviser to the PM can be endlessly scrutinized, sure. His role in winning in 2015 - namely, getting the Liberals to vote for anti-terror legislation that would prove crucial to moderates and those worried Trudeau was an unserious pretender - will go down as a masterstroke. That the government’s political antenna has gotten significantly worse (in normal times) since his departure also suggests he’s a big force. (Butts has tweeted a few of my columns before, which isn’t why I’m a big fan of his, but feels somewhat relevant for readers.)

The CBC reported that Butts, as well as Canada 2020 executive chair Tom Pitfield, was advising Carney as of June, and there’s been no further comment publicly. That said, it is still shocking that a team as competent as that one could think Carney should run in this race as a pure statement of self interest. Fuck my objections to Carney, this is a ludicrous decision for Carney.

Let’s start with the personal - his chances of winning this are much worse in a race where the party needs a steady hand on the ship of state and will be biased against a candidate who has never even held a seat. The difference between Carney and, say, Christy Clark - both nominal “outsider” candidates - is that everybody in the party knows Clark can do the basic things of both governing and campaigning well. There is little confidence in Carney, and his Globe op-ed has gone over like a bucket of warm piss - raising more questions about his instincts.

A run for the next leadership, after running and winning a seat at this election, would make a lot more sense. If he were to run in Spadina, beat Kevin Vuong, and then show himself a serious and credible politician in that process, he would be much better off both to win the membership and actually do well as leader. Finding the balance between the overly detailed and esoteric financial answers needed when answering a presser at the Bank Of England and how to effectively communicate a complicated point in 15 seconds without sounding like a ChatGPT output for Generic Politician Speak is a hard game. Learning that during a leadership race you’ll probably lose - in part because you’re learning - is a bad idea.

Carney’s loyalty to the party will also be questioned - any campaign worth its salt will ask why you never took a cabinet job when offered one by the Prime Minister. Either you admit that you’re not interested in serving your party unless it’s on your terms solely, or you have to obscure the point and make it about a load of other issues. But the basic point - that the PM asked you to serve and you said no because you’d rather be untarnished by him than step up when asked - is not going to go away. Those questions of loyalty go away once you not only run for a seat but defeat someone who every Liberal in the country hates in Vuong.

More importantly, Carney has - or at least should have - no ambition to save the furniture. I listened to him on Uncommons this morning in preparation for this column, and if you take him at face value for why he is looking at some form of service he wants to do things. This isn’t the way to do that. If you want to advance ideas, the right way is to wait and run in the next race after a leader better suited to handling this campaign and the actual job in front of him - survival, not victory - hands off to the real, long, thorough process we need but cannot have now.

It’s also not the best time for Carney’s best pitch to the electorate. We are in a populist moment where electorates are so done with the status quo they’re willing to indulge truly terrible ideas in the name of shaking up the system or throwing the bums out. After four years of Trump and Poilievre chaos the virtue of a quiet, almost technocratic competence will seem much stronger. Running as an expert against the guy who makes shitting on them as much his cause célèbre as anything else is like asking my gay ass to seduce a chick at a bar - it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.

I can make the case for why people are making the decisions they are whether I like them or not - I get why Freeland’s pretty clearly running, I absolutely get why Clark’s gunning for it, and even a more minor candidate like Chandra Ayra’s quixotic bid makes sense. Like, let’s take the last one - Chandra’s presumably hoping that the pro-Modi Indian diaspora signs up and votes for him, he gets 15%, delivers some votes to the winner, boosts his profile so he keeps Nepean, and jumps Yasir as the Next Ottawa Minister whenever that happens. It’s a rationale I can easily understand and see how it went from a consultant’s brain to being launched (even though I think Chandra’s gonna get 1%. With Carney, I don’t even understand the logic on Carney’s own terms.

The thing I keep coming back to with Carney is that if you genuinely believe he is the candidate that plenty of people clearly do, you cannot let him use his one introduction to the province on this race. It would be malpractice for Carney to run with no political experience, at the start of what he intends to be his third act in public life. I actually respect Carney for wanting to put in another shift, as he has put it before. But this feels less like Brady as a Buccaneer and more like Jordan on the Wizards.

If I was advising Carney I’d tell him to end this before it starts. It is in his best interest he wait, and run when he’s better in a position to be effective. I genuinely cannot believe Carney has built a team this good and they’re letting him run. I cannot believe it.