Mark Carney Is on the Verge of a Big Election Win

TORONTO — Danielle Martin was going door to door meeting voters when a woman, newly released from the hospital, really wanted to show off her stitches.

“I said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t feel like that would be appropriate,’” Martin, a high-profile family doctor-turned-Liberal candidate, recalled with a laugh. “I’m not sure my insurance covers that.”

Martin became Canadian famous after defending the country’s health care system before a U.S. Senate committee a dozen years ago. Now, she’s bringing a health lens to some of the biggest challenges facing the country — “housing is a health issue, the economy is a health issue” — as she runs for office under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal banner to fill a downtown Toronto seat that could prove pivotal for Carney.

Voters will hit the polls Monday in three by-election parliamentary races — contests to fill mid-term vacancies in the House of Commons — and winning just one would turn Carney’s minority government into a slim majority. That would give him some real breathing room to enact his agenda and would secure his grip on power until at least 2029, when the next national election could be held.

It’s the latest turn in a remarkable trajectory for Carney. Until a year ago, he was a political neophyte. He had a sterling economic resume and international contacts to match, but he had never run for office. Then Donald Trump started mouthing off about annexing Canada and imposing tariffs — pissing off Canadians, accelerating the end of the Justin Trudeau era and vaulting Carney into a stunning election victory over a collapsing Conservative Party.

Carney has since proved fairly adept in domestic politics, helping to poach a handful of lawmakers from both Conservative and farther-left New Democrat benches. More are reportedly toying with the idea of joining Carney’s Liberals as Canadians continue to sour on Trump’s America.

Trump is also partly responsible for Martin’s decision to run. Liberals had previously tried to recruit her a few times before when the party was tied to Trudeau’s falling star. But the timing never worked out, she said in an interview, citing a mix of factors including a yearning to stay in medicine and having a young daughter home at the time. Then a seat came open when top Trudeau deputy Chrystia Freeland quit his Cabinet amid no confidence he could take on Trump’s “aggressive economic nationalism.” The 49-year-old Martin decided now was the time.

Martin has made boosting a Carney agenda and standing up to Trump key parts of her pitch on the trail.

“We are at a critical moment in this country, and that not just our economy and not just our sovereignty — although that would be enough — but also our values are under threat,” Martin said at her campaign kickoff last month. “That’s why I’m here. I’m here to leave it all on the field.”

Exactly what Carney’s agenda entails, however, is still somewhat unclear. He’s won plaudits on the world stage, but is facing rising concern at home about the cost of living. He’s still fleshing out his policies on a host of issues, including a promised artificial intelligence strategy and health care gaps to meet the needs of an aging population. Meanwhile, simmering separatist movements in Quebec and Alberta also pose threats to national unity.

If polls are correct, Martin and Carney’s Liberals are positioned for victory on Monday. The hard part may come after.

These three elections are the first since Carney made his blockbuster speech at Davos earlier this year, when he called for the world’s middle powers to band together to forge a New World Order. It’s a vision now being tested on the ground in Canada’s biggest city, where the public may care more about their own personal finances than Carney’s geopolitical ambitions.

Two seats here are up for grabs: Martin is vying to keep the downtown Toronto riding of University-Rosedale in Liberal hands, while Doly Begum is striving to do the same in Scarborough-Southwest in the city’s east end after former Cabinet minister Bill Blair was given the top diplomatic post in London. (The third is taking place in the Montreal suburb of Terrebonne after Canada’s top court annulled the Liberals’ one-vote win, forcing a new election.)

Both Toronto ridings are considered safe Liberal seats in one of the world’s most multicultural cities, where more than half of its residents were born outside of Canada. Begum herself was born in Bangladesh and immigrated to Toronto with her family when she was a kid.

Begum is something of a celebrity in her riding. For the last eight years, she has served there as deputy leader of the provincial New Democratic Party, before deciding in February to run for higher, federal office with the Liberals in the by-election, bringing her reputation as an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate with her to Carney’s increasingly big tent party.

While chatting with her outside on a residential street of detached and semi-detached homes, someone swung their front door open and cried out to her in Bengali, “I thought I heard your voice.” She hadn’t even knocked on the door.

Another man asked Begum to wait while he got his wife so they could meet. His wife emerged from her house and embraced the 37-year-old politician. The cold kept their sidewalk chat short, ending with an “Inshallah” — wishing Begum luck to continue representing them, as did many other residents as she walked through the neighborhood.

News that Begum had switched parties made a brief sensation, and was another nod to Carney’s wide appeal on the right and left. She said the decision was a long time coming.

“It made sense,” said Begum, sitting at the back of her campaign office, which used to be a Newfoundland bar in a plaza nestled in the east end of the city. Balloons in the Liberals’ red and white colors hung on the wall, taped above a map of the riding where 62 percent of its residents are visible minorities, according to Statistics Canada, with South Asian, Black and Filipino communities among the biggest.

“It’s not just going from one party to another,” she said. “It was also moving from provincial politics to federal politics, and the opportunity to do more for the riding.”

Many in Scarborough-Southwest have long struggled to get by. The average income hovers just above C$49,000, below the C$84,000 city average. And lately, Begum said, affordability has come up as the top concern among residents when she meets them at their doors. It’s even become more frequent than Trump’s tariff threats to the Canadian economy.

While Trump and the spectacle of U.S. politics do come up, it’s pocketbook issues that are driving people’s day-to-day decisions, and anxieties. A dozen eggs cost C$3.28 in 2018. Today it’s C$4.81, according to federal data tracking monthly retail prices. In the same period, the cost per kilogram of whole chicken has jumped from C$5.62 to C$8.57. The cost of beef has risen roughly 60 percent.

“Now you’ll hear people talk about not being able to afford groceries so much more than ever before,” Begum said. “That was not a conversation that I would have in 2018. There were those conversations — but not as many.”

The emergence of affordability as a major issue for Canadians presents a challenge to Carney — a guy who voters believed would not only be best fit to handle Trump, but whose financial acumen as a former central banker of two G7 economies uniquely qualified him to find ways to jumpstart a lagging economy.

So far, he has made only modest progress. Notably, Trump’s tariffs on Canadian-made steel, aluminum, copper, softwood lumber and autos continue to weigh on the economy and the public. Carney had promised to secure a new bilateral trade deal with the U.S. by July 2025, but it has yet to happen.

Still, Carney continues to hold a significant lead over rivals with49-percent support over Conservatives’ 35 percent, according to a Leger poll last month. One reason Canadians may be patient on that front is they’re less eager in general to work with an increasingly belligerent White House pursuing its “America First” foreign policy. Fifty-five percent of Canadians now believe the end of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement wouldn’t be so bad for Canada — though that isn’t a sentiment shared by the country’s business leaders.

Appeasing both the business elite and regular Canadians could be difficult for Carney, whose Davos Man reputation can come off as a superpower or a liability. Does the master of finance also realize that the rising cost of gas is eating away at his citizens’ grocery budgets?

Carney, of course, would say yes. And he has expressed his impatience and desire to move his agenda along faster, in part out of hopes of strengthening the economy and putting more money into people’s pockets.

If he comes out of the by-elections victorious, he will be better positioned to do so. A majority mandate would allow the government to change some rules of the House of Commons to take more control of parliamentary committees and expedite votes on legislation. A Cabinet shuffle could also be called in short order to swap out any dead weight for the kinds of ministers who would help Carney advance his agenda. (Some policy analysts like Howard Sapers have described proposals that push for an erosion of parliamentary democracy and centralization of power as having “a certain authoritarian tinge.”) Carney may also struggle to manage his big tent majority at times; Marilyn Gladu’s stunning defection from Conservatives means the Liberals are now making room for social conservatives in their caucus — a shift that has irritated leftists at the grassroots level.

Meanwhile, Trump still looms.

The prime minister routinely mocks reporters’ questions about his relationship with the president and the frequency of their informal and formal communication. For all their jousting, Carney and Trump have developed a friendly rapport, solidified by regular texts to each other.

“[Trump’s] more interested in your viewpoint on various things in private — and that creates an ability to work, work through things,” Carney told the Lowy Institute last month. His message: trust the process.

Canadians seem to get it, at least for now. Martin said at one point that when voters air their grievances about Carney to her or say he’s bungling a certain issue, they also recognize he’s in a particularly tough job in a difficult time.

“He’s able to handle complexity,” Martin said. “And, it turns out, so are Canadians.”