The Liberals had experienced a weird couple of years. Way back in 2012, rather than let Bob Rae parlay the interim leadership into the permanent gig, the party rallied around a second generation Trudeau. He was bright, youthful, and carried with him a kind of natural Liberal energy that the last few leaders definitely lacked. Nobody ever expected Michael Ignatieff to impress Canadians with his socks (although to be fair no one ever asked to see them, so who knows what he was packing). If you listened to Justin Trudeau talk about policy, you'd be hard pressed to imagine him belonging to the same party as Jean Chretien. Chretien was a creature of the centre and had won three, back-to-back majority governments precisely because of it. He had allowed Free Trade to remain after campaigning against it. He and Paul Martin slashed and slashed every single department they could find until Canada was able to post its first surplus in decades. But Trudeau and his team appeared to recoil at the very notion of the political middle. Deficit spending, carbon taxes, bigger government. Basically anything that Stephen Harper did, Justin Trudeau proposed to do the opposite. All those big, structural differences with the NDP? All gone, with the hope that voters would side with sunny ways rather than the guy with a beard. According to the polls at the time, Canadians seemed receptive to it, and before anyone knew it Justin Trudeau sounded like a winner. He was going to sweep the country off its feet just like his dad and transform politics for the better.
Fast forward a couple of years, including two elections and a few blackface scandals, and Trudeau was out of a job. A Trudeau would now join the ranks of Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, and Edward Blake as leaders of the Liberal Party of Canada who would never wind up as Prime Minister. It was a massive embarrassment to his father's legacy, to whom he was its keeper, and an even deeper disappointment for the Liberal Party. Eight years on from that disastrous, third-place showing in the 2011 election, and the Liberals were still in third-place. What was the point in being a Liberal if not holding power? Without that power, what did the party actually stand for?
Did voters even care what they stood for anymore?
Merging with the New Democrats had been floated as an idea almost the second after all the votes were counted in 2011. Hell, it had been popping up ever since the ill-fated coalition agreement between Stephane Dion and Jack Layton (With Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois in attendance) had been signed back in December 2008. Journalists and pundits who lived in the Ottawa-bubble would salivate at the idea of this mythical, untested, complex, and likely-to-fail creation. Chretien might be in favour of it. Ed Broadbent too. Lock them in a room together with a bottle of brandy and let them hash out the details. But that was back in the days when Stephen Harper was the common enemy. There wasn't much of an argument for the NDP, the incumbent government, to join forces with a party that many of its members detested (Years of being mocked and getting looked down by the Liberals will do that to you). Mulcair had publicly ruled out both a merger or co-operation, citing the collapse of the coalition in early 2009. NDP MP Ryan Cleary had publicly mused that if any Liberal MP was interested in joining the party, they'd have to resign from parliament and run in the ensuing by-election under the NDP banner. Floor-crossings to the government were not permitted and merging was out of the question.
That was not to say that there was zero appetite for a merger. Pat Martin, who had been forced to resign from cabinet because of accusations of sexual harassment, had long been in favor of a merger between the NDP and the Liberals. Finance Minister Nathan Cullen, back when he was a leadership candidate to replace the late Jack Layton, won around twenty-four percent of his party's convention vote based on the premise of cooperation with the Liberals. Not enough to make any of this a reality, but enough to suggest that there was a market for it in some corners of the party. The biggest obstacle still remained the hope within Liberal Party member's heart that they were just one election away from being swept back into power, and Mark Carney was drawing people to the big red tent.
The former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor had long been touted as a possible leadership candidate, despite his repeated claims of having little-to-no interest in getting involved in electoral politics (they all say that). The first such "Carneymania" frenzy happened in 2012, shortly after Bob Rae announced that he would not seek the job he had lusted after since ditching the NDP in favour of the Liberals seven years earlier. Instead of challenging Justin Trudeau, Carney departed for England to take up the position of Governor of the Bank of England, the first Canadian to hold the gig. The whole international-mandarin-class could barely hide their disappointment. He survived the tumultuous (and ongoing) Brexit crisis, and while it destroyed political careers in the UK, it provided Carney with the opportunity to not only further raise his profile on the world stage but build up a thicker skin needed for electoral politics back home. From across the Atlantic, as Trudeau flustered and floundered from scandal to scandal, Liberals could only look on with envy. Apparently the feeling was at least somewhat mutual, since Carney was taking calls from senior Liberals back home about everything from the party's fundraising numbers to Trudeau's state of mind. Of course when such information leaked to the press, as it always does, Carney was ready with his reply; he takes calls from everyone, and is prepared to give advice if people want it. So when he finally ended his stint in England and returned home to launch his leadership bid, it was obviously done because not enough people in the party were taking that advice. Ambition? Nope, just a desire to be of service. Cue the campaign slogans and aw-shucks grins.
But not everyone was happy at the thought of a bureaucrat with zero elected political experience taking the reigns of Canada's once great natural governing party. Carney's star has risen outside of the party and its culture, which has only grown more clannish than it had been during the Chretien-Martin days. Although desperate for solutions, there are many within the party who have zero tolerance for any criticism or thoughtful critique. Carney's leadership launch pointily criticized, without naming names, the growing out-of-touch nature of the Liberal Party. Besides, could someone as politically inexperienced as Mark Carney be the type of candidate to catapult the Liberals from third to first? It was a legitimate concern, even amongst some of his admirers. To his detractors, Carney's centrist and admittedly centre-right credentials made him on odd fit for a party where the centre-left was more and more on the ascend. Calls were being made to recruit a candidate who could actually give Carney a run for his money, which he had a lot of.
Jean Charest, the former Quebec Premier who led the dying federal Progressive Conservative Party from 1993 until 1998, politely declined calls from senior Liberals (including Jean Chretien) to seek the Liberal leadership. As the case for Charest went, his candidacy would reinvigorate the party's prospects in Quebec, challenging the NDP's iron hold on the province. Instead, sources close to Charest had indicated that the former Quebec Premier was more interested in seeking the Tory leadership when it inevitably opened up after Jason Kenney lost in the next election and stepped down. Although Charest would need to get around former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's inevitable opposition to make such a bid even remotely viable.
Toronto Mayor John Tory, another name associated with the Progressive Conservative brand, was also on the lips of some pretty senior Liberals. Surveys showed that Tory registered quite high with Liberal voters, especially among those who had helped propel him to an easy re-election victory over former councilor Doug Ford. But Tory was clearly enjoying being mayor of Canada's largest city, and was apparently still holding out hope that the Ontario PCs, struggling with a minority under Vic Fedeli, would come crawling back to him and make him Premier.
François-Philippe Champagne? As the highest profile Liberal still standing in Quebec (There were six MPs in total) he was fielding calls from both federal and provincial Liberals eager for his economic credentials. But while Champagne was happy getting the attention, he admitted to those close to him he lacked the financial backers to take on someone of Mark Carney's stature. Former MP Chrystia Freeland, a once rising star who had been narrowly defeated for re-election in the NDP's march through downtown Toronto, was taking her own calls, in this case from former leader Justin Trudeau and his former top aid Gerald Butts. But Freeland was getting back into journalist and international politics, and was also negotiating behind the scenes with Prime Minister Mulcair and his people to be Canada's next ambassador to the United Nations. Like Tory, former Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson was also fielding requests to throw his hat into the ring, but he was too busy organizing for Mark Carney against fellow BCers Joyce Murray and Taleeb Noormohamed.
More polite no's to the unofficial "Anybody but Carney" campaign.
But suspense in politics is overrated. Mark Carney's first-ballot victory was virtually guaranteed from the outset, especially when his most credible opponent was an also-ran from the previous leadership race. With over fifty percent of the convention vote, the scale of Carney's win meant that at least until after the next election, his word was law. His authority would be uncontested. His opponents would either get on board or have to start updating their resumes and begin lining up jobs outside of elected politics. Want a merger with the New Democrats? Go run in a by-election for them.
By the time Carney got to the podium, Liberals were begging for a reassuring, no-nonsense presence. That's exactly what they got. Namechecking party luminaries like Lous St. Laurent and Lester Pearson (two leaders with deep ties to Canada's bureaucracy), Mark Carney's speech could be best described as bland and straight to the point. A far cry from his predecessor, but that was exactly the point and part of the deal when it came to Mark Carney. There was some language about Canada reaching for its full environmental potential, maybe through a federally mandated carbon tax, and a stronger presence on the world stage, but observers could be forgiven for thinking they were listening to a speech being delivered by the current occupant of the PMO. Yet again, the Liberal Party was banking on the star power of their leader to paper over the cracks. Yes, there wasn't a whole range of differences between the Liberal leader and the Prime Minister, but Mark Carney had helped guide Canada's banks through the Great Recession and had nabbed some pretty good international headlines for the country while he was abroad. He was the favourite son who had gone and made a name for himself out in the real world. Surely voters would be willing to trust the keys to 24 Sussex to someone with that kind of resume than the guy who had accidentally gotten himself elected and re-elected.
Ask any Liberals and they'd just keep saying the same thing; the NDP hadn't won the last two elections, the Liberal Party had blown them. That wouldn't happen a third time.
Two years out from the next scheduled election and the Liberals were ahead in the polls again, thirty-three percent to the Tories twenty-eight. The incumbents were at twenty-seven. Not great for the government, but still plenty of time to turn things around. In some polls Brian Mulroney trailed as bad as third place before romping to a second straight majority in 1988. For the time being though it looked like swing voters and soft-Liberals were willing the lend the party their stamp of approval again. They'd done the same for Trudeau. Now it was Carney's turn.