Evaluating the Liberal Leadership Candidates Three Weeks In
We’re now three weeks into the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership race. There are two clear frontrunners in the campaign and a third candidate that could gain traction once the debates begin. Those won’t happen until the final few weeks of the campaign, however, because the party has decided they will only feature candidates who pay the full $350,000 candidate fee by the deadline on February 17, 2025.
Two installments of that total have been paid already. The first was a refundable payment of $50,000 on January 23, 2025. The second was a non-repayable payment due on January 30, 2025. The non-repayable nature of of that payment reduced the number of candidates down to five.
How Many Candidates Will Be Left on March 9?
It’s not a certainty that all five will remain in contention until the announcement weekend. However, the candidates that remain likely have the fundraising machines behind them to do it. The question they’ll have to ponder is whether they have any real base of voter support to continue or whether it’s better to throw their support behind a frontrunner before the vote.
In the old days of delegated conventions, there was some benefit of waiting to drop out and endorse. If you did so late enough in the game during a multi-ballot vote, you could be seen to play “Kingmaker (or Queenmaker)” and put the eventual winner of the top.
We saw this play out during the 2013 Ontario Liberal Party leadership where Eric Hoskins made a dramatic change in direction on the convention floor and threw his support behind Kathleen Wynne. She became leader and premier while he became the Minister of Health.
That kind of drama likely won’t happen here given the ranked ballot weighted-one-member-one-vote nature of the campaign. If a low-support candidate wants to have any impact on the vote, their best shot is to drop out in advance so that their supporters can rank another candidate first on their ballot. Their second best shot is to tell their supporters who to rank second should they be eliminated on subsequent counts.
I suspect all of the remaining candidates will try to stay in the race until at least the first debate, especially if the candidates succeed in pushing for one to take place ahead of the $350,000 payment deadline. The debates are their first real chance to showcase their talents and to test their support levels after doing so.
How the Campaigns are Performing
For now, here’s how I think each of the campaigns is doing three weeks in.
Mark Carney
Carney is running a frontrunner campaign where he is largely avoiding the media and focusing on the ground game. In the lead-up to the cut-off date for registered voters, that meant spending a ton on online ads. As Doug Ford’s digital ad creator Cole Hogan noted on Twitter, Carney’s ads totaled $94,687 the week of the cut-off.
Shortly after the deadline, the party announced that it now had approximately 400,000 registered Liberals, up from 100,000 at the beginning of the month before Justin Trudeau resigned as leader. The general consensus is that many of these sign-ups came from Carney’s team.
If that’s the case, the head-down nature of his campaign is paying off, despite cries from his opponents (both Liberal and otherwise) and the media that he should be doing more to publicly engage Canadians.
With the voting pool now set, Carney also finally waded into concrete policy this week, opening with his plans for tackling climate change in a budget friendly way for families. I’m not going to wade into the specifics here but I may write a separate piece about this policy and the way it was launched because I think it’s a critical element of this leadership race.
On top of good fundraising and voter sign-up numbers, Carney is also rolling in endorsements from the Liberal caucus, a metric his opponents and actual caucus members Chrystia Freeland and Karina Gould likely should have been able to beat him on. While I don’t actually care about endorsements, especially in a WOMOV race, it is a knock to the two other campaigns that they largely don’t have the backing of their colleagues.
I think the most notable thing Carney has done in this first third or so of the campaign actually happened this week when he held his own against a heckling ‘reporter’ from Rebel ‘News’. Carney was friendly, positive, and completely unbothered by this person invading his personal space.
It’s this kind of unflappability that Canadians love in their leaders when they’re aggressively challenged. They celebrate it in the moment and remember it for years to come. People still quote Pierre Trudeau’s 1970 “just watch me” interview on the steps of Parliament and remain proud of Chretien’s 1996 “Shawinigan Handshake”. Carney’s version (incidentally occurring in Shawinigan) added a smile to the “leader with a spine” vibe he demonstrated.
All in all it’s been a very good three weeks for Carney. The question now is whether he can keep building on that momentum to the finish line. If he does, he could potentially be in a general election almost immediately after this race. Given that reality, he must start putting forward more policy solutions for the Canadian public to consider as part of a future Liberal election platform.
Chrystia Freeland
Freeland has been dominating the news, appearing on TV daily and regular writing op-eds to get her her views out. While she trails Carney in caucus endorsements, she does have the second highest number supporting her.
Much of her policy announcements have been focused on Trump and Trudeau. With Trump, it’s all about setting an aggressive response to tariffs and the changing nature of our relationship with America. On Trudeau, it’s all about reversing the trend of him consolidating power in the PMO during his time in office.
Freeland’s pitch is that she’s a proven fighter who has taken Trump on before. That he dislikes her just another reason to make her the next Prime Minister because bullies only respond to strength. While I think Trump will pull policy focus for much of the next four years, I do think she needs to broaden her focus and talk about the other things keeping Canadians up at night.
Those things can’t just be a list of how Trudeau has failed. So far she’s made a proposal to review the party’s policy process and membership rules. She also spent an entire day of this very short campaign talking about reducing the size of cabinet and giving more power to MPs. That will really only appeal to her caucus colleagues — and they’re largely siding with Carney. I don’t know anyone who has based their vote on the size of cabinet and can’t name a leader that kept their pledge to keep cabinet small. It seems like a strategic blunder and an example of being focused on the wrong things.
Given almost every policy she’s released is a direct response to Trump’s or Trudeau’s policies, I can’t help but think this sometimes feels more like a campaign focused on the breakdown of her professional relationships with both leaders rather than about the broader change Canadians are looking for right now. Voters may like her feisty anger. But I suspect they want it to be used effectively.
Freeland’s big focus this week has been to try to pressure the party into holding more debates and sooner. I understand why this is a priority for the campaigns that are not the perceived frontrunner. More air time only benefits them. However I think it’s a mistake to assume Carney would be bad at debating or that Freeland, noted for not being a top-notch communicator, would excel in this format.
More importantly, the focus on debates is a focus on process, not the issues Canadians are concerned about. Once again, in this extremely short race, the Freeland campaign is talking about how decisions are made rather than what decisions should be made. If her campaign doesn’t refocus soon, I can’t see her beating Carney.
Karina Gould
Gould is easily the youngest candidate in the race and is clearly campaigning as the candidate with ideas. She continues to release new policies each week on a host of different topics. The two biggest to date are probably the commitment to spend 2% of GDP on national defence and to cut the GST by 1%.
In a longer race, Gould would probably be getting more attention. However, it’s a truncated race where voters seem to be focused on so-called ‘winnability’, caucus has backed Carney en masse, and many of Trudeau’s top organizers are working behind the scenes to deliver a first-ballot victory to the frontrunner.
While I like Gould so far, I suspect this will ultimately prove to not be her time in the spotlight. Most people I talk to think she is running to be the leader after the next election loss and that this is simply a dress-rehearsal. I don’t think she or her team believe that and I think she got into this race to lead.
I suspect she and her team are betting that when the candidates finally go head-to-head in the debates, she will turn some heads. The question is whether it will be enough. At minimum, Gould would have to unseat Freeland as the clear alternative to Carney. She might be able to do that if she can lay out a clear program of change that appeals to younger voters.
Both women are also facing a lot of sexism in this race, within the party and outside of it. The American belief that a woman can’t win (Clinton, Harris) has definitely seeped into our politics, too. That’s putting a drag on their candidacies, whether pundits want to admit it or not.
The biggest worry for Gould is placing fourth or worse in this race. We don’t know yet how many Liberals each campaign registered or where the pre-existing 100,000 registered Liberals will throw their support. But if Baylis or Dhalla somehow leapfrog her in the vote tally, her chances of becoming leader next time will begin to immediately shrink. If the debates don’t lead to a surge in her fortunes, she has to turn her attention to becoming the king or queenmaker of the race.
Frank Baylis
Baylis only held his campaign launch this week, after the party officially greenlit the leadership candidates. He’s done a few interviews and reached out to important political advocacy groups like Operation Black Vote, but so far I’ve seen little activity from him within the party.
If I was running a campaign for a former MP who is largely still seen as a political outsider and a longshot in this race, I would be booking him on every TV show possible and rolling out an impressive policy program to create some chatter about and momentum for the campaign.
Baylis’ team seems to be doing none of that. Their focus so far has been on introducing him to the voters through videos about his family and other short interviews about his life. This would be fine in week one or two but we’re now well into the race. To avoid being seen as a total also-ran, Baylis has to actually start campaigning.
Ruby Dhalla
I’m not really sure how Dhalla was greenlit for this race from a policy perspective. Despite being a former Liberal MP, all of her campaign content makes her candidacy sound like a better fit for the Conservative Party of Canada than the Liberal Party of Canada.
I don’t doubt she has her supporters. They probably include longstanding “business” Liberals who don’t like the progressive politics of the party. They also likely include voters who care less about party stripe than voting for a specific candidate and decided to sign up in this race to cast their ballot for Dhalla.
Having said that, Dhalla signed up very late to the game, barely meeting the candidate deadline. It remains to be seen how many new voters she was able to sign up in the week that she had to do so. But given her conservative communications and policy slants in this race, I can’t see her picking up a lot of the 100,000 supporters that have stayed loyal to the party in recent years and are the most likely to vote.
Theresa has served as the Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party, the VP Communications for the Ontario Women’s Liberal Commission, the Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, and an election speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. As a member of ‘Team Neutral’, she helped manage the 2013 and 2020 OLP Leadership races.
