With a Canadian Federal Election call expected from new Prime Minister Mark Carney this weekend we should take the time to answer the question millions of Americans have never asked before; how does a guy get to be Canadian Prime Minister anyway?
Since Carney was chosen as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on March 9 we've seen a number of American pundits and influencers, most with little or no history or knowledge of Canadian history or the Parliamentary system sniffing that he's "unelected" and spamming social media with their concerns about this Deep State takeover. Most of these are just Republican trolls of course but for the benefit of Americans who genuinely are unfamiliar with the system of government used in a country that most of you, let's be honest, haven't previously paid much attention to, here's a quick primer.
Canada uses a version of the Westminster System inherited from the British Parliament and passed on with various adaptations by a number of countries that were formally British colonies including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the Anglo Caribbean countries like Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad etc, some African countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe along with Japan. People vote for their local Member of Parliament and whichever party elects the most MP's wins the election and their leader becomes Prime Minister, we do not vote for the Prime Minister as a separate office. It's entirely possible to have a governing party change leaders and thus Prime Minister between elections without needing a new election. In Canada the has happened several times including 1948 (when Liberal Louis St Laurent took over), 1968 (Pierre Trudeau), 1984 (Liberal John Turner), 1993 (Conservative Kim Campbell) and 2003 (Liberal Paul Martin). All perfectly legal. In the UK it happened more recently when the Tories managed to go through four Prime Ministers in rapid succession to the amusement of all. I mention this last one because one of the social media trolls expressing their "concern" was former Prime Minister for a Day Liz Truss who took office in exactly the same way and some unelected English Lord whose name I can't be bothered to look up but who definitely knows better as do all of the Canadian Conservative trolls who have been reposting their performative umbrage at this "Liberal coup" and demanding a snap election.
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Mark Carney is slightly different from the above examples in that he was chosen leader without actually having a seat in Parliament. This is rare but not unheard of and again perfectly legal, the last time this happened was in 1984 when John Turner was chosen Liberal Leader in spite of having left Parliament a decade earlier. In the 1890's three Tory Prime Ministers were also chosen this way. Under these circumstances the new Prime Minister is expected to call an election fairly quickly and all of the above modern Canadian examples did so. As it turned out of these five, three won their elections (St Laurent, Pierre Trudeau and Paul Martin) and two lost (Turner and Campbell). In fact they lost badly leading to their party's worst defeats to that date. Speaking of Conservatives taking umbrage, one of the more prominent is far right Alberta Premier Danielle Smith (who was not only the first to rush down to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring and she also made the pilgrimage to Trump's inauguration only to be left out in the cold) who has been demanding an election in spite of the fact that she herself was chosen Alberta's Premier in 2022 while also not having a seat and then waited seven months to call an election. If you were wondering if any Tories had any issues with that you must be new here.
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With that housekeeping out of the way we can look at the actual leadership race. When Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on January 6 after over a year of terrible polls, three by-election losses, a media feeding frenzy and a full scale caucus revolt, everybody knew there were two obvious candidates to succeed him as Leader. The first was Chrystia Freeland whose sudden resignation in December had kickstarted caucus and press rumbling. A Toronto MP (disclosure she was actually my MP until she switched ridings), Freeland had been a senior member of the Cabinet since the government's election in 2015 serving as Deputy Premier and held the most powerful posts of Finance and Foreign Affairs. That last post was a troll at Putin as in her pre political career as a journalist she had been such a harsh critic of Putin's (she's of Ukrainian heritage and worked in Russia) that he literally banned her from Russia. She had been a Trudeau loyalist and had been widely seen as a likely successor but they had a falling out over the proper reaction to Trump's trade war threats with Freeland objecting to a temporary Christmas insisting the revenue should be set aside for future. She either threatened to resign or was demoted and then did resign depending on who you ask leading to a cabinet crisis and calls for Trudeau to step down which he eventually announced he would do on January 6.
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She was long considered a frontrunner but the manner of her leaving/getting expelled from cabinet was bound to be divisive to Trudeau loyalists and opened a path for another candidate but at first the race was notable for the high profile candidates who announced they wouldn't be running. Dominic LeBlanc, who was promoted to Finance Minister was a respected long-time Trudeau loyalist who had served in several cabinet posts as his father Romeo had also been in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet in the 1980's. An Acadian from New Brunswick he speaks fluent French and had a small but loyal regional base in one of the most devoted Liberal areas of the country but he had some health issues and announced that considering Trump's economic threats he felt duty bound to stay in his post as Finance Minister. Similar reasons were given by Melanie Joly the Foreign Affairs Minister. An elegant blonde woman with an equally elegant French accent last seen on American TV giving a cooly dismissive slap down to Marco Rubio after greeting him at the airport with the world's shortest red carpet that also ended in a puddle. Canadians really are developing a talent for petty trolling. A former lawyer and Oxford grad both of whose parents had been prominent figures in Montreal (another devotedly loyal Liberal fortress) she had an obvious regional power base and media skills considered on the left of the party but she also begged off citing a similar duty to stay at her post.
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Another high profile candidate who had no such excuses was Christy Clark the former Premier of British Columbia from 2011 to 2017 who had also been long seen as a potential successor and the only prominent candidate from Canada's third largest province. The problem was that it was never quite clear what party she aspired to lead. The British Columbia Liberal Party is entirely separate from the Federal Liberals and was in fact a rickety coalition of Liberals and Conservatives as BC had not had a respectable provincial Conservative party since the 1950's and hadn't actually elected anyone at all since the early 70's. As such the BC Liberals were not considered a proper Liberal party at all by many Liberals and Clark was at best considered on the pro-business right of the party so much so that in 2022 she had also been talked about as a possible candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party. After mulling it over she eventually insisted she was in fact a Liberal and had no desire to become a Tory although she did sign up to endorse the candidacy of Jean Charest. He was himself a unique figure in that he was both a former Tory cabinet minister in the 1980's and leader from 1993 to 1996 then becoming the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party and Premier from 2003 to 2012 before then switching back to the Federal Tories in 2022 (Quebec politics are even more convoluted than BC politics) in time to overwhelmingly lose to Pierre Poilievre. When questioned Clark denied she had meant to actually join the despised Tories and had only done so to support former Liberal Charest and stop the even more hated Poilievre but it left her open to more suspicions that she was not really a Liberal. It also brought into question the political judgement of both Clark (and for that matter Charest) in thinking two former Liberals would be welcomed by today's hyper partisan Conservative Party. After a few days of grilling and with polls showing her a distant third she announced she was dropping out giving the reason that her French language skills were not quite up to snuff.
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Into this vacuum stepped a few other candidates of varying levels of prominence. Karina Gould is the current House Leader and former cabinet minister from Ontario considered on the progressive wing of the party who appealed to youth voters. Frank Baylis was a former MP from Quebec as well as a businessman and film producer who had been one of the first critics pushing for Trudeau to resign. Jaime Batiste is an MP from Nova Scotia and the only candidate from the solidly Liberal Atlantic provinces as well as being a Mi'kmaw and the first Native candidate to run for the leadership of any party. Chandra Arya is a more obscure backbench MP from Napean Ontario and another Trudeau critic who was actually the first to jump into the ring as soon as Trudeau stepped down.
But the candidate everybody was waiting for was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013) and the Bank of England (2013-2020) becoming the first foreigner to do so, winning much praise from the business press. After leaving that post he went into business as well as becoming the United Nations Envoy for Climate Action. However even before he ended his tenure at the Bank of England he was considered such a rock star in the business press that he was courted as a possible leader or cabinet member by both the Liberals and Conservatives until he made it clear that he considered himself firmly Liberal thereupon Trudeau attempted to lure him into joining cabinet in time for the last election and while he demurred he was always considered a leadership frontrunner whenever Trudeau stepped down. Unlike Freedland he had played no role in pushing Trudeau out and thus had made no enemies although there were some concerns that Carney was a novice who had never run for anything before and had no natural constituency aside from the editorial boards of the financial press and the green rooms of the CBC. Still he turned out to be a competent speaker at ease in interviews particularly getting excellent reviews in one of his first public outings actually being an appearance on Jon Stewart's show to the unconcealed fury of the Tories. He also showed a surprising willingness to verbally face off both with Donald Trump as well as with Conservative Leader Poilievre (both of whom are loathed by Liberals in equal measure) and do so with an air of self assurance that Liberals (and Canadians) were clearly seeking and he immediately became the clear front runner with an insurmountable lead.
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Although the Liberals allowed anybody to sign up and become a member for free, in order to weed out potential crackpots (in the past there have been a few anti-abortion candidates popping up to annoy everybody) they have developed more strict rules around allowing candidates forcing them to raise an entrance fee of $350,000 (of which only the first $50,000 is refundable) and subject themselves to a vetting process to flag any potential conflicts. This process quickly removed obscure anti-abortion candidate businessman Michael Clark and then actual MP Jaime Baptiste who dropped out citing inability to raise the entrance fee and endorsed Carney. Chandra Arya was declared bluntly disqualified as "manifestly unfit" for reasons that were never made public but are presumed to be his known links with India's strongman Indira Modi who has been credibly accused of not only spending money to influence Canadian elections as well as spying on Sikh activists in Canada including even having one of them assassinated.
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Arya's rejection raised some eyebrows but did not become a media circus partly because he's a minor backbench MP with no real profile and partly because he chose to quietly slink off without making a fuss. The same would not be true of the remaining candidate who would provide the only real drama of the race. Ruby Dhalla was a former Ontario MP who had once been considered a rising star in the party but has lately become Canada's answer to Tulsi Gabbard; an attractive, flashy, media hungry attention getter who started off as a progressive but would make a dramatic turn to the right. First elected in 2004 as a member of the previous Liberal government of Paul Martin, Dhalla had been a media star as a beautiful former model and actress (she had even been included in a Maxim Magazine feature on the world's hottest politicians) and the first Sikh woman MP who was considered on the progressive wing of the party. After the defeat of the Martin government in 2006 she was assumed to be a potential future leadership candidate although she begged off of running when the job became open in 2006, 2008 or 2009. By that point she had developed a reputation as a high maintenance diva known for upstaging other MP's by showing up for press conferences in a white stretch limo while skipping the drudgery of committee work and abusing her staff leading to her being voted the worst MP to work for and employing immigrants as household staff, bullying and underpaying them and seizing their passports so they couldn't leave. Dhalla was investigated by the Ethics Committee and absolved of legal wrongdoing but she would lose her Ontario seat in the Liberal loss in 2010.
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The 2010 loss was a crushing party wide defeat that could not be blamed on a particular candidate including Dhalla and under normal circumstances she should have been able to make a comeback in the next election in 2015 but by then many Liberals had tired of her antics and new leader Justin Trudeau rejected her candidacy. This led to a fun press conference that she had called to announce her candidacy for her seat surrounded by election signs emblazoned with her face only to announce that she had selflessly decided not to run after all and she had nothing else to announce. She had kept a surprisingly low profile since then but it was not really a surprise when she suddenly popped up to announce she was running for the leadership. Her campaign showed she had made the Tulsi pivot to the right, making cracking down on immigration and crime and being the only candidate willing to accept the premise of Trump's attacks and negotiate on his terms rather than imposing counter tariffs. This along with her brash personality and attacks on the other candidates got her the attention she clearly craves but it was noticed that her biggest base of support aside from the Sikh community were the same sort of weird right wing online fanboys that Tulsi attracts and there was even a Twitter based campaign to convince Conservatives to sign up as Liberals in order to vote for her.
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As entertaining as it was, this silliness came to an end the same way Arya's had when the vetting committee disqualified her on the grounds of multiple violations of campaign finance and election rules. Unlike Arya she of course did not go quietly and lashed out at the party and other candidates, especially Carney, claiming she was being silenced by the Old Boys Network because they were afraid of her "groundswell of grassroots support" and alleging they were motivated by sexism and racism. She also found it "troubling" that both she and Arya, the other disqualified candidate, were of Indian descent although Arya himself made no such claims. She also appealed the ruling which led to a classic Dhalla moment where she was informed of the rejection of her appeal while she was being interviewed live on CBC TV leading to her making more angry personal attacks on Carney, denying she had any connections with the Modi regime (which to be fair the committee did not specifically claim) and bragging about her internal polls that showed her neck in neck with Carney to which the host politely told her that actual polls showed her in a distant fourth place. And that was the end of the Ruby Wave.
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With the Dhalla distraction out of the race the rest of the campaign was remarkably dull. Carney as the immediate frontrunner got the endorsement of 83 sitting and former MP's compared to 34 for Freeland, 7 for Gould and none for Baylis. All of the former and potential candidates quickly endorsed Carney except for Christy Clark and Chandra Arya who endorsed nobody as obviously so did Ruby Dhalla. The debates were a snoozefest with the remaining candidates violently agreeing on virtually everything and getting along nicely. So nicely in fact that during the French debate when Carney tripped up a couple times on his rusty French, Freedland stepped in to politely correct him and it turned out that Carney was actually the Godfather to one of her kids. Karina Gould was noted for having the best debates and having youth support and there was a brief flurry among the pundit class that she might be a threat to challenge Freeland for second place but the only other suspense was whether Carney would win on the first or second ballot.
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The final ballot results were;
Mark Carney - 85.9%
Chrystia Freeland - 8%
Karina Gould - 3.2%
Frank Bayliss - 3%
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There would be no need for a second ballot. Carney would be sworn in as Prime Minister on March 16 and what he described as his "War Time Cabinet" (which would be considerably smaller than Trudeau's) would maintain Gould, LeBlanc and Joly with Freeland returning albeit at the less post of Transportation Minister which would be a demotion from her previous cabinet posts at least for now. Christy Clark's campaign may have been short and somewhat farcical but it need not be a career ender and at least she didn't burn any bridges behind her so if she wants to run in the next election it's hard to see how Carney would have any objection and in fact given the dearth of high profile candidates in British Columbia he might even welcome it. The same is clearly not true of Ruby Dhalla's kamikaze campaign which crashed and burned so totally this should pretty much be the last we hear of her unless she takes the next logical step of simply joining the Tories which at this point wouldn't even be a surprise. Even given her flame out if she had simply behaved as Clark or Arya had and gone home to quietly sulk she could have made a run for her old seat if not federally than for the Ontario Provincial Liberals who just finished losing an election and might be looking for a new leader but that election is a story I'll save until next time when I do a Provincial update.
