In the marquee moment of the 2025 election — the much-anticipated English-language debate — Pierre Poilievre followed the rules of political engagement. Mark Carney did not. It captured neatly their differences in character, experience, and philosophy.
Poilievre was sharp, crisp, and relentless. Over and over, with discipline, he made the case against the Liberals: high prices, high taxes, inadequate housing, open borders. He deftly answered some of the moderator’s questions and avoided others.
It was attack, attack, attack. He told Carney that he was Justin Trudeau’s “economic advisor” for the last five years because, after all, the Liberal Party website said so. (Carney disputed that.) He said that Carney was no different than Trudeau because he had the same cabinet and staffers, “who are actually here with you, at this debate in Montreal, writing the talking points that you're regurgitating into the microphone.” (“I do my own talking points, thank you very much,” replied Carney.)
Over and over, Poilievre talked about “the lost Liberal decade” and blamed all wrongs under the sun on the Liberals, and, by extension, Carney himself.
It was the performance of a practitioner of the art. Poilievre knows how to remonstrate and exaggerate. He is comfortable with outrage. It flows naturally. Four months ago, before Justin Trudeau left and Donald Trump arrived, it was enough to make him the next prime minister of a country weary of the status quo.
By ordinary measures, in an ordinary campaign, his debate Thursday in Montreal would have been a success. He ably made the case, as challengers do, as prosecutor, inquisitor, and sloganeer.
But this is no ordinary campaign in no ordinary time. So, while Poilievre looked polished, every inch the politician he has been for 21 years, Carney looked the opposite, and that didn’t seem to hurt him.
He was on stage being what he is: banker, economist, bureaucrat, and technocrat who has, astonishingly, never been elected to anything. He was plodding, measured and cerebral. Bill Davis, the much-elected premier of Ontario, said “bland works.” Carney has embraced it.
He began answers with two or three points, as if he were reading a memo. He apologized often for taking too long. He put up his hand politely seeking the attention of the able moderator, Steve Paikin. He rarely interrupted others while allowing them to interrupt him, with little more than a shrug. He was a gentleman in a saloon.
With his “After you, Alphonse” manner, he surely disappointed his partisans, who wanted him to be more aggressive. Carney failed to define his opponent — to remind Canadians of Poilievre’s fraternizing for the anti-vaccine truckers who occupied Ottawa, his scalding attacks on the media, his promise to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada, his general lament that “Canada is broken.” All made him sound like Donald Trump over the last two and a half years, which is now inconvenient.
Poilievre is not Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, Andrew Scheer, Erin O’Toole or another largely centrist Conservative opposition leader. He is a different animal.
But Carney left Poilievre largely unscathed. When he might have stoutly defended the Liberal record (low unemployment, less inflation than other countries, a third of the COVID-19 deaths per capita of the United States, the successful renegotiation of the free trade agreement, the expansion of the social safety net) he didn’t. He failed to say it was the Liberals, not the Conservatives, who built a pipeline to take Alberta’s oil to markets (a point made derisively by Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the New Democrats).
Carney has the mien of a clergyman. “If I may,” he intoned. He deferred. His best rejoinder: “You spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax, and both are gone!”
As prime minister for a month, he shrugged off criticism of this or that in the Liberal record because, well, it wasn’t his department. He was like the grandparent who enjoys the benefits of offering a granddaughter popcorn at the zoo in the afternoon but none of the responsibilities of feeding her vegetables in the evening.
Carney sometimes treated Poilievre as a nuisance, as if he were just another “contestant,” which is what Poilievre oddly called the assembled leaders. When Carney did attack, he used a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. He noted that Poilievre voted against the gun registry and has no climate plan, and agreed that he built few houses as housing minister in Stephen Harper’s government. Carney was unfazed by attacks on his integrity.
Oh, he occasionally sighed, as if asking himself, “What I am I doing here?” He seemed bemused but never annoyed. For a man said to have a temper, it did not flare. No one got under his skin, much as they tried and his advisors feared.
This was a debate without zingers or knockout punches. Politicians no longer unsettle each other with an elegant put-down. Eloquence is gone from public speech, and the witty jeer, jibe, and barb are gone from political debate.
Carney, though, handled Poilievre with a patrician indifference, as if swatting a fly. He did this with a laugh and a smile. Poilievre smiled too, but his smile seemed forced, as if formed reluctantly in an obligatory effort to “humanize” himself, under threat of fine or penalty, because this is a requirement of politics.
The debate accentuated, once again, that this is a race between the consummate professional, who masters the political game, and the seasoned amateur, who is still learning it. So far, Carney’s public apprenticeship has calmed an anxious people, who will now decide whether it’s reason to hire him.