Universal Pictures

By Lisa Van Dusen 

April 4, 2025

In the 1975 Spielberg summer blockbuster Jaws, a line that had become a running on-set joke about the stinginess of producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown in failing to supply a boat big enough to assist the film’s shooting barge made its way into the final cut, becoming one of the most quoted, and misquoted, lines in movie history.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody warns Robert Shaw’s Captain Quint after getting his first glimpse of the film’s “stranger in town” lead; a gargantuan, human-addicted shark with its own indelibly ominous, tuba-solo soundtrack.

With the usual disclaimer that a week is an eternity in politics and a day is an eternity in 21st-century election campaigns, so far, this Canadian election is about one thing: Donald Trump. And because Donald Trump is a geopolitically dangerous, bilaterally corrosive, economically belligerent, and existentially threatening presence in our immediate vicinity, the traditional ballot question of leadership has taken on exceptional proportions in this wartime campaign.

With 24 days to go, Mark Carney’s expertise in matters economic, financial, and trade-related based on five years served as governor of the Bank of Canada, seven years served as governor of the Bank of England, and 13 years spent in the borderless upper echelons of non-state economic actor Goldman Sachs have made this election, at this writing, his to lose. At a certain point — perhaps it was all that annexation talk that made Canadians feel like so much chum — Trump’s behaviour apparently made Carney’s qualifications segue in the minds of voters from relevant to timely to indispensable.

Which makes the economist fighting an unprovoked economic war of choice unleashed by a rampaging tyrant is — in this moment on this battlefield — Canada’s Martin Brody.

In this extraordinary political context, Pierre Poilievre smiling more often won’t compensate for the 25 years he’s spent not being the only guy to serve as central banker in two G7 democracies, and Jagmeet Singh promoting victory bonds won’t give him a Harvard degree in economics.

Which makes the economist fighting an unprovoked economic war of choice unleashed by a rampaging tyrant — in this moment on this battleground — Canada’s Martin Brody.

The only way that political alchemy is likely to change is if being Mark Carney suddenly becomes a liability rather than an asset; if Carney does something or is revealed to have done something so stratospherically off-putting that it decouples his candidacy from the situationally asymmetrical value of his resumé.

That may be why Carney, so far, has maintained his lead and why, as Policy columnist Daniel Béland writes this week, his verbal garbles have notably failed to make a dent in his approval rating in Quebec, where the Liberals are 20 points ahead. “As in other parts of the country,” writes Béland in Monsieur Téflon: Quebec Voters Impervious to Early Carney Gaffes, “the ‘Trump effect’ and concerns about tariffs and Canada’s sovereignty play a central role in this campaign.”

Which means the same exceptional life experience that in another election year might make Carney seem unrelatable is instead reassuring; we live in an incredibly complex world and people capable of solving incredibly complex problems generally don’t invest a lot of time cultivating their retail-politics rizz because they don’t have to. The unflappable temperament and deadpan delivery that might, in any other context, come off as intellectual aloofness seem absolutely fine with people so tired of performative bloviating that their thumbs are seized with repetitive stress injury from mute-button overuse.

That doesn’t mean — especially in an age when a twice-impeached felon can bellow about immigrants stalking and eating house pets in a campaign debate and still be president of the United States — that a stunning upset is out of the question.

But so far, the dominant plotline is that Canadians are gonna need a bigger boat to fight this shark, and if Carney’s qualifications are that boat, then he’s gotta be the captain.

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 as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.