By Lisa Van Dusen

March 9, 2025

Mark Carney has now stepped into his new role as Liberal leader — and, at a moment to be determined, prime minister — with an overwhelming 86% of the vote from party members.

In the end, Carney not only defied the expectations telegraphed by polling, fundraising and other anecdotal evidence, his victory delivered a message from Ottawa’s Rogers Centre to the rest of Canada.

The Liberal Party chose the leader on Sunday it feels is best positioned to vanquish two antagonists, one political and electoral, the other geopolitical and existential.

The first antagonist, Pierre Poilievre, has segued with the sort of seamless alacrity that can produce the political bends from a seemingly insurmountable polling lead attributed to Trudeau fatigue to a virtual dead heat attributed to Trump phobia.

That shift from the focus on his former foil to the focus on him has not redounded to Poilievre’s benefit, and he has himself and Donald Trump to blame for that.

It is difficult to imagine a more alarming, avoidable reversal in Canada’s economic prospects than a trade war with the United States, but Trump has made it a reality. It is equally difficult to imagine a more shocking geopolitical development than a sudden transformation of our bilateral relationship with the United States from one of allies to one of enemies, but Trump has also made that a reality.

He has done both of these things without either credible provocation or plausible justification and with a level of recklessness that betrays as a true motive a larger agenda of systemic sabotage in keeping with his contempt for the existing liberal world order and affection for its autocratic adversaries.

Canadians are not only being subjected to a ludicrous game of intelligence-insulting bilateral trolling as a means to an end, we’re being additionally harassed, as a democracy, with threats of economic subjugation and political obliteration.

These events have compelled political players worldwide — at least the ones who still nominally rely on public approval for their power — to recalibrate their relations with, and rhetoric about, Donald Trump. The apologists, the appeasers, the coattail riders, the situational ethicists and the normalizers who’ve made plausible Trump’s persistent political viability have been publicly struggling with how to distance themselves while keeping their options open and being persistently thwarted in that effort by Trump’s own behaviour.

In Poilievre’s case, at a time when seriousness, authenticity and trustworthiness have taken on disproportionate political value based on the altered context of an existential threat from an unserious, inauthentic, and untrustworthy actor, he can only distance himself from Donald Trump by disavowing the years he has spent unapologetically embracing Trump’s hypertactical politics, post-truth rhetorical stylings and far-right flirtations — an option that risks alienating both independent voters tired of being manipulated and the Conservative base that got Poilievre where he is.

As Policy Columnist Daniel Béland has pointed out, Carney’s lack of political experience is certainly an issue. But what Liberal Party voters have just said to their fellow Canadians is that there are different kinds of experience, and in this moment, the experience of navigating the complexities of global economic crisis management and monetary policy in two G7 countries is pertinent to the crisis at hand.

More than that, they have sent a message about the importance of temperament. When the president next door is leveraging emotional volatility and unprovoked retaliation to wreak havoc against Canada and the international community, temperament matters.

Carney will now be under immense pressure to call an election immediately, which will consign him to a battlefield where Poilievre’s disadvantage — that he has nothing but political experience — would suddenly become an advantage, especially if Canadians haven’t had a chance to see Carney at work.

The argument for waiting is that Carney’s own major advantage at a time when stability, continuity and calm have never been easier to argue for is the opportunity to prove himself as a national leader against the existential antagonist first, then worry about the politics.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.