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Geoff Russ: It's over for the Liberal celebrity candidate gimmick

Competent stars are chased out, and the incompetent ones aren't of any use. What's the point?

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Canada needs a break from star candidates.

Justin Trudeau himself epitomizes the star candidate, possessing no specialized skills besides good presentation and teaching high schoolers. He was the ultimate celebrity politician who needed technocrats around him to govern well, only for him to alienate nearly all his brightest and best.

With Trudeau planning to resign, his closest advisers Gerald Butts and Katie Telford are?moving on to another celebrity in Mark Carney. The former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor unofficially kicked off his Liberal leadership campaign with a superficially smooth but oddly uncomfortable Monday night appearance on The Daily Show, followed by an official launch Thursday in Edmonton.

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When Carney is ignoring Canadian networks and touring any country but Canada, he is staging awkward photoshoots in his home and native land. Whether skating on the Rideau Canal or forcing himself to hold a can of beer in an Oilers jersey, he resembles an ambassador trying to fit in with the locals.

It is difficult to escape the sense that Carney is far more comfortable literally rubbing shoulders with London’s A-listers like former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, actor Jude Law and Ghislaine Maxwell, partner of Jeffery Epstein, before she was convicted as a child sex trafficker. Carney’s campaign, it should be noted, has denied being friends with Maxwell.

Shaking hands with one or two of Epstein’s friends and former clients is simply one of the drags of being a modern celebrity. Is anyone really going to turn down a handshake from Bill Gates?

The real scandal is Carney’s career-long fondness for deepening western ties with China.

China has not hesitated to kidnap our citizens and will likely be ready to invade Taiwan by the end of the decade. The Liberal leadership frontrunner’s last known meeting with Xi Jinping took place last spring, just months before he became an adviser to the Liberal Party of Canada and was floated as a replacement for Trudeau.

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Europe’s deep Russian ties prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 laid bare the dangers of democracies relying on authoritarian powers. In the wake of Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs, the need to diversify Canada’s exports should not result in turning to China for relief, even if that is the preferred approach of prestigious candidates like Carney.

On the other side of the aisle, the Conservatives have not attracted traditional star candidates. Andrew Perez, a frequently quoted Liberal political commentator, considers this to be a sign of weakness in Pierre Poilievre’s brand.

“It’s actually astonishing that a plethora of star candidates *aren’t* lining up to run under Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative banner in an election that will certainly take place in a matter of months,” Perez posted on X.

“Now that an election is imminent, this shortcoming is as clear as day.”

With no disrespect to Perez, his assessments are incorrect. The Conservatives have attracted public figures in western Canada, such as conservative documentary filmmaker Aaron Gunn.

Confirmed as the Conservative candidate for the B.C. riding of North Island over a year ago, Gunn is a well-known voice in B.C.’s political debates. His documentaries routinely go viral, the most famous of which is “Vancouver is Dying,” which attracted more than one million views in two weeks after its release.

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He is a different sort of candidate than the typical Liberal variety, best exemplified by former news reporter and talk show host Marci Ien, the MP for Toronto Centre since 2020. Ien took the seat of Bill Morneau, formerly the head of Canada’s largest human resources firm and arguably the most competent cabinet minister to ever work under Trudeau.

Ien did not replace Morneau’s experience in business, however, and brought little to the capital besides above-average communication skills and an interest in 9/11 conspiracy films. Her career as a cabinet minister reflects this. Unfortunately, celebrity politicians in the Trudeau government with any real talent for governance tend to be humiliated and stonewalled out of Ottawa.

Chrystia Freeland is the best example of this, having been subjected to humiliation and demotion for, among other things, daring to suggest $61.9 billion budget deficits are undesirable before dramatically leaving cabinet. She followed in the footsteps of Morneau, who exited after the PMO’s contempt for his expertise became unbearable.

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Perhaps the only competent Trudeau-era cabinet minister under Trudeau to go out on his own terms was Seamus O’Regan, who resigned from Parliament last summer after serving as the minister of labour from 2021 to 2024. O’Regan handled a number of strikes and displayed a willingness to decisively use his powers to end them before they spun out of control.

Star candidates who have remained include Ien and former Olympian Adam van Koeverden.

What is the point of attracting star candidates if they possess no discernible skills relevant to good governance? Considering van Koeverden has never made cabinet, perhaps the Liberals are wondering that too.

Contrast that with Billy Morin, the Conservative candidate for Edmonton Southwest. A former chief of the Enoch Cree Nation, Morin has already led a government and is a popular local figure. He will join former Haisla chief councillor Ellis Ross from the B.C. coast as a Conservative candidate, another well-known Indigenous voice who made his name striving for a better economy for his nation and community.

Morin, Ross and Gunn are not traditionally glitzy celebrities, but that is not important. Both have real skin in the game, name recognition among their prospective constituents and can point to a clear set of political beliefs and convictions.

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With all the domestic difficulties plaguing Canada, there needs to be representation for all those who feel left behind by this celebrity-ridden Liberal government: from small business owners, middle-class professionals, Indigenous chiefs and those who understand new media.

More importantly, Canada needs a strong, stable majority government without a leadership race to distract it from countering Trump’s tariffs, reckoning with China and taking hard-nosed, decisive action to fix our economy. As John Ivison noted, the entry of Mark Carney will be a desperate attempt to hold a likely Conservative government to minority status following the next election.

Using a star candidate to deadlock Parliament is the worst possible scenario to meet Trump head-on, and just one more example of the Liberals putting party over country.

National Post

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