Fourteen minutes before he was legally obligated to sit down and shut up Sunday at the stroke of 12, Prime Minister Mark Carney reached the campaign finish line in Central Saanich and headed back to Ottawa.
He’d just finished a cheerful midnight mass of sorts for hundreds of people at Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse. Then he took the bus to the airport and went home to find out if it was a requiem for his six-week-old prime ministership or the early baptism of his stint as a democratically elected leader.
Turns out it was the latter.
It was the most bizarre election in Canadian history. Most domestic concerns were overtaken by the sudden menace posed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s delusional fixation on annexing Canada.
It had the perverse effect of ending several years of dismaying national fractures and bringing the country together.
While the election was relatively close and a Liberal minority looked likely at press time, Canada hasn’t been this united in mood since its 100th birthday in 1967. Nothing brings a nation together like an external threat.
If Election 2025 was a ball game, the federal Liberals made the greatest pitching change in history. They dumped a reviled starter who had lost his stuff and subbed in a rookie for the ninth inning who won the game for them.
The buttoned-down banker will never send people into raptures like his predecessor Justin Trudeau did. His 100th event in 36 days was warm and friendly but relatively subdued, partly because of the Lapu Lapu horror in Vancouver.
Grappling with the mental-health crisis that is apparently behind that mass killing will become a priority in the days ahead.
The B.C. legislature has been periodically seized with that issue for several years now. Terrifying incidents involving deranged people threatening the lives of innocent citizens are aired routinely.
It was likely considered too soon to address the underlying issue, so Carney just expressed sorrow and dwelled on the Filipino concept of bayanihan, the spirit of community co-operation, especially during difficult times.
He spoke quietly of how it was happening in Vancouver and elsewhere across the country, where people were drawing together as a community.
One of his major moments on the campaign was when he got a handful of letters from 9-10-year-olds about their dreams for Canada. “There was a lot about nature and clean water, but a lot more about other things.”
They referred to tariffs and sovereignty, ideas unknown to Carney when he was their age.
One girl wrote: “I dream of a safe Canada … a clean Canada … a kind Canada.
Then, Carney said, “came the kicker.”
The student wrote: “I dream of a Canada that is not the U.S.”
Carney said the fact kids are writing about such sophisticated concepts “gives just a sense of the scale of this attack — and it is an attack — on our country.”
“They want our land. They want our water. They want our country. President Trump wants to break us economically so America can own us, and that’s not going to happen.
“Americans understand three things — they understand money, lawyers and Fox News.”
Carney said Canadian counter-tariffs are having maximum impact, his government is lawyered up and suing the U.S. all over the place, and “we got Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Fox News.”
He said every dollar Canada collects in counter-tariffs will be “given right back to workers and businesses that are affected.”
He said that will be relevant when the impositions on B.C. lumber start to take hold. B.C. will also benefit from a plan to build “literally millions of houses, using Canadian material and technology.”
The rest of the strategy to fend off the U.S. is to build new trade corridors and clean-energy grids, and sweep away all the federal impediments to internal trade.
It was clear Sunday night that Carney knew he was leading mostly because he was judged the best person to take on Trump.
But it won’t be by way of matching bluster. Carney joked at his final stop about the lack of poetry in his speeches and his penchant for econometrics over rhetoric.
He’ll be holding the reins on the body politic now. He’ll be running the numbers and pulling the levers with “elbows up.”
But if this latest incarnation of the Liberal government needs someone to whip it into a frenzy, it will have to rely on someone else.
