Christy Clark crashes and burns

Christy Clark almost certainly won’t win the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, but at least she’s already made some history: never before has a candidate so quickly and thoroughly torched their own credibility as she did last week. 

In a recent interview with the CBC’s Catherine Cullen, she claimed the mantle of a “lifelong Liberal” — and denied ever having taken out a membership in the Conservative Party of Canada. Alas, Cullen had the receipts on it, as did any number of Conservatives. Those receipts included a video in which Clark explained her decision to, as she put it, “join the party” to support Jean Charest in his 2022 campaign for the leadership. “Well, I misspoke,” she wrote on social media afterwards. “Sh*t happens.”

Oh, indeed. 

Clark, the former B.C. premier under the now-defunct right-of-centre BC Liberal Party, was already a weak candidate by any conventional measure. Her French is laughably bad, and would be immediately exposed in the French-language leaders’ debate. It’s reasonable to assume the Liberals would lose most, if not all, of their Quebec seats under Clark. 

It’s not clear they’d do much better nationally, either. In an October survey the Angus Reid Institute found that among the field of potential contenders Clark was by far the most unpopular for current and Liberal-curious voters. In fact, she was the only candidate who was a net-negative among all three groups the pollster tested: current supporters, “definite” considerers, and “might” considerers. More recently, in a Nanos poll that asked respondents who the most appealing Liberal leadership candidate was, Clark finished last at four per cent — behind, it should be noted, Mark Carney at 14 per cent, Chrystia Freeland at 19 per cent, and “none of the above” at 22 per cent. Even in BC, where she’s supposed to be strongest, she still trails Carney and Freeland (and, yes, “none of the above”) by upwards of 10 points.

 A big part of this, I suspect, is her well-documented drift to the right. She started off as a loyal Jean Chretien Liberal before joining the internal party coup against him. She then ran (and won) for the BC Liberals — the province’s de-facto Conservative party — in 2002, then did a brief stint as an open-line radio host before returning to provincial politics and winning the leadership of her party in 2011. As Conservative strategist Garry Keller noted on social media, she attended the subsequent year’s Manning Centre conference — not exactly a Liberal hotbed — and tried to rebrand herself as “the Iron Snowbird,” an obvious reference to Margaret Thatcher. 

But if there’s a clearly disqualifying feature of her candidacy, over and above the obvious opportunism and lack of public support, it has to be her attitude towards climate change. The Liberals may have fatally undermined their own signature climate policy with sloppy politicking, as I’ve written repeatedly, but it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped believing in the issue or its importance. 

Clark, in contrast, has always sought to pour water in her climate wine. As premier, she froze the province’s carbon price in 2013 and never once increased it after that. She began loudly championing LNG exports as a climate solution and alligator-armed most of the other climate commitments made by Gordon Campbell. As the Pembina Institute’s Stephen Hui wrote in 2016, “since taking over the premier’s office in 2011, Clark’s lack of action on the climate file has taken the province in the wrong direction.”

Ironically (or, perhaps, appropriately) Clark suddenly became very interested in climate policy in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 BC election, when the Green Party held the balance of power in an ultra-tight minority parliament. In her so-called “clone” speech, read by B.C. 's Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon, Clark made 30 pledges that were absent from her Liberal Party’s platform. As David Moscrop noted in a piece for Maclean’s, those promises included “more than a dozen lifted from the platforms of the likely-to-govern-soon New Democrats and their Green Party backers.” 

When her last-ditch attempt to hold onto power failed, she returned to her previous political trajectory. Indeed, since leaving office her rhetoric around climate policy has become indistinguishable from your garden-variety federal Conservative. In a 2022 podcast appearance, for example, she suggested that the Trudeau government was "stomping on the heart of Alberta and western Canada" with its climate policies. In a 2024 appearance on the Arc Energy Institute’s podcast, she gave Stephen Harper the credit for the TMX pipeline.

It’s easy to make the case that Liberals should return to their Chretien-era moorings, ones that kept the party tethered much more closely to things like fiscal responsibility and economic growth. That’s one that both Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland, the two obvious front-runners here, will make. But the next leader also can’t sail too far away from the Trudeau government’s commitment to ambitious climate policy, no matter how much someone like Clark might want to try. Perhaps the “Iron Snowbird” can take a shot at the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership the next time it opens up.