By Daniel Béland

April 2, 2025

The headline in Tuesday’s Journal de Montréal said it all: “Sondage Léger: les Québécois passent l’éponge sur la mauvaise semaine de Carney, toujours solidement en tête”. En anglais: a Léger poll was showing that Quebec voters had “wiped the slate clean” on Mark Carney’s bumpy launch in the province, where he’s now surfing a 20-point lead. Even in an age of political wonders, this merits explanation.

Since Carney decided to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, commentators both within and outside of Quebec have expressed concerns about his knowledge of both the province and the French language. These concerns have remained strong since the beginning of the federal campaign early last week, especially because Carney has made several gaffes and controversial announcements that have attracted negative media attention in Quebec.

It began last Tuesday,  when he “rebaptized” Liberal Châteauguay-Les Jardins-de-Napierville candidate Nathalie Provost “Nathalie Pronovost.” Simultaneously, he referred to her as a survivor of the Concordia shootings while she is in fact a survivor of the December 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, during which 14 innocent women were assassinated in cold blood because of their gender.

As the Polytechnique massacre is a focal point of contemporary Quebec history and politics, especially with regard to gender equality and gun control, this second gaffe reinforced the existing narrative that Carney does not know Quebec well. He apologized profusely for this gaffe the following day but, in Quebec, it created intense negative media coverage at the very beginning of the campaign.

During the first week of the campaign, Carney also made announcements that triggered controversy in the province. One of them was the Liberal campaign’s decision to pull out of the “Face à Face” leaders’ debate organized by TVA, a television network that is part of the powerful Quebecor empire. “Face à Face” is distinct from the official French-language debate organized by the Leaders’ Debates Commission, which is set to take place on April 16, the day before its English-language debate.

In contrast to the two official debates, this year the proposed TVA “Face à Face” involved a pay-for-play scheme according to which each major federal party (the Bloc, the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the NDP, but not the Greens because they lack Quebec representation in the House of Commons), would have to pay $75,000 to take part in the event.

After saying he might participate, last week Carney announced that he would not do so, a decision that forced TVA to cancel the “Face à Face” altogether. To justify this decision to opt out of a French language debate, “the Liberals have offered up a smorgasbord of pretexts that varied from the absence of Green Party Leader Elizabeth May to high sounding principles about not paying journalists“, wrote former NDP leader Tom Mulcair.

Yet, the truth of the matter is that this controversial decision was aimed mainly at reducing the electoral risks facing the Liberals in the province. Such risks stem from the fact that, due to his limited French language skills and his relative political inexperience, for Carney debating in French twice with party leaders who are both more fluent in the language and much more politically experienced than would have been a clear political gamble. While Carney was criticized extensively for not participating in TVA’s “Face à Face,” this is probably a price the Liberals were willing to pay.

At the same time, some Liberal policy announcements also stirred controversy in Quebec. One of them is Carney’s statement that, under his prime ministership, the federal government would intervene in a potential Supreme Court case against Quebec’s 2022 language law known as Bill 96, which features a preemptive use of the notwithstanding clause. Highly unpopular among Quebec’s anglophone minority, Bill 96 has also been strongly criticized by Montreal Liberal MPs such as Anthony Housefather, on its own and in the context of the recent debate over the modernization of the Official Languages Act.

Echoing such criticisms of Bill 96, Carney stated that “We will always defend the Charter. We’ve made clear, I’ve made clear, that we will support (an) intervention at the Supreme Court and fully respect the language rights”. He also expressed concerns about the preemptive use of the notwithstanding clause, which the Legault government also triggered in 2019 in the context of Bill 21 on laicity. This position stands in strong contrast to the one of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who said that, under his leadership, the federal government would not intervene in any possible Bill 96 Supreme Court case.

These controversies provided strong political ammunition against the Liberals to both the Bloc and the Conservatives, who have criticized them and claimed that Carney is someone who does not have the interests of francophone Quebeckers at heart. More generally, framed as an outsider and a centralizing figure, the Liberal leader has faced relentless attacks from the Bloc, as its leader Yves-François Blanchet spends his time saying that Carney misunderstands Quebec and speaks French poorly, things that Conservatives also like to repeat on the campaign trail.

Last week, the Bloc leader went as far as suggesting that Carney is a risky “Pandora’s box,” who stands in contrast with Poilievre, “the devil that you know”. Although Blanchet clarified that he did not prefer Poilievre over Carney (both would be bad for Quebec according to him), his statements prove that he wants to convince Quebec voters that Carney is someone who is not like them and who should not be trusted, especially because, as a new politician lesser known to the public, he could be full of (unpleasant) surprises.

Despite Carney’s early, Quebec-related campaign controversies and the relentless attacks he faces, Tuesday’s Léger poll has the Bloc and the Conservatives tied in second place with only 23% of support each to the Liberals’ 43%. This despite the fact, according to the same poll, that 49% of respondents think that Carney does not speak French well (compared to 36% who do), and 52% disagree with his decision to pull out of TVA’s “Face à Face” (compared to only 32% who agree with it).

How do we explain this? As in other parts of the country, the “Trump effect” and concerns about tariffs and Canada’s sovereignty play a central role in this campaign, especially for older voters, who care more about these issues than do younger ones, who are more focused on the housing crisis and cost-of-living issues.

Although both the Bloc and the Conservatives would like to change the conversation and see less public discussion about President Trump, so far in the campaign, his shadow hovers over Quebec as much as it does over the rest of Canada, a situation that objectively favors Carney, who remains the Prime Minister and, therefore, the only party leader who can actually deal with a rogue U.S. president and do things to address the fears Trump has generated among so many Canadians and Quebeckers.

As long as Trump and his policies, especially tariffs, remain so central to political discourse and media coverage, Carney is likely to benefit from that situation, in Quebec as well as in other parts of Canada.

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