Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt
Mark Carney was presented back in June with two “emotional support chickens” — the creation of an Edmonton Oilers fan and crochet artist to help fans of the hockey team deal with playoff stress.
“They give you something to hold onto while you’re trying to make it through overtime without having a heart attack,” said Ashley Sinclair, the creator, who admitted to being “gobsmacked” when she saw photos of Carney tossing around the chickens.
The Edmonton Oilers aren’t anywhere near the Stanley Cup yet, but Carney may want to haul the chickens out again to help get him through the next four to six weeks. Though the prime minister would likely say that nothing in his job has been easy since he took it on this year, this next month is throwing him into multiple games of chicken.
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Presiding over a minority Parliament always brings its share of chicken games, but the Nov. 4 budget is looming and Carney is holding meetings with opposition leaders this week, looking for the handful of votes the Liberals need to get it passed.
It’s a confidence vote, so the stakes are high for all the parties, who have to stare down the prospect of throwing the country into another election. Think that can’t happen so soon after the last one? That’s what Joe Clark and his Progressive Conservatives thought too in 1979, when their budget crashed and Canada turned around and put Liberals back in power in early 1980.
Some might argue that it wouldn’t be the worst thing for Carney if he had to go back to the polls, but the latest Abacus survey, shared with the Star on Thursday, shows Conservatives and Liberals in a dead heat — 40 per cent support for Pierre Poilievre’s team, 41 per cent for Carney’s.
Abacus CEO David Coletto says some of the underlying data in this latest poll shows positive perceptions of Carney are starting to shift. (The poll was conducted online among 1,504 Canadians over the past week, and while margin of error can’t be calculated for this type of survey, a similar size survey would be considered accurate within 2.53 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
What it means is that no one is likely looking for an election, least of all the New Democratic Party, with just seven seats, still in slumping poll support and just getting a leadership campaign under way.
Carney met with interim NDP leader Don Davies on Wednesday and judging from Davies’s statement in the Commons on Thursday, some hard lines were set down. “Now is not the time for an austerity budget,” Davies said. “Canada needs investment, not cuts. That means building infrastructure to strengthen communities, affordable, non-market homes, clean energy and a strong public health care system. These are the kind of nation building projects New Democrats support.”
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Meanwhile, though, those nation-building projects are quickly evolving into another game of chicken. Carney has said to expect another round of announcements around the Grey Cup, which comes mid-November. (Sorry for all the sports references here, but that’s how things roll in Ottawa these days.)
As my colleague Althia Raj wrote this week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith stepped up the pressure on Carney with her proposal for a new bitumen pipeline to be built to the British Columbia coast — an idea that will run up against resistance in B.C. She made it very clear that she was daring Carney to turn her down. “This is a test of whether Canada works as a country,” Smith said.
As Raj reported, citing several caucus sources, Carney played down the prospect of a pipeline when he met with MPs on Wednesday. Little wonder — he does not need to play yet another game of chicken with the nervous environmentalists in his own ranks.
Of course there’s someone else out there who keeps wanting to test whether Canada works as a country, and that’s Donald Trump. Just this week, the U.S. president was talking about his Golden Dome missile defence dream and said Canada wanted to be part of it. “To which I said, well, why don’t you just join our country? Become 51, become the 51st state and you get it for free.”
Premier Doug Ford said the comment drove him crazy. Trump didn’t elaborate on who had called him about the Golden Dome — whether it was Carney himself, for instance. If so, what does Carney say when Trump brings this up? Does he shake his head and say, “Never, never,” as he did at the White House earlier this year?
The trade talks with the U.S. aren’t building to the same looming deadlines as the budget and the major-projects test imposed by Smith. But Trump is always looking for someone to blink.
Carney may need a few more of those emotional support chickens.
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