By Daniel Béland

February 26, 2025

On Monday and Tuesday evening, the remaining four Liberal leadership hopefuls participated in the only two official debates of this unusually short race: one in French and one in English.

Because Mark Carney seems way ahead in the race and likely heading toward a crowning, these two debates provided an opportunity to test his debating skills and imagine how he might fare in the leaders’ debates of the next federal campaign, which might begin as early as next month.

This is particularly important because Carney is new to politics, something he regularly advertises, when he emphasizes on every possible occasion that he is not a career politician. Yet, for Carney, lack of political experience is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, this biographical fact allows him to draw a strong contrast between himself and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who famously qualified for his MP pension in his early 30s. This absence of prior political record also makes it easier for Carney than it is for Chrystia Freeland, Karina Gould, or one-term MP Frank Baylis to distance himself from an unpopular Trudeau government (unlike his rivals, he never sat at the cabinet or the caucus table) while stressing his technocratic accomplishments and record as a policy wonk who successfully headed both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England during major crises (respectively the 2008 financial crisis and BREXIT).

On the other hand, political experience is clearly helpful when you want to become prime minister and central bankers do not have the best record as far as transitioning from their elite technocratic world to the partisan arena. In the specific case of Canada, political experience can also help in terms of mastering our two official languages, as debates in the House of Commons take place in both of them, which is an excellent practice for participating in political debates in English and in French.

And, what is the verdict concerning Carney’s French language skills in the aftermath of Monday night’s debate? This is an important issue because, in federal politics, it is now widely expected that a prime minister should be able to address Canadians in both official languages. This is what we call the “bilingualism test,” which is especially crucial with regard to Quebec and francophones living in other provinces.

Because other politicians, including fellow Liberals, raised serious questions about the quality of his French in the aftermath of the Edmonton speech that officially inaugurated his leadership campaign last month, the pressure was strong on Carney to do well in French Monday evening. This was a particularly difficult task for him because it was his first-ever debate as a candidate to political office.

Some francophone voters might be more forgiving about Carney’s French if they think that his leadership and policy experience could help protect Canada against the strongest economic and foreign policy menace it has faced in a very long time.

Unfortunately for him, as far as the quality of French is concerned, Monday was not a good night for Carney, especially because he spoke less fluently than the three other people on stage, especially Frank Baylis, a Montrealer, and Karina Gould, a McGill alumna. The most discussed highlight of the entire debate was actually when he misspoke and apparently expressed support for Hamas before immediately correcting his mistake, with the help of the other candidates on stage.

Carney’s lackluster language performance is bad news for the Liberals, especially if they try imagining how he would fare in a French-language debate against Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet and Poilievre, whose French is better and more natural than Carney’s.

In the context of the threats against Canada uttered by Donald Trump, however, some francophone voters might be more forgiving about Carney’s French if they think that his leadership and policy experience could help protect Canada against the strongest economic and foreign policy menace it has faced in a very long time.

Beyond the French-language issue, Carney’s performance during these two debates raises other questions about whether he is ready to debate against experienced politicians like Blanchet, Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh and, if she is invited on stage, Elizabeth May. Even during the English-language debate, Carney spoke more about concepts than about people, something especially striking because both Freeland and Gould, who probably won both debates because of the degree to which her passion and debating skills defied expectations, emphasized the impact of broader economic realities on ordinary folks.

In contrast, Carney sounded like the technocrat he was for so many years. Clearly, he knows his policy stuff and he is a calm, steady figure but, Monday and Tuesday night, he might have proved more effective in inducing sleep than melatonin. In the age of Trump and the turmoil he is creating, however, boring might be reassuring for many voters. As Policy editor Lisa Van Dusen wrote last week, “Carney is spectacularly, sublimely boring — in the most electable way possible.”

Certainly, he projects the opposite image of Poilievre, the attack dog whose populist rhetoric makes some Canadians anxious and uncomfortable, a situation that might help explain his relatively low favourability rate. Many people seem to support Carney because he is not Poilievre and the former’s lack of political experience and, in this case, of apparent debating skills, are part of the attraction.

At the same time, although the two Liberal leadership debates might have felt soporific to some viewers, the lack of punchlines and zingers is good news for the Liberals because, as opposed to what happened in the past, notably during the 2008 federal campaign, in their future attack ads, the Conservatives should find it hard to weaponize quotes from Carney’s Liberal opponents against him.

This is the advantage of having undramatic debates, in which the frontrunner’s demeanor suggests that not only is boring good, it may well be the new red.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.