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National Post

Terry Glavin: Mark Carney owes Jagmeet Singh a massive thank you for NDP implosion

It's a verdict that's rapidly embedding itself as the answer to the riddle of the Liberal party's revival from its vegetative state as recently as last December to this week's election-day comeback, only a handful of seats shy of a majority in the House of Commons: Party standard-bearer Mark Carney owes his triumph to Donald Trump. Article content Article content The notion is particularly popular in the United States. In Democratic party circles, especially, Canadians have lately become celebrated as plucky allies in the gallant resistance to their daft president's jingoistic threats to break all the rules of global neoliberalism, annexing Canada along with Greenland in the bargain. Article content There's definitely a case to be made for the proposition. Canadians are furious about all this, and a suave and worldly big-money asset manager should be presumed to possess a competence and dexterity that would definitely count as an advantage in the daunting work of muddling through the mercurial president's tariff-war belligerence. Then again, Carney's unique skill set would also lend itself well to the fashioning of elaborate masquerades of ad valorem equivalents, GATT Article 20 exemptions and other such resorts to the highly-specialized vocabulary of international trade pacts in order to camouflage a capitulation to the White House, or a suicidal deepening of economic dependence on China. You could dress these things up as masterstrokes of highbrow statesmanship. Article content Article content But never mind that. The Liberals successfully marketed Carney as a kind of Svengali, and a significant body of voters bought it, so fair play to the Liberals. Article content It's just that the presence of a dangerous president in the White House might not have been that much more significant in the scheme of things than the bizarre absence of someone else. Article content Article content You'd never know it, but until just last month, Canada's prime minister was Justin Trudeau. After Carney was formally anointed March 9 at the conclusion of the heavily ritualized Liberal leadership succession, Trudeau simply vanished from public view. He'd been prime minister for nearly a decade, and he was suddenly made invisible. Article content Article content Everyone appears to agree that the just concluded federal election was one of the weirdest and most momentous ever. Carney has called the election 'one of those hinge moments of history,' and it was. 'Existential' is a word that came up a lot. Article content We know Justin Trudeau still exists. On March 17, he posted a selfie on Instagram. He was buying kitchen utensils at a Canadian Tire store, apparently in Ottawa. The Globe and Mail has cited unnamed sources who say Trudeau is renting a house in Ottawa's Rockcliffe neighbourhood. That's all we've heard from him. Article content The peculiarity of this state of affairs can be explained by the Liberal party's understandable determination to induce a state of amnesia in the electorate, owing to the catastrophe of the Liberals' more than nine years in power and the galloping unpopularity of Trudeau himself. By the final days of 2024, the Liberals' approval ratings had been reduced to what pollster Angus Reid calculated at just 16 per cent.