Tom Mulcair: My advice to Liberal handlers, let Carney be Carney

Former BoC governor Mark Carney has announced his Liberal leadership bid - Mike Le Couteur reports on who may follow.

Mark Carney is what sports writers would call a generational player. Someone who’s got talent galore and whose skills and leadership could help make a franchise a winner.

The problem for Carney is that he appears to be surrounded by very experienced people from the Trudeau era. They were really good coaches for their former star player and as a political player Trudeau was a star in his own right. He was just a very different star from Carney.

Trudeau needed to be fed his lines, Carney doesn’t. The only awkward moments of his launch were when Carney struggled to lift words off a page that had clearly been written by someone else.

Perhaps my Journal de Montréal colleague, Guillaume St-Pierre, summed it up best in giving his positive review of Carney’s campaign launch: the more he dropped his prepared notes, the better he was.

I hope for Carney’s sake that that lesson will have been learned by the people around him: let Carney be Carney.

If not, it’s Carney himself who is going to have to break free from the very natural tendency of senior Liberal communications folks to think that their words are better than those of their candidate.

Make no mistake, these are very experienced and capable people. It’s just that they’re experienced with a beast who was in many ways the polar opposite of Carney.

Trudeau couldn’t explain management strategies or planning; he didn’t know a thing about either. Carney has been solving monumental management and finance issues for decades and that’s the skill set Canadians are desperately looking for. Perhaps the best moment of his launch was when he derided Poilievre as the rank amateur that he is, but Canadians don’t know that yet and Carney has to continue to use his excellent teaching skills to drive that home.

Trudeau was a master of delivery. He wasn’t so great at delivering his own words. That didn’t come naturally to him. He hesitated and paused a great deal when answering extemporaneously.

Trudeau compensated by excelling at effortlessly reading off a teleprompter. He was so good at it that unless you knew what those two plexiglass squares off to each side of him were, you’d swear he was speaking off the cuff.

Everyone has commented on how short this leadership campaign is going to be. Given the stakes, it’s absurdly short. That brevity means that it’s even more important for candidates to always put their best foot forward. There are not going to be many chances to create a lasting positive impression.

The Carney who showed up on The Daily Show, whip smart, engaged and mildly self-deprecating is the one who can get voters onside.

Now that he has officially started his campaign, our attention will begin to focus on other candidates as well.

Frank Baylis’ bona fides

We tend to forget that in addition to the prohibitive front runners, Carney and former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, there will be others in the race.

One who is less known is Frank Baylis. Full disclosure: Frank is a friend of mine.

He served one term with Trudeau and simply decided he had better things to do, including running his highly successful businesses.

In addition to his total fluency in French, Frank is the only Black candidate for the Liberal leadership. An engineer by training, he’s also a billionaire. One of the five businesses he’s sold in recent years earned him US$1.75 billion.

He has fought his whole life for equality. His late mother, a nurse originally from Barbados, won a landmark legal case against Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel when they refused to hire her as a nurse, because she was Black. Frank saw his mother courageously fight that case, which dragged on for 12 years before she finally won.

It was no surprise to me to see Frank take a leadership role in the fight against Quebec’s discriminatory Bill 21. That law targets religious minorities in general and Muslim women in particular. As Frank recently said to me, his mother fought against discrimination when she couldn’t get a job in her profession because of the colour of her skin. He was determined to fight discrimination against women who are being told they can’t get a job teaching in Quebec, if they wear a headscarf.

When Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced that he was not running, I had to remind some of my colleagues here that there was indeed a Quebec candidate in the race, and it was Frank.

The Quebec question

I know that mentioning Quebec issues during a campaign can produce a collective eye roll, from coast to coast, but bear with me. There are a few (including Bill 21) that will be on the table.

Trudeau’s failure to defend the Canadian constitution, that guarantees equality of English and French before Quebec courts, will also be raised. Candidates better be up to speed on Bill 96 and know how it’s affected language rights.

Quebecers have the same rights as Manitobans to have their laws enacted in both languages and to produce documents in either language before the courts. That right has been compromised by Quebec Premier Francois Legault and Trudeau never raised his little finger to fight it. Quite the contrary, he incorporated a reference to the Quebec language law into the federal Official languages Act.

A simple question can and should be asked of all candidates: will you stand up for minority religious and language rights even if it means ruffling some feathers in Quebec? Trudeau wouldn’t. Frank Baylis would. What about the other candidates? It’s a question that concerns all Canadians.

Poilievre has been openly musing about imposing the abandoned Energy East pipeline and a rejected massive LNG project, on Quebec. Trudeau shoved the Trans Mountain pipeline down the throats of British Columbians but didn’t dare take on Legault who said Energy East has no social acceptability in Quebec.

Poilievre is echoing a promise made in 2023 by Peter MacKay at the Conservative convention in Quebec City. Their dream is to export more oil and gas from the East Coast of Canada.

That is also a question that deserves to be debated.

One other natural resource issue could quickly be on the table, and it’s bulk water exports. People who think Trump wants all of Canada should go back to what he said during the campaign. He really wants Canadian water for the parched southern states.

Jean Chretien insisted on wording in NAFTA that made it possible for Canada to ban bulk water exports. During my time as environment minister in Quebec, I learned that this is one of the most sensitive and emotional issues among voters. Clear questions on where candidates stand on this key issue will be part of this whirlwind campaign carried out in the shadow of the Intimidator-in-Chief south of the border.

Carney is out of the starting blocks and Freeland is about to launch. This is going to be more like a quarter mile drag race than a full Grand Prix, but the stakes couldn’t be higher for this great country we call home.

Tom Mulcair was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017