Hey, I'm feeling not to spunky tonight so this won't be lengthy.
But here are some interesting comments and posts I saw today:A substacker named Linda T is not impressed with the "He Yells" critique of Prime Minister Carney:
There’s a new story making the rounds in Ottawa, and it picks up neatly where an older one left off: apparently, Mark Carney likes to yell at annoying, incompetent politicians.
He must be going hoarse on the Liberal benches...
...The more progressive Liberals complain that he’s too managerial, too pro-growth, too friendly to energy, too dismissive of caucus feeling, the more he looks like someone separate from the very Liberal brand Canadians had grown sick of. The more MPs leak that he’s harsh behind closed doors, the more he looks like a man trying to drag an entitled caucus back to work. The more they warn that he isn’t a real Liberal, the more many voters may think: good.
That’s the irony. Carney’s distance from the Liberal Party may be one of his strongest political assets.
The Liberal brand was badly damaged before he took over. Canadians were tired of the lectures, the scandals, the identity games, the broken systems, and the sense that the country was being governed by people who were always performing virtue while avoiding accountability. Carney gives voters a way to keep the Conservatives out without having to pretend they still admire Trudeau-era Liberalism. He’s a permission structure for exhausted Liberal voters, soft Conservatives, centrists, and institutional Canadians who wanted a change without wanting Pierre Poilievre.
So when Liberal MPs complain that Carney doesn’t treat them with enough deference, they’re misunderstanding the transaction. Carney’s appeal isn’t that he restores the Liberal Party to its old self. His appeal is that he appears willing to discipline, ignore, or override that old self.
That leaves the caucus trapped.
They can’t easily remove him, because he saved them. They can’t easily defy him, because he has numbers. They can’t easily embarrass him, because their own public reputation is worse than his. They can’t credibly present themselves as guardians of democratic accountability after years of swallowing every Trudeau excess. And they can’t appeal to voters by saying, in effect, “please help, the prime minister we backed for power now has too much of it.”
No one is coming to help them.
Carney owns them. Not emotionally, maybe not even ideologically, but structurally. He has the office. He has the majority. He has the polling. He has the floor-crossers. He has the ability to replace troublemakers with new loyalists. Most importantly, he has the one thing caucus MPs usually respect more than principle: the appearance of being able to win.
That’s why the leaks are a bluff. They’re not a rebellion. They’re a flare shot into the sky by people who’ve realized the ship captain isn’t taking orders from them.
And if they keep pushing it, they may find the public reaction colder than they expect...
