ANALYSIS: While Liberals chase Carney, Conservatives crow about a blue-collar candidate

The Trudeau Liberals and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney have been engaged in the strangest of dances for more than a few years now.

Carney came out as a Liberal Party of Canada supporter in 2021. His priorities — dealing with climate change above all else — are Liberal priorities. Some Liberal MPs want him in Parliament on their side of the House. And on Sunday, according to The Globe and Mail, the prime minister himself and Carney “held talks” — was it a negotiation? A summit? Were lawyers present? The Globe did not say — about Carney “joining the government” in some unspecified role.

Carney does not now work for the government of Canada in any capacity. He’s busy doing other things.  But many Liberals wish otherwise and believe his arrival as a Liberal MP would somehow revive the flagging political fortunes of the Trudeau government.

Set aside that unproven assumption, though, for a moment to consider instead the candidate recruitment priorities of the Liberals and their chief opponents, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, and what that might tell us about the two parties’ relative standing in the polls.

While the Liberals chase a former central banker like Carney who moves easily among global elites, Conservatives Friday were crowing about their man running to represent a working-class neighbourhood in northeast Winnipeg. Colin Reynolds, a construction electrician and a “proud” private sector union member, is the nominated Conservative candidate in the riding of Elmwood–Transcona, now without an MP since New Democrat Daniel Blaikie went to work for Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew. For the coalition Poilievre is trying to put together, Reynolds is just what the Conservatives want.

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Forget that Poilievre has been a career politician almost all his adult life whose work uniform consisted of a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. These days, he’s “Blue Collar Pierre” in short sleeves and a yellow safety vest, visiting shop floors across the country and high-fiving those — as the Conservatives call them — who shower at the end of the day. Reporters are never invited to these events but the photographer on Poilievre’s payroll — a former Globe and Mail award-winning photographer, no less — is there to capture all the details of Poilievre’s transformation for the hundreds of thousands of those who follow the Conservative leader and his party’s social feeds.

Getting those who “shower at the end of the day” to vote conservative is straight out of the playbook the Ontario Progressive Conservatives used to great effect in the last election in that province. Premier Doug Ford dispatched Monte McNaughton to build bridges and forge alliances with Ontario’s private sector unions, those who represent construction workers, pipe fitters, truck drivers and so on. And it paid off in spades. Where private sector unions once spent millions campaigning to defeat Ontario Progressive Conservatives, McNaughton’s hard work had those private sector unions actually endorsing Ford and the PCs.

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Poilievre’s team, whose brain trust comes from the same stock as those advising Ford, saw the brilliance in that strategy and have been pursuing working-class voters with a single-minded zeal ever since.

Just last Sunday, Poilievre was a speaker and guest at the annual Family Day picnic in Toronto of Local 183 of the Labourers’ International Union of North America. That LiUNA local has 60,000 members, making it the largest construction local in North America.

The week before he was in Richmond, B.C., hanging out on a job site with the workers of Orion Construction. And at the Calgary Stampede earlier this month, Poilievre flipped pancakes for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 2103 whose members, Polievre said on his social feeds, “will be building a lot more homes when I remove the gatekeepers.”

You can trace events like those going back to the beginning of his leadership campaign. He has been working the blue-collar side of the street for two years now. And the payoff is a candidate like Reynolds in Elmwood–Transcona who, in a social media post, declared that “Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau’s costly coalition does not represent union workers like me.”

Now, the question for the Liberals who are wondering why their numbers are dropping: Would Mark Carney represent union workers like Reynolds? It’s hard to see how.

David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.