Re: [OT] Our next prime minister will be Mark Carney

On 2025-03-10 9:32 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

The Liberal leadership convention has finally chosen a new leader and,
to the shock of almost no one, Mark Carney is the winner. (He got 86% of
the votes from Liberal Party members, runner up Chrystia Freeland got
less than 10%.) That means he will become our next prime minister as
soon as Trudeau formally steps down, which is expected in the next few
days.

 

Carney's term as PM may well be rather brief. He's widely expected to
call an election in the next few weeks, hoping to use a renewed interest
in the Liberal Party to win. I sincerely hope that voters are not
fooled: the Liberals have only put lipstick on the pig that is their
party and will maintain all the same policies as under Trudeau with the
exception of the much-despised carbon tax. But Carney is even more
fanatical about Net Zero than Trudeau was and has promised to replace
the carbon tax with something even more effective - i.e. even more
destructive of the Canadian economy - so that we can meet his carbon
reduction goals.

 

But at least the odious Justin Trudeau is finally on his way out so
we'll be spared having to endure his performative virtue-signalling.

 

By the way, Carney has never stood for elected office before and has no
seat in Parliament, meaning he will not actually be able to participate
in parliamentary sessions directly. He'll have to delegate others in his
cabinet to do the things that a prime minister usually does. There's
precedent for this though so procedures are in place. But it's also why
Carney will be keen to have an election very shortly: he really needs a
seat in parliament to look the part of a leader. Here's hoping that
Carney's fate is to be only a footnote in history, as the guy who was
Prime Minister for a few short weeks until the next election established
a massive Conservative Party majority.

 Thanks for the information. I had no idea party leadership didn't have
to be M.P.s Is that true for lesser party leadership posts or just Prime
Minister?

The PM chooses the cabinet and I think he also chooses the House Leader and Whips. Traditionally, all cabinet members are MPs but I recall one exception from 1979. Joe Clarke defeated Pierre Trudeau in 1979 but had only a very narrow majority of the seats. When he staffed his cabinet, he got Senator Lowell Murray to join the cabinet in a major role. This raised a few eyebrows but there was a precedent for it, although not necessarily in Canada. (We use precedents from Britain too.) Clarke lost a confidence vote a few months later and we had another election; Trudeau got back in, despite the fact that he'd actually announced his intention to resign the leadership of the Party after his defeat by Clarke. He hadn't actually resigned though and when Clarke narrowly lost a budget vote forcing an election, the Party talked him into staying on. Somehow, all the things that had lost him the 1979 election got sufficiently forgotten that he was re-elected with a majority.
For what it's worth, a rather pivotal moment in history *almost* involved that precedent. When Germany invaded Denmark and Norway in April 1940, Neville Chamberlain effectively lost the last of his support among the MPs in the (British) Conservative Party and knew he'd have to step down. The only two credible replacements were Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax, the latter of whom was most definitely NOT an MP. However, there had been precedent for people from the House of Lords to serve in cabinets and as PM. Chamberlain had Churchill and Lord Halifax come to a meeting with him and offered the job of PM to Lord Halifax first. Lord Halifax declined, otherwise we might have seen very different leadership in WW2.
Jean Chretien, who you may remember from the 90s, didn't have a seat when he won the leadership of the Liberal Party. An MP in a safe seat in New Brunswick, Romeo Leblanc (father of current Finance Minister Dominic Leblanc), resigned from his seat and Chretien ran to fill it in a by-election ("special election" is the US term). Chretien won and had his seat in Parliament. Mark Carney *could* conceivably go that route too but the pundits believe he will simply call a full federal election in the hope of getting a seat that way. The Liberals have some momentum at this moment but if they try to hang on without an election, they will clearly reveal themselves to be the same bunch of corrupt, incompetent clowns so they really need the election to happen BEFORE the bloom has come off the Carney rose.
Trump has *really* helped the Liberal Party despite his contempt for "Governor" Trudeau with all his talk of tariffs. The country is in such turmoil over the tariffs and the impact on the economy that the Liberals have somehow regained some credibility as the ruling party. Up until very recently, the Conservatives had a lock on a big majority. Carney is an economist with a record of having been Governor of the Bank of Canada AND of the Bank of England and this may succeed in duping enough Liberal supporters to come back to the party simply because he isn't Justin Trudeau, who is widely despised. Carney will not make a substantial difference in policies from the Trudeau-era Liberals which is why he won so readily among Liberal Party members. But if there is any sense in our electorate, everyone else should run away from the Liberals because this incarnation will be no better than the Justin Trudeau incarnation.
Lorne Gunter explains why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8RfcjNsAiA [5 minutes]
--
Rhino