Opinion | Donald Trump upends notions of stability and change as Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre square off

 

In a little more than five weeks, either Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre will be the prime minister of Canada. 

But it is abundantly clear that this election campaign is more than a faceoff between the Liberal and Conservative leaders. 

It’s also going to be a tug of war between change and stability — and which one of those forces is ultimately most important to Canadians at this tumultuous time for the country. 

Carney and Poilievre, in their own ways, are going to be struggling with that tension in the weeks ahead, and kicked off their campaigns on Sunday playing on this terrain. 

“We need change, big change, positive change,” Carney said, pitching himself as the man who will shake up a party that has been in power since 2015. In just nine days since his swearing-in, Carney said, “you’ve seen a change in approach and action. It’s not words, but action.” 

Meanwhile, “Canada first, for a change,” is Poilievre’s new slogan, a bid to knit together Canadians’ fear of instability with the desire for a new government after what he repeatedly described as the “lost decade” of Liberal rule. 

Change is definitely in the air, and it’s a strong wind blowing in from the south. It is difficult to recall any Canadian election in recent memory — not even the great free-trade campaign of 1988 — so consumed with the politics of the United States. 

Donald Trump boasted on Friday that he had changed the course of the Canadian election in a big way.

“Just a little while ago, before I got involved and totally changed the election — which I don’t care about … the Conservative was leading,” Trump said. 

He is correct. Trump has indeed changed the game, particularly when it comes to this tension between change and stability. With an erratic U.S. president making threats of tariffs and annexation against this country, whipping up chaos in his own nation, Canadians may be in less of a mood for change than they were just months ago. 

The change they may want now is some stability. 

That plays into the Liberals’ hands, as Trump said, and as the polls have shown. The more that Trump has shaken things up here, the higher the Liberals have been climbing in the polls, to the point that they stand a real chance of winning on April 28 — a prospect that many would have found ridiculous not so long ago. 

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/donald-trump-upends-notions-of-stability-and-change-as-mark-carney-and-pierre-poilievre-square/article_87f48d77-25c2-44bb-8491-5927dfebdc2e.html