Carney speaks human, Freeland speaks expert in the battle of the technocrats

Mark Carney is running for leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister of Canada, putting to rest years of speculation and the joke uttered whenever the government made a decision: “What does this mean for Mark Carney?” He’ll be up against erstwhile finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, who was a Trudeau stalwart almost to the bitter end.

There are other contenders including long-time Cabinet minister Karina Gould and two other members of Parliament, Jaime Battiste and Chandra Arya, but the odds-on favourites in the race are Carney and Freeland. They’ll be locked in a battle over who can connect quickly with voters, and the early advantage goes to Carney — with a caveat or two. 

It’s a shame that we’re often stuck reducing politics to aesthetics, but we are. Most people aren’t policy experts and spend their days in other ways, living their lives without worry about the minutiae of this or that issue. When it comes time to make a political decision, like who to back in an election, they use mental shortcuts to make decisions. One popular shortcut is likeability, an emotional connection that draws one person to another or repels them. And part of that is whether the politician in question can speak human. 

Chrystia Freeland is a competent and capable politician. Like Carney, she’s a technocrat who knows files inside and out and believes there are technical solutions driven by expertise that can solve Canada’s problems. But she also speaks like an expert and technocrat. When she tries to leave that terrain, things get dicey. 

In the spring of 2023, she tried to relate to people struggling through the cost of living crisis, likening cutting a Disney+ subscription to how she approached managing government finances. That analogy was taken out of context and weaponized in subsequent attacks on her. She was painted as an elite, entitled insider for whom ten bucks a month or so is a rounding error on a rounding error.

Suffice to say, her attempt to relate to ordinary Canadians didn’t go well. It’s unfair, but politics is unfair. To win, you’ve got to minimize the chances that your opponent can make an unfair attack stick to you. She’s going to have a hard time doing that in the weeks to come as opponents within the party and outside it tie her to the status quo and every problem plaguing the country. She’ll have a hard time talking her way out of that.

Mark Carney, on the other hand, is surprisingly smooth and even funny. Carney’s campaign soft-launch on the Daily Show revealed a more affable man with a sense of humour. It turns out the guy — a two-time head of a national central bank — has a bit of charisma. An early poll from Leger has him ahead of Freeland by six per cent.

But Carney, who is working to cast himself as an outsider, has two fundamental weaknesses. One, he’s thoroughly an elite — a central banker, the chair of an asset management firm, an advisor to both the Liberal Party and the UN. For many, that CV will read as about as insider as it gets, even if he hasn’t been previously elected to political office. He also has his own aesthetic liability: he speaks in platitudes and clichés.

Over time, people see through them.

In a late-December op-ed for the Globe and Mail, Carney wrote “These are not easy times. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves that there are quick fixes. But Canadians don’t shrink from challenges — we face them head on. With the right resolutions, we can build the future we want, and the future our kids and grandkids deserve.”

That’s the kind of thing I tell myself in January before I’m eating three Snickers bars a day in February.

Carney’s op-ed was about as platitudinous as it gets. He suggests Canada’s future rests with resolutions to “Stand up for Canada,” “Play as a team” and “Embrace change.” He might as well have said we must “give 110 percent” or “leave it all on the ice.” He added some more pabulum before hitting the mother of them all: “Bring the Stanley Cup back home to Canada, where it belongs.”

Speaking human is one thing, communicating in an accessible way to those you seek to govern. That’s good. But if you’re not careful, that accessibility becomes patronizing, insincere, and unserious. People see through it, because though they may not be experts in politics, they aren’t stupid. We all know when we’re being talked down to.

In the short run, Carney might be able to out-talk Freeland, connecting with Liberal voters, relying on an avuncular, dad-out-for-a-canal-skate posture. He might win the leadership and become prime minister, for a short time anyway. But against Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, and facing the entire country, not just Liberal voters, the kindly everyman bit risks wearing thin fast, particularly at a time when the country is in a less than cheerful mood.

As a politician, speaking like a human doesn’t mean executing small talk about the weather or your favourite hockey team’s chances this year. It means saying true things in a way that resonates with those you would be elected to serve, and offering solutions to their problems that sound credible and sincere (a practice Poilievre has mastered, even if his “solutions” are unlikely to solve Canada’s problems). And while Carney might get closer to the mark than Freeland, eventually people will catch on to the bit — and tire of it. Fast.