Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Leader Mark Carney participate in the English-language federal leaders' debate in Montreal, on April 17.Christopher Katsarov/Reuters
The defence that Liberal Leader Mark Carney has mounted for attacks on the Liberal record is that he wasn’t there. He’s all new.
That’s been hard for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to get around. He spent two-and-a-half years campaigning against Justin Trudeau’s record and Mr. Carney seemed to make it disappear. U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade-war threats had people thinking about the Liberal Leader as part of the future, not the past.
Mr. Poilievre made it his mission to try to change that in Thursday’s debate. He dug in right away.
When Mr. Carney talked about the need to negotiate with Mr. Trump from a position of strength, Mr. Poilievre argued that the Liberal government made Canada more dependent on the U.S. by failing to approve pipelines and resource projects and that Mr. Carney still supports a law than blocks their development.
“You have seen how much these policies weakened our country for the last decade,” Mr. Poilievre said.
“So let’s go to my record,” Mr. Carney responded. “My record is a month long as the Prime Minister.”
Federal party rivals target Carney in English-language leaders’ debate
For much of the debate, from pipelines to housing to crime, that was the central dynamic of the debate. Just as it has been a key dynamic of the campaign.
Mr. Poilievre scoffed that Mr. Carney’s promise to double the pace of homebuilding was the same promise that Mr. Trudeau made a decade ago, but house prices doubled since.
“It may be difficult, Mr. Poilievre,” Mr. Carney retorted. “You spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and they’re both gone. They’re both gone.”
Both leaders, in fact, performed strongly.
Mr. Poilievre occasionally crossed the line into attack-dog territory, but returned to the more even-tempered, prime ministerial demeanour he was trying to maintain, and delivered crisp messages on cost-of-living issues.
Mr. Carney wasn’t able to veer back as often as he would have liked to his key message that he’s the crisis manager to help the country deal with the threat raised by Mr. Trump’s trade war.
But he did hold his own in a deluge of attacks, usually looking down at his notes, expressionless, while they launched barbs. He didn’t sound like a rapier-wit debater, but he did come across as a serious figure.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Carney was the target.
Late in the debate, when the leaders were given a chance to ask any other leader a question, all three of the others posed their query to Mr. Carney. Often the Liberal Leader asked for a chance to finish a three-point answer, as others interrupted, by pleading, “If I may. If I may.”
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh wanted to carve out a place in the debate at a time when he’s being squeezed out of the campaign. He made himself the evening’s muckraker, interrupting opponents and heckling them.
His goal was clearly to paint Mr. Carney into a corner with Mr. Poilievre as a leader who would cut social programs and build pipelines that damage the climate. Mr. Singh drew a portrait of Mr. Carney as a former head of a company that raised rents on affordable housing and a Prime Minister who cut capital-gains taxes for millionaires.
Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet was out to portray Mr. Carney as caring little about Quebec, and what he insisted are different economic interests from the rest of Canada.
And it was a lively debate. All of the leaders were effective, and accomplished some of their goals. None of them was a clear winner.
Mr. Carney didn’t really get to push the debate squarely onto the topic of dealing with Mr. Trump – and we know he wanted to, because that was the topic of the post-debate TV ads the Liberal Party bought. He did get to look serious and was able to hold his own while everyone attacked.
And through it all, there was a leader-versus-party contest between Mr. Poilievre and Mr. Carney – who is now rated by more Canadians as their preferred prime minister.
Mr. Poilievre kept working to pin the tarnished brand of 10 years of Liberal government on the new leader. He landed a few blows. But Mr. Carney always had a version of the same answer: “I’m a very different person from Justin Trudeau.”