Introducing Chaos Campaign

A dedicated newsletter for the craziest election campaign Canada has ever seen

Tomorrow, Mark Carney will be sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister.

At the end of 2024, Carney had never even held elected office. But after decisively winning a speed run of a leadership campaign, he is set to take the reins of a G7 economy. And he couldn’t have picked a more unpredictable and tumultuous time.

Canada has a housing crisis, a healthcare shortage, an endemic productivity problem — and its government has a delivery problem. There is a land war in Europe, a fragile peace in the Middle East, the looming possibility of invasion in Taiwan, and a declining ability for the liberal world to address these problems. Everybody has a disembodied humanoid in their pocket with ability to regurgitate nearly any piece of humanity’s collective knowledge in a matter of seconds, which sometimes even gets things right, and nobody is quite sure what to do with it. Climate change is still threatening to make the planet uninhabitable in the medium term, and is already causing pain and turmoil right now.

Oh, and by the way, our neighbour keeps threatening to annex us.

He may be prime minister, but Carney will need a mandate. That means Canadians are likely going to head to the polls in a massively consequential election — which, hopefully, won’t be our last.

So, from now until election day, Chaos Campaign will become a running journal of the campaign — the policies, the promises, the scandals, the politicians, the scrums, the debates, and the chaos.

This newsletter will be a looser, quicker, and more frequent newsletter than Bug-eyed and Shameless, so it will be arriving in your inbox separately.

Sometime in the next two weeks, we expect Mark Carney to visit the Governor General and trigger a snap election. When he does, he’ll be hitting the hustings in competition with six people who, just a few weeks ago, saw their own political success in the entrails of Carney’s Liberal Party.

There is Maxime Bernier, the populist conspiracy-monger who has turned the People’s Party he founded into a cult of personality around his own brand of gullible paranoia. He has now tried four times to mount a return to Parliament — failing each time. Can he succeed in retaking his old riding of Beauce? Or will his loser streak continue?

There is Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault, the first party leaders to try and tag-team their way into the House of Commons. Their odds seem long: The Green Party has grown increasingly marginalized as Canada has been hit by a series of non-climate related crises, and a mounting anti-carbon tax consensus seems to suggest that Canadians are putting decarbonization on the back-burner. Still, the Greens are trying to orchestrate non-compete agreements with her fellow progressives, and Pedneault will have a chance to introduce himself as the only Quebecois national leader. Can the Greens convince anyone that they’re the right party for uncertain times?

Jagmeet Singh is about to mount his third national election campaign, and New Democrats find themselves wondering why. The NDP caucus is now nearly 40% smaller than it was when he took the helm in 2017, and apart from a killer TikTok game and some tough words for billionaires, the party seems unsure of its purpose. Their core policy propositions in recent years — dental care, pharmacare, Mulcair — have finally come to fruition, albeit in a pretty anemic way. While the NDP have demanded credit for the programs, nobody seems keen to give it to them. At the same time, Singh has proved to be a fairly effective campaigner who always seems to come into his own as he crisscrosses the country. Can the NDP finally convince the country they can govern — or, at least, that they don’t deserve electoral oblivion?

Last year, Pierre Poilievre was standing on the sidewalk outside Parliament and measuring the third-floor drapes at Langevin Block. For the past two years, his Conservative Party has bushwhacked a path to victory by winning over ardent conservatives and nationalists, those who defected to Bernier or who gave up voting altogether — earning him ample comparisons to populists in America and Europe. Certain analysts have been warning that his ‘Canada First’ risked derailing his shot at becoming prime minister, and they (me) may yet be right. Still, Poilievre’s low-tax build build build ethos might prove the right message for the moment, if he can get past the Trump stuff. So can Poilievre snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?

And finally, there’s Mark Carney. Look out for a special dispatch on the incoming prime minister tomorrow.

See you all on the Chaos Campaign.