By Lori Turnbull

April 1, 2025

Liberal leader Mark Carney has undone the sizable lead that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives held in the polls while Justin Trudeau was the still the prime minister. Carney has done this by responding to voters’ primary concerns and offering a suite of policies that have broad appeal. If voters give him what he asks for — a “strong, positive mandate” — we could see a very different party system on the other side of this election; one that is centered around two main parties, with smaller parties having a hard time punching through.

According to a recent Nanos poll, the Liberals are now eight points ahead of the Conservatives. Timing is everything in politics, as in life. When Poilievre was poised to win the next election, he was resonating with voters on matters like affordability and the housing crisis while Trudeau and the Liberals came across as tone deaf on this stuff. But now, the game has changed. Trudeau is gone, Donald Trump is threatening Canada’s sovereignty and our economy, and Poilievre is trailing in part because he’s still fighting the last war.

And though Trudeau’s departure from politics seemed to take way too long in coming, now it looks like he might have loitered just long enough to save the Liberals as the timing of Carney’s arrival could not be better. He’s seen by many as the right person for the moment and he’s not been in politics long enough to accumulate much baggage or blame.

Carney’s campaign strategy seems straightforward: he knows that Canadians are anxious about tariffs, trade wars, and the uncertainty, trepidation and disbelief that now define our relationship with the United States. He is meeting these concerns by offering tax breaks, spending on investments to grow the economy, building our defence industry, showing up as a real partner in NATO, and developing an integrated national economy.

Through galvanizing slogans such as “Canada Strong” and “Elbows Up”, Carney is plucking the threads of Canadian patriotism. Celebrity proxies are carrying his message to different constituencies. None of this is political rocket science. It’s just what the moment calls for and, thanks to his CV, Carney strikes people as capable of fulfilling his promises.

Carney’s policy approach is pulling the Liberal Party back to its more traditional ideological space: the centre. He seems to be practicing the kind of brokerage politics that saw Jean Chrétien form successive majority governments. The idea is that, to attract enough votes to win an election a political party should be a “big tent” — per Barnum & Bailey by way of Gerald Ford — under which many people, of different opinions, identities, and interests can fit. Competing claims must be brokered internally so that the coalition stays together and the party remains competitive.

Carney’s policy approach is pulling the Liberal Party back to its more traditional ideological space: the centre. He seems to be practicing the kind of brokerage politics that saw Jean Chrétien form successive majority governments.

As a central banker, public servant, international climate policy specialist, and global financial crisis-manager who literally wrote the book on values-based economic growth, Carney might be uniquely suited to perform the role of power broker. That term — coined by political journalist and author of the “Making of the President” books Theodore H. White and popularized by Robert Caro’s iconic biography of Robert Moses — would accurately describe what Carney has already done to leverage his strengths, re-brand the Liberal Party and manage the current bilateral crisis amid a daily parade of sideshows.

Carney’s focus on the political centre is, for many, long overdue. An Angus Reid poll published last September found that roughly one-third of the population felt political parties have become too extreme. Forty-eight percent said that no one represented their views. Of those who identified as centrists, almost half reported feeling politically orphaned. It seems that Carney is skating to where the puck actually is, and many of those orphans have found a home.

If he is successful in taking the Liberals back to majority status, the results could be dire for the New Democrats and could have the broader effect of reconfiguring our political party system. This election is going to be difficult for smaller parties no matter what they do because the ballot question is centered on who is best suited to take on Donald Trump. Parties who are not in a position to form a government will have a hard time convincing voters to give them their vote.

The New Democrats made an error in aligning with the Liberals as closely as they did through the confidence and supply agreement. They might have had impact in pushing the dental and pharmacare programs forward, but they could have done this — and perhaps even more — by acting as a full-fledged opposition party that held the government to account and put conditions on its support every time there was a vote. Now, the party has largely lost its distinct identity and cannot seem to capitalize on the fact that the Liberals have largely vacated the progressive political space.

In an existential election amid unprecedented economic harassment from a longtime ally, Canadians are gravitating toward the candidate familiar with the intricacies of how the global economy works. These are not the terms on which either Poilievre or Singh built their careers, because they didn’t have to. Again, timing is everything.

The fact that Carney has been able to re-situate the party on the ideological spectrum in his very short time at the helm speaks to just how much political parties’ brands reflect their leaders. His emerging platform sits in stark contrast to Justin Trudeau’s progressive policy agenda. Though very different in their personas, communication styles, skill sets, and policy priorities, Carney and Trudeau have at least one thing in common: they both inherited a Liberal Party in a severely weakened state. Trudeau became leader at the worst time in the Liberal Party’s history, when they had been reduced to third place in the House of Commons with a meagre 34 seats.

Trudeau rebuilt the party in his own image when he became leader in 2013 and went on to form a majority government just two and a half years later. Carney’s path is different in that he became leader when the party was still in government, but with public support ratings so low that implosion in the next election was all but guaranteed.

Both Trudeau and Carney had the task of saving the party. Trudeau did it by taking a turn to the left, but Carney is taking the party back to the middle. Time will tell whether his efforts will bear fruit.

Policy Columnist Lori Turnbull is a professor in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University.