Liberal leadership race: Carney vs. Freeland
The Mike Moffatt test
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If you’d like to vote in the Liberal leadership race, the deadline to register as a federal Liberal is Monday January 27. You have to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and you can’t be a member of any other federal party.
If you’re not sure whether you’re registered or not, my suggestion would be to register again.
When you vote, there’ll be authentication required. (In past nomination contests during Covid, there was a process to scan your photo id, like your driver’s license, and to submit a selfie.) Each of the 343 ridings across the country will have equal weight, so that you can’t have tens of thousands of people in one riding deciding the contest.
The actual vote happens on March 9. It’ll be a preferential ballot: if there’s multiple candidates that you think would be a good leader, you rank them.
How are they on housing?
Of course the big question is, who can best respond to the economic turmoil that we’re facing under Trump 2.0, while holding the country together?
The new leader seems likely to be either Mark Carney (who steered the Bank of Canada after the 2008 financial crisis, and the Bank of England after Brexit) or Freeland (who renegotiated NAFTA with Trump the first time around).
Trudeau is out. I have zero insight into who will replace him, although it’s curious that I personally know both Chrystia Freeland — whose blistering resignation letter is a thing of beauty — and Mark Carney, apparently two of the leading contenders. Both are smart and well-informed.
In a short race, it’ll be hard for a candidate who isn’t already well-known to make an impression. Other people who have declared an interest are Karina Gould, Frank Baylis, Jaime Battiste, Chandra Arya, Ruby Dhalla, and Michael Clark. Wikipedia.
Cabinet ministers like Dominic LeBlanc, Melanie Joly, Francois-Philippe Champagne, and Jonathan Wilkinson are staying at their posts to respond to Trump, not running for leader.
That said, even if the next four years are mostly going to be spent dealing with the chaos and drama of the second Trump administration - or in opposition, scrutinizing the actions of the Poilievre government as they face off against Trump - there’ll still be things happening on housing. What do Carney and Freeland think about housing? What are their sources of information? I think of this as the Mike Moffatt test: who’s read Mike Moffatt, or talked to him?
Carney was a member of the cross-partisan task force that came up with the Blueprint for More and Better Housing - Moffatt was a key driver of this task force. 2024 op-ed by Carney summarizing its recommendations. A 2011 speech focusing on elevated house prices as a risk to financial stability.
As finance minister, Freeland’s team talked to Moffatt. Two major policy changes, the GST waiver on new rental housing and accelerated depreciation on new rental housing, both happened under Freeland and reflected Moffatt’s recommendations. At a post-budget event in 2021, she commented that “affordability concerns are first and foremost an issue of supply.”
A Canadian version of term limits
When I was door-knocking for the Liberals back in 2015, I would sometimes talk to people who usually voted Conservative, but after nine years of Harper, were thinking that it was time for a change. I would tell them what a Conservative friend told me: “Politicians are like diapers, they need to be changed every once in a while.”
Trudeau has run into the same feeling. The last time that someone won four elections in a row was more than 100 years ago. It’s like a Canadian version of term limits. People simply don’t trust any politician to run the country for more than about nine or ten years. Fourteen years would be far too long.
In the upcoming federal election (likely to happen very soon after the Liberal leadership race concludes), the most likely outcome is still that Poilievre wins a sweeping majority. But I think that the Liberals are likely to do better with Carney as leader than with Freeland, simply because Freeland was at the heart of Trudeau’s government for the last nine years; the same distrust dynamic applies to her. Justin Ling describes decision-making as having been driven by a “triumvirate” of Trudeau, Freeland, and Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford.
More
The Bridge, with Peter Mansbridge, Chantal Hebert, and Bruce Anderson. Sober analysis of federal politics. I find Chantal Hebert’s insights to be particularly interesting. January 10 episode, describing how Trump is the big issue.
The Herle Burly, with David Herle, Scott Reid, Kory Teneycke, and Jordan Leichnitz. An entertaining cross-partisan panel of experienced political strategists. January 20 episode, reviewing and critiquing the launch events for Carney, Freeland, and Karina Gould.