The Decibel - Who will be the next Liberal leader?

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

The Liberal leadership race is on – and its biggest candidates are in. Former deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland, House Leader Karina Gould and former governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney all launched their campaigns this past week.The shortened leadership race will see the deeply unpopular party select Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s replacement as figures like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and U.S. President Donald Trump loom large.The Globe’s senior reporter Stephanie Levitz joins us from Ottawa. She’ll take us through the top contenders, the challenges ahead for the candidates and the choice the Liberal Party has to make ahead of a federal election – a leader who can rebuild, or one who can go toe-to-toe with Poilievre?Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The Liberal leadership race has begun, and its biggest players are in. My name is Krista Freeland. My name's Mark. My name is Karina Gould and I'm running to be the next leader of the Liberal Party. Krista Freeland, Karina Gould, and Mark Carney all launched their campaigns this past week. They'll have until early March to make their case to liberals across the country. It's a shortened leadership race. The party is deeply unpopular at the polls, and figures like Pierre Paliéve and Donald

Trump loom large. Today, Globe senior reporter Stephanie Levitz joins us from Ottawa. She'll take us through the top leadership contenders, the challenges ahead for the candidates, and the choice the party has to make ahead of a federal election. I'm Maynika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Stephanie, great to have you on the podcast for the first time. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Okay.

So we know that Mark Carney, Chris Dear Freeland and Karina Gould are all officially in the race. And let's start with Freeland actually, who launched her campaign from Toronto on Sunday. She's been a major player in the Liberal government for a while. I think we know her name right, former finance minister and deputy prime minister. So let's talk about that launch that she had on Sunday. How did it go? Well, you know, the entire thematics for her campaign might have been summed up in the entry music she chose to use, which was the song Maneater.

When you look at Krista Freeland's arc, say over the last month in particular, the way in which she quit Justin Trudeau's cabinet and soft launch probably at that moment, her bid for leadership, the main theme for her honor that he doesn't quite like her, saying that you know only she knows the nation's finances and the path forward that would both grow our economy while thwarting his advances to take over this economy. If you force our hand, we will inflict the biggest trade blow that the United States has ever endured. The campaign launch on Sunday was disrupted numerous times by protesters who were advocating against Ms. Freeland for the role she played with the Trudeau government's decisions it's been making along the way with regards to its Middle East policy. That slowed some momentum.

The speech dragged on. You could see some clips, you know, of kids hoovering back timbits to try and stay awake with the sugar. And so it undercut some of the momentum that she, I believe, was hoping she was building for over the last month and left a bit of a muddled message perhaps for her campaign in the end. Maybe it wasn't as smooth and as energetic as they had hoped it would be. Okay, and on that same day that Freeland launched her campaign, about an hour away in Burlington, Ontario, Carina Gould also launched her campaign. So she's the current leader of the House. She served alongside Trudeau and Freeland for a long time, but under a much lower profile. So can you just give us a sense, Stephanie, what do we know about Gould?

Who is she? So Karina Gould is 37 years old. She's a mother of two. She joined the ranks of very few female parliamentarians in recent memory who, you know, have been pregnant throughout their time on the front benches and Gone off on maternity leave and then come back to their jobs, which is a, you know, healthy sign I think of the demographics and Parliament changing because she's 37 She stands out from the other leading candidates and all the candidates really in that way

She's significantly younger than them like a generation younger than them And if you think about the Liberal Party, you know, their primary color is red, as people know. And if you think about the red as a spectrum of red, you might position Christoph Freeland and Mark Carney on the bluer red side of things, meaning that they're slightly more fiscally conservative in their outlook, perhaps in their comportment, perhaps in the policies they'll advance. Karina Gould would lean sort of sliding over to the ready orange side of the dial, much more progressive and in her outlook. She is a millennial liberal in that way and really represents a block of voters who

were not historically tied to the Liberal Party until Justin Trudeau came along, really made a play for that youth voter support. She was part of that, if you think about how old she is and when Justin Trudeau started rebuilding the Liberal Party in 20, you know, starting sort of in 2008 through to 2013. And so she will occupy in this race,

that progressive center. She will speak to that wing of the party in this race. Canadians have lost trust in our party. And if we are going to be able to keep building our country, we must rebuild our party. And how did her launch go? Pretty standard, right? I mean, you know, you hear you have someone at a restaurant surrounded by family, surrounded by friends, you know, trying to give off those vibes. She went off and did some podcasts after that, like definitely running in a way that is perhaps more grassroots in its flavor than what Christopher Feelin

and Mark Carney are trying to do, which is more of a big national splash, more celebrity-ish in their approaches. I also saw she put out like a two-minute video, right? Kind of giving her pitch to people across Canada. So yeah, a different approach than the other two that we saw. Yeah, a different energy. I mean, this race is so short that traditional methods

of campaigning won't be as available or as accessible to candidates. A lot of this may be fought over social and through videos getting messages out. And the liberals online authenticity has never quite been their strongest suit. Of the three, it could be Karina sort of again, from the generation that really grew up using these tools, as opposed to a generation who had to be taught

how to use them, might be able to build more of an organic campaign that way than say the other two. All right, let's talk about Mark Carney then. He announced his bid for leadership last Thursday. So a few days before the other two. And right, let's talk about Mark Carney then. He announced his bid for leadership last Thursday, so a few days before the other two. And his name has been thrown around a lot in the past few months,

but he's actually never held office, right? So can we get just a brief overview of who Mark Carney is? There's two kinds of Mark Carney's. There's the Mark Carney who introduced himself at his campaign launch as I'm Mark from Edmonton and I played hockey growing up and I'm the all Canadian boy, which is all true and factual. Mark Carney is an exceptionally accomplished individual who's been the governor of two banks, two central banks, both the Bank of Canada and the

Bank of England. He served as a position with the United Nations on sustainable climate financing. He has tried to lead the charge on integrating our capital markets and climate change and how those things could work together. He is the father of four children, multiple Ivy League graduate. You know, in his late 50s, he sort of represents a demographic and a generation of leadership in this country and who built a productive life of public service. Being the governor of a bank is public service in a very different way and with a very different arc than say Christopher Yellen, Karina Gould, or other career politicians. And how did his launch go? When he launched his leadership bid on Thursday, how did that process go? Mr. Carney, a couple of days prior to that, had done an interview on John Stewart, where he had come across as an affable, funny, whip-smart guy.

Let's say the candidate had a plan to deal with the challenges in the here and now. You sneaky! You're running as an outsider. I am an outsider. Tons of energy, lots of back and forth. It was a really like, you know, a lot of folks after that interview were like, oh, I didn't know he could do any of that, because they thought of him as a central banker,

and a central banker feels like a roll out of central casting like stiff upper lip kind of thing, right? Then he goes and does this launch where he tries to now become the consummate Canadian politician and it was a bit woodier. It was stiff. There were issues with his teleprompter. You had the sense that maybe he hadn't read his speech before he said it. So you know, he set up expectations probably very high with that Jon Stewart interview and they were tempered quite a bit by how things came across for him in Edmonton.

Hmm. Okay. So of course we've talked about kind of the three big names in this race. So Carney, Gould and Freeland, but they're not the only three in this race at the moment. So Stephanie, could you just give us a rundown of who else is currently in the ring for this? So there's three other folks as far as as we know, making a go of it. Their former Liberal MP Frank Bayless, he was a Quebec MP and now he's into health technologies. That's his company. And then you have two sitting MPs.

One of them is Nepean Liberal MP Chandra Arya. And the other is Nova Scotia Liberal MP Jaime Batiste. Jaime is super interesting because should he succeed in getting together the money and the signatures for his bid he would be the first indigenous candidate. He's Mi'kmaq, the first indigenous candidate running for leadership of the Liberal Party which is a powerful message of course for a party that has made reconciliation such a centerpiece of its agenda. So we'll see with those three whether they can pull together the required $350,000, get all the signatures they need to enter the race in earnest.

Yeah, as you mentioned, $350,000 to enter the race. That's actually a pretty steep amount, right? Usually leadership races aren't that high. Why is that? Parties set this figure so high for two reasons. I'll go with the less cynical one first, which is barred entry. If you set the leadership race entry fee too low, it makes it very easy for all sorts of candidates to enter the race. Perhaps they're running for a particular ideological reason. Perhaps they're trying to shake things up and be a rabble rouser. Perhaps they're just trying to get their name brand recognition out there for the next time. Setting a number that high really dissuades people. And some people would

argue unfairly dissuades them. It means it's only exclusive to rich people. But let's not forget, that's not $350,000 out of the candidates own pocket. They have to raise the lion's share of that money. They can donate a bit to themselves, but most of it comes from donors. The other reason you might set that kind of figure as it is, the party needs money. This is money that goes directly to the party to run the leadership race. For the liberals who have been falling behind the conservatives, say, in fundraising for years now, they don't have a ton of money. They were already trying to build a war chest to run the next election campaign.

Can we just take a second here, Stephanie, and talk about the names not on the ticket here? Were there any surprises when it came to people who actually decided not to run who people thought they might have? There were three big names I would say that folks were looking at thinking they would mount a leadership bid. One of them was Dominic LeBlanc who became finance minister after Christopher Eland quit. Longtime liberal, very close friend of Justin Trudeau seen as a very steady hand in that party. You know the guy who went down with Trudeau to Mar-a-Lago to sit with Trump, because he

could glad hand the boys in the back room. That's very much the vibe Dominic LeBlanc gives off. And then you had Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Jolie, who has long been understood to be interested in leadership. And she alluded to that when she made the decision not to run. The third was Francois-Philippe Champagne, currently the Innovation Minister. Again, long rumored to be interested in leadership. Some of that are direct tie to the fact that he's from Chouinigan, the home of former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. They were seen sort of as allied in that respect. And he too bowed out, as did,

I should say, Dominique LeBlanc, the three of them saying the same thing. Their jobs in cabinet right now, the chance to help Canada, at least in the early days, whether the storm of the incoming Trump presidency for them, was the thing they wanted to do now more than run in a leadership race and potentially be prime minister. We'll be back in a moment. So of course, this leadership race isn't actually up to the country. It's not up to ordinary Canadians, right? This is up to other liberals. So what kind of response has there been amongst liberals so far to this leadership campaign?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, right? And people in our in our election system, they think when they go to the polls on election day, that's when they're voting for the Prime Minister But in reality the moment in which people can choose who might be the next Prime Minister of the country is in a leadership race Because when the party makes that decision about who the next leader will be well That's the next Prime Minister potentially right in the case of this race absolutely the next Prime Minister Yeah, and so the liberals are an interesting party because when Justin Trudeau took over, I guess it's about 12 years ago now, they really changed the rules of the party and who the members

could be. They did away with paid membership. They changed the structure of how you actually are a member of the party. And I bring that all up to say that the liberal party in contrast with the conservatives or the new Democrats is not this organized political apparatus. It's a much more fluid base of people. And it'll be interesting to see because of the short length of this race, there's two things that will happen at the same time. Candidates absolutely have to go sign up and register new supporters who will vote for them in the contest. And those supporters

will be aligned behind a particular leadership candidate. Then you have the existing base of the party and that probably manifests itself best in looking at the members of parliament because they are the heads of those writing associations. And so getting a sense when you ask the question, okay, what does the party think? Well, what do the members of parliament think? Where are they lining up right now? Who's endorsing who? And you're seeing those numbers kind of fall into place. Krista Freeland has a bunch of cabinet minister endorsements behind her, a bunch of MPs are coming behind her. But you know, the other day, a big development

was Melanie Jolie, who decided that she was going to endorse Mark Carney, she brings with her a lot of grassroots organizational support. So you can say, okay, well, there's a wing of the grassroots now that clearly appears to be in favor of Mark Carney. But because the candidates have room to sign up new members, they have a deadline. I think it's about, you know, the 27th of January. That's the cutoff to get new registered support.

How many members they sign up will be really interesting. And the other thing that's important to note, we don't actually know how many registered liberals currently exist. The party hasn't released a number. We don't know what their membership roles currently look like like or how many people will be eligible to vote in this contest. And over the past year we've learned a lot about foreign interference because we had that public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada and we learned that nomination races and party memberships are particularly vulnerable to this. So how have the Liberals addressed that?

The issue here was nomination races and in particular who is eligible to vote in a nomination contest and therefore who is eligible to be a member of a political party. So for the Liberals they have the, they had, I should say past tense, the widest possible view of that, which is to say that you had to be over the age of 14 and ordinarily reside in Canada. That was it. You did not have to be a permanent resident. You did not have to be a citizen of this country. They argued that that helped create a pipeline of if you come to this country, you're not

yet a permanent resident, you're not yet a citizen, but you want to engage in politics. It gave you a way to do that, engage in your country, build future voters. The issue, as was identified in the Foreign Interference Inquiry, is that left the process open to manipulation by nefarious state actors who could weaponize members of their diaspora communities to go vote in nomination races by threatening them, by saying, if you don't go and vote

in this nomination race for this candidate, I'll make it so that your family back home suffers, or or all see that your student visa gets revoked. That's that's terrifying stuff and there was evidence put before the Hogue inquiry that that was in fact the case in a nomination contest for the Liberal Party. So there was a lot of pressure on the Liberals to change their membership rules and the irony here is throughout the course of the Hogue inquiry again and again and again the party insisted there was nothing wrong with the rules and so the party has now changed its rules about who can register as a liberal, become a liberal party member. They have to be a permanent resident

or a Canadian citizen or have status as an Indigenous person before they cast the ballot and that was widely seen as an acknowledgement that maybe the pre-existing set of rules were, in the words of the Hogue Commission, a gateway for foreign interference. Wow. All right. Let's talk a little bit about strategy here, Stephanie. I want to focus on Freeland and Gould for a minute because both of them have worked very closely with Prime Minister Trudeau over the years, and he is not a particularly popular figure, to say the least at this moment. So how are they distancing themselves from him?

It's an interesting question and one that will become more salient as their campaigns roll on. I mean, Krista Freeland, when asked versions of this question at her campaign launch and also throughout her speech, kept pointing to that letter, kept pointing to the moment that she quit, kept saying that there had been disagreements for months. And she used a line that perhaps we'll hear a lot about,

which is democracy is about being responsive. So it's acknowledging when the path you had chosen as an elected official is no longer the path the vast majority of canadians want you to take you pivot. That's a fair argument that's a way in which perhaps she can distance herself from true to say that i believe we were doing the right thing but the conditions conditions on the ground change. I thought we should change. He wouldn't listen. That's a path you're going to hear her take. I think more tangibly what you're going to hear is things from her and also from Carina Gould on issues like the consumer price on carbon, which suddenly became the third rail of Canadian politics where opposition parties, the conservatives in particular, were really

using it as a proof point that the Liberal Party was out of touch, that this price was leading to increased inflationary pressures. That's not entirely factually accurate, but politically it worked. And so far we've seen, you know, even in the early days of these campaigns, Christopher Fielen heavily signaling she will back away entirely from the consumer price on carbon. Carina Gould saying that she is going to, it was set to go up in a number of months, she is going to at least hold it steady there. So they will find policy points where they can differentiate themselves from the record of Justin Trudeau.

But let's also recall that's a record that will matter in the general election. It sort of remains to be seen if that's what the liberal party wants. Like, do they want distance from the Trudeau policy regime, or is it just they don't want Trudeau? Interesting. Because he was such a became such a polarizing figure within the party. But it's worth noting that for the liberals, their polling numbers seem to have hit a floor like and that have not gone below that floor. So that floor can be understood to represent the

base of the party. Those are the people who will vote liberal no matter what. They are wedded. So if in a leadership race, you're trying to get to that base and that base has yet to abandon Justin Trudeau, well, how far do you go to distance yourself from Justin Trudeau in a leadership race? And that's why this leadership race is interesting, because even though it is a leadership race for the members of the party, as you said, it's all of Canada watching this, trying to determine, would I vote for this person in the next general election, even if I'm not going to engage

in the leadership race right now? So on the flip side, Mark Carney is, of course, painting himself as an outsider, right? So is there a sense that that lack of political experience, could that actually help him here? It helps him because he's just not tied to any of the experience, could that actually help him here? It helps him because he's just not tied to any of the record, right? It helps him because when he was governor of the Bank of Canada, he was appointed by

former conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and it seemed like the two did pretty well getting along with each other. So if you're a Liberal Party member, you're looking for maybe that more centrist fiscally responsible perspective, you can look at him and say, well, he did all right. He, however, will be beset by the problem of, well, if you were so good, how come this is the first we're ever hearing from you? Where have you been for us lately? We offered to bring you into the government numerous times. You kept saying, no, you wouldn't run for a seat. So there's a bit of a perspective within the liberal party that maybe Mr. Carney is a fence-sitter and only chose

to enter this element of public life when it seemed to suit him the best as opposed to what might have been best for the party or for the country. Of course, whoever wins this leadership race will very soon, sometime in the next few months, be going up against conservative leader Pierre Poliev in the general election this year. So how is Poliev, I guess, influencing this leadership race? Like, is there a sense that the liberals are going to be choosing the best leader specifically to go up against him? That will be part of the question liberals are going to have to ask themselves, right? What's the ballot box question in this liberal leadership

contest? Is it I think this person is best placed to beat Pierre Poliev or if not beat, at least, you know, in political problems, save the furniture, make it so that the liberals are not reduced to a tiny little rump in the House of Commons. Is it, no, I want someone, I will acknowledge that the political winds have shifted now, this is a change narrative we're up against. So what I'm looking for is someone who's willing to play the long game, we'll stick it out, we'll help rebuild the party, reset us, figure out what it means to be a liberal today.

The fact that the three leading candidates, though, are backing away from the consumer carbon price in some degree or another, that's Pierre Poliak. Oftentimes when a political party is in a leadership race, the other parties back off. This is for party members to decide, we're not necessarily going to engage, we'll wait to see who is elected, and then we will comment. Peer Polyeth's conservatives are clearly not doing that. They're already out against Freeland, Ms. Gould and Carney. Carbon tax this, carbon tax that.

They have a great ad campaign that they think is great, just like Justin. They're already working to brand them knowing that time is short. And the converse effect of that perhaps will be liberal party members and voters in this leadership race looking at those attack ads, right? Seeing them and thinking, oh God, yeah, okay, maybe Freeland's not going to work out or maybe Carney's not the right play. They will be influenced by those attack ads in the same way a general electorate voter might be too. Of course, the conservatives are expected to win the election later this year based on

the polls that we've been seeing for months now. I guess I wonder, is there a chance that whoever wins the liberal leadership race and then loses the general election, could they be quickly replaced as leader or is the party kind of likely to keep them around for the long run? Do we have a sense of that? It's an excellent question and it's a question, you know, that the candidates have yet to answer as well. Would they stay? Right? It's worth noting, as we have learned through this process of with Mr. Trudeau, the party itself has no mechanism by which to remove a leader. In this instance, if they were to lose the general election, they could face the membership at the party's next convention and have to have a vote of confidence in their membership. So it will be, you know, what is the metric of success

for the Liberal Party come the next election? As I alluded to earlier, like is the metric of success holding onto government? Well, if that's the metric, that's gonna be exceptionally difficult. If the metric of success is holding Pierre Pauli up to a minority, is it retaining a certain number of seats in the House of Commons?

Is it just simply retaining official party status in the House of Commons? Once upon the time retaining official party status in the House of Commons? Once upon the time, the liberals didn't even have that. So it'll be up to voters in that race to articulate or at least make up their minds. And I also think it'll be up to the leadership candidates to answer that question. Are they willing to stick around?

I mean, at his campaign launch, Mark Carney wouldn't even say where he was gonna run for a seat and how quickly he would seek one. He could be elected leader of the Liberal Party without a seat in the House of Commons. So how committed are all of these folks to playing the long game that might be required here is a question they will likely be forced to answer before this is all said and done. So before I let you go Stephanie, going forward, what are the next important dates to look out for in this leadership race? So there's a few. January the 23rd is when the candidates

have to pay the first installment of the deposit and also show that they have enough signatures in support of their bid. That'll be a turning point moment. You have various other dates for the payment of the deposit. March 9th, of course, is the big day. March 9th is the day that Liberal Party members

will elect their next leader. They use a preferential ballot. That's worth noting too. So it's not one member, one vote. It'll take some time for the winner to be known. So that's really the day we're all looking towards here in Ottawa. And I'm sure elsewhere in the country as we wait and see what happens. Stephanie, so great to talk to you.

Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramen-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.