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Chris Selley: Carney benefited from not being Trudeau. Why is he channelling him?

As of Monday, both have now insulted Grassy Narrows protesters. This is political malpractice, at the very least

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This was Prime Minister Mark Carney’s quite astonishing remark at a housing announcement in Toronto on Monday, referring to a woman protesting on behalf of the mercury-poisoned Grassy Narrows First Nation in northwestern Ontario — one of the worst environmental disasters in Canadian history.

Chris Selley: Carney benefited from not being Trudeau. Why is he channelling him? Back to video

Somehow, the quip didn’t seem to make much news. But CityNews Toronto screen-capped the immediate aftermath of the quip, which was just as remarkable as the words themselves: Everyone on stage, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow burst out laughing. LOL! Pwned!

If I were newly installed NDP leader Avi Lewis I would be putting that photo on T-shirts, never mind that Chow is party royalty. We shall see how much of Lewis’s leadership platform makes it to the party platform: His chief of staff and principal secretary are veterans of relatively sane NDP politics in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, respectively. But if he has any chance of not riding the federal NDP into the ground like Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove, he needs to differentiate himself and his party from everyone on that stage, centrist establishment Dippers included.

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“Liberal, Tory, same old story,” Boomer-aged NDPers will tell you, and they’re not wrong. The same goes for Boomer-aged NDPers who become Mayor of Toronto.

It has often been observed of Carney that he has benefited tremendously simply from not being Justin Trudeau. As it turned out, it wasn’t Liberal governance Canadians were sick of — or at least, not quite enough of them — so much as it was the prime minister.

With that “outlast her” remark, and followup smirk, Carney couldn’t really have looked or sounded more like Trudeau. One of Trudeau’s several watch-through-your-hands moments on the reconciliation file came at a March 2019 party fundraiser, also in Toronto: “Thank you very much for your donation,” he told Grassy Narrows protesters who crashed the event. He later apologized.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Carney didn’t apologize, despite his remark being objectively nastier — if you’re going to try to make yuks out of mercury poisoning, which I absolutely advise against, “outlast” is not a verb you want to use — and despite his father having vigorously defended the residential-school system, which isn’t anything the prime minister should have to answer for, but which is nevertheless something he might want to keep in mind.

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First Nations groups who oppose economic and resource development can make Carney’s life very difficult if they want to, and thereby Canadians’ lives less wealthy and happy — not least Indigenous Canadians who support economic and resource development. That’s going to matter in the long term.

In the medium term, I’m thinking more and more that skeptical pundits, like me, underestimated just how fundamental an itch Carney scratches for a critical mass of Canadians: the desire to be dominated by a technocrat, the way they were dominated by the Chrétien-Martin Liberals.

Jean Chrétien was no technocrat. He was a purely political animal. But people liked him, against all sense and reason. People still like him. And there’s a real whiff of that old thug about our current PM. Watching Carney settle into the role like a chaise longue at Harrington Lake on a summer day, watching his approval ratings hold steady or even climb even as the economy continues to struggle, one wonders if he could govern forever.

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But then there are these times when Carney reminds you quite powerfully of Trudeau, the recently flamed-out force he successfully auditioned to replace, and you can see how it will end eventually in tears, as all prime ministers’ tenures do. He is lumbered with no fewer than two Trudeau-era immigration ministers in prominent positions, both of whom should by rights have resigned from Cabinet (or been fired) after Auditor General Karen Hogan’s withering report into the student-visa fiasco. They remain in place. Marc Miller’s X account is an oblivious liability-in-waiting all on its own.

On Monday, with “I can outlast her,” Carney practically channelled Trudeau.

Federal Liberals are born on third base, or at least second. It’s truly extraordinary how much and how many Canadians want to like them, no matter what they do, even if it’s the opposite of what they said they’d do or even of what they did yesterday. I imagine Canadian popular musicians vote monolithically NDP, assuming they live here and vote. But there was Joni Mitchell at the Juno Awards on Sunday night in Hamilton, Ont., pumping Carney’s tires outrageously: “This man is a blessing. You guys are so fortunate,” she told the crowd. It reminds me of the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie falling tragically in love with Justin Trudeau. Shouldn’t rock stars be better than average at spotting complete phoneys?

Were I forced to place a bet on the federal NDP’s immediate future fortunes, I would bet that they’re absolutely cooked. I’m not sure there’s a riding in this country Lewis could win without displacing a more talented politician. If Canadians haven’t yet concluded the Liberal Party of Canada is a proudly amoral machine for wielding power, I don’t know why they ever would. But convincing them is Lewis’s job, now, and Carney could be an opportunity.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com

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