Carney's Version

Canada is at a crossroads. We are just days away from deciding which irreversible course our country will choose. Will we follow the growing authoritarian movement, willing to trample on constitutional, civil, and democratic rights? Or will we lead a new coalition of strengthening democracies prepared to fight, to the death if necessary, for the rule of law?

While our country is facing an existential threat from a key ally who has become a pariah state, former Ezra Levant spokesman Pierre Poilievre believes the most important issue, the one that the country must resolve Monday, is whether we should be using disposable plastic straws in our disposable sugar drinks.

The Conservative solution to asserting our independence and rebuilding our military to protect us, in a new international order where the most powerful nations no longer even pretend to respect international boundaries, sovereignty, or the rule of law, is to give us back plastic straws.

The United States wants our natural resources. They want our metals, our minerals, our oil. They want the water we drink, and the water we preserve. It is not clear how Pierre plans to respond; perhaps his solution is to build a great big plastic straw from Great Bear Lake through Great Slave Lake to the Great Big Faucet on the Canada-US border.

That this shallow circus clown, intent on selling out our country to the fascists next door, is a contender for Prime Minister is a national embarrassment. Even more so when contrasted with the alternative on offer.

Mark Carney is not flashy. He doesn’t chase headlines. He doesn’t seem to spend a lot of his mental energy worrying about optics or his public image. He won’t waste a lot of time or energy worrying about peoples’ egos. He’s a problem solver, used to working behind the scenes to great effect. In short, he’s that rarest of commodities in our national politics: he’s an adult.

Make no mistake. Canada is in a fight for its very survival as an independent nation.

While the Conservatives cut our military spending to the lowest it has been in generations, Mark Carney is offering a plan to rapidly reinvest in and rebuild our armed forces. He’s upgrading Canada’s air defence window. He’s officially reconsidering the F-35 in favour of aircraft from actual allies.

While the American dictator threatens the world with random AI-generated tariffs aimed to upend the world economy, it was Carney who went to Europe to organise a worldwide response that forced the Mar-a-Lago Buffoon to back down. He didn’t publish his strategy. He didn’t brag about it. He didn’t even really talk about it in public. He just did it; in coordination with key allies, he threatened the United States bond market in a way that would quickly tank the US dollar. When it comes to playing the game of economic chess, he’s our grandmaster.

“We can give ourselves far more than Donald Trump can take away,” Carney declared during last week’s English-language debate. This is the attitude of someone who sees the country as a land of opportunity, not a culmination of failure — as a work in progress rather than a broken country.

In Carney’s version of Canada, we are some 40 million people across nearly 10 million square kilometres that share core fundamental values and have the knowledge and resources to accomplish anything we set out to. We have been galvanised by an expansionist dictator in the United States who sees what we have and wants it. Like so many dictators before him, Trump sees everything in terms of how it benefits himself. Faced with this threat, Canadians are coming together in ways we have not seen since the last world war, and Carney is offering a vision of how to put it all together to place Canada as a leader of the democratic world.

In Poilievre’s version of Canada, we are, at best, a vassal state of the United States whose only means of survival is the firesale of our natural resources. Poilievre, who offers Canadians neither a properly costed election platform nor any reassurance that he is not a compromised foreign asset, sees Canada as a broken country, not worthy of investment or improvement.

The key difference between Carney and Poilievre is that one believes in Canada, and one does not. In this election, a Poilievre win would be Canada’s last straw.