Mark Carney is our next prime minister.

I’ll take bets on it today. Any amount.

I’m playing a trick, of course – all he has to do is win the Liberal leadership race, and that seems not in doubt.

For how long, though, who knows? The riskier bet is who wins the next election that follows within weeks of Carney’s installation as our 24th PM.

On that matter, the easy wager for about two years now has been on Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. The Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kept digging, and digging and digging themselves an inescapable hole seemingly to the other side of the planet. (Aside: that shovelling from Ottawa would surface in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, not China as the myth goes.)

But something has been afoot now for a few weeks that casts this conventional thinking into legitimate doubt. In saying “afoot,” I might be better to use the word “stampede,” because as we check our watches it is looking more and more at this moment like another minority government,........

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