Carney reminds voters why they wanted to oust the Liberals: Ivison

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After Mark Carney’s press conference last Thursday, when he said the old relationship with the United States is over, many Liberals might have had the same thought about the race to elect the 45th Canadian Parliament.

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It was as if the mild-mannered Liberal leader had found the last remaining phone booth in Ottawa from which to emerge transformed into the sober and assured prime minister.

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For a brief moment, he was no longer auditioning for the part, he was centre-stage playing the role — a luxury not open to his rivals.

Canadians took note. Liberal support is still ticking upward and, if an election were held tomorrow, they would most likely win a majority. The Conservatives are holding steady, but the NDP support is in single digits and the Bloc Québécois is also losing support to the resurrected Liberals.

The ballot question is clear for now: who is best positioned to handle the threats posed by Donald Trump?

Tariffs will likely be with us as long as Trump is around, as was made clear in a Bloomberg interview with the chair of the president’s economic advisers, Stephen Miran, who offered an indication of how intrinsic they are to this administration. He said that U.S. consumers are “flexible” and have options of what they can buy, while countries that export to America are “inflexible” and have no alternative markets. “They’re the ones who will bear the burden of these tariffs, which means there is going to be very limited pass through into downside economic risk or higher prices,” he said.

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The president’s “Liberation Day” of April 2 looms and the Wall Street Journal suggests he is pushing his advisers to be even more aggressive on new levies.

Thus far in this campaign, more tariffs means more anxiety, which translates into more support for the Liberals.

But success can breed complacency and complacency breeds failure.

The entire Liberal project depends on the credibility of one individual and Carney has just strained that precious commodity by defending what many Canadians will judge to be indefensible.

In January, Paul Chiang, the Liberal candidate for Markham-Unionville in the Greater Toronto Area, told a Chinese language media conference that the Conservative candidate for Don Valley North, Joe Tay, had a $184,000 bounty on his head for his advocacy of democracy in Hong Kong, and that anyone could claim it by taking Tay to Toronto’s Chinese consulate.

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Chiang has not denied he made the comments and has apologized to Tay, calling his words “deplorable.”

But they are more than that. They are a sign that the Liberal party’s inexplicable attachment to Beijing remains intact.

What is clear is that China has long tried to engineer the nomination of people sympathetic to Beijing

This should have been a no-brainer for Carney and his team — an open and shut case of transnational repression. Candidates have been removed by all parties for the most ludicrous of reasons over the years — remember the guy who was removed by the Conservatives after being caught on camera peeing in a coffee cup while on a service call? Chiang, a former police officer, clearly endorsed foreign interference in diaspora communities in Canada and he should have been denounced, then renounced, by his party.

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Yet Carney said Chiang will continue to represent the Liberals in Markham-Unionville because he is “a person of integrity” who has served his community and retains the leader’s confidence. “I view this as a teachable moment,” he said.

He will come to regret that decision. He may be already, given the confirmation that Chiang will remain in situ stomped all over his message of the day, a major housing announcement.

The Hogue public inquiry that wrapped up in January heard from Justin Trudeau last spring, amid concerns that the Liberals put partisan interests ahead of the national interest, and turned a blind eye (or worse) to China’s meddling in the 2019 and 2021 elections. According to media reports, the Liberals chose to ignore information that was supplied to them about the case of Han Dong, the former Don Valley North MP, who won the Liberal nomination with the help of busloads of paid Chinese international students.

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Trudeau was briefed about the concerns of the security services but concluded that the threshold for overturning the nomination process was not met.

What is clear is that China has long tried to engineer the nomination of people sympathetic to Beijing and was busy during the last election ensuring that Conservatives were defeated and Liberals elected.

Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole told the commission of inquiry that he believes his party lost up to nine seats because of Chinese disinformation.

Carney’s decision to keep Chiang on the team will resuscitate that whole controversy and remind people why they wanted to get rid of the Liberals in the first place.

The chances that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre can defeat Carney on the question of who can best handle Trump look remote, though they would probably be improved if he behaved a little less like the president. On Sunday, the Conservative leader went off on a Trump-like, late-night social media rant about Carney being guilty of plagiarism, tax evasion, denying insurance to dying coal miners, sorcery, cannibalism and meeting with Satan. (I exaggerate — but not much).

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But Poilievre still holds some cards. At his press conference in New Brunswick on Monday, he rejected calls for his campaign to confront Trump head-on by saying he would keep focused on affordability issues affecting families and seniors. “I will continue, despite the calls to the contrary, to talk about these things, even if I am the only leader in the country who offers any change,” he said.

While anxieties about Trump are predominant among voters, change remains a powerful message.

Abacus Data’s latest poll suggests 54 per cent of voters still want a change of government and there remains disquiet about the prospects of a fourth Liberal term in government.

To this point, Carney has been effective at presenting himself as an agent of that change; he appears to have persuaded some voters that, by electing him, they are getting a change of government.

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But he has just reminded them that he is the leader of a party that has been, and appears to still be, much too close to the PRC and its rejection of Canadian values.

As NDP candidate for Vancouver East, Jenny Kwan, put it in her condemnation of Chiang’s intimidation: “In what universe is this normal?”

jivison@criffel.ca
Twitter.com/IvisonJ

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