Thirty-seven years ago, inside a television studio in Ottawa, John Turner thrust an index finger at Brian Mulroney and warned that with one stroke of a pen Mulroney had reversed 120 years of national development and thrown Canada into the “north-south influence of the United States.”
“When the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow,” Turner said.
Turner lost both the election and the larger debate — the free-trade deal between Canada and the United States went ahead and came into effect two months later. But that exchange — possibly the most dramatic in the 60-year history of televised leaders’ debates in Canada — is still replayed on television at election time. And Turner’s warning now could be said to hang over the 2025 campaign.
In truth, a televised debate is not well-suited to settling big questions of national purpose and direction.
In 1988, the three leaders — John Turner for the Liberals, Brian Mulroney for the Progressive Conservatives and NDP leader Ed Broadbent — spent six hours in close proximity, three in English and three in French. They were each given three minutes — a luxurious amount of time by current standards — for both opening and closing statements. And Turner still insisted that a third debate, devoted entirely to the free-trade deal, was necessary.
In 2025, four party leaders shared four hours together, two in each official language. They raced through a couple dozen topics. They were given 10 seconds to say what they felt was the biggest security threat facing the country. Their closing statements were capped at 45 seconds.
The result of a modern debate is always something of a blur. But what this year’s encounters underlined is that this election is primarily about both two very different candidates for prime minister and two very different ideas of what the greatest threat to the country actually is.
For Liberal Leader Mark Carney, the pre-eminent crisis facing Canada is Donald Trump and everything he represents. For Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the primary crisis is Justin Trudeau and the Liberal agenda of the last nine years.
“It may be difficult to, Mr. Poilievre — you spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and neither — they’re both gone,” Carney said at one point on Thursday night.
Of course, for the Conservative leader, that is not nearly enough.
“Are you prepared to elect the same Liberal MPs, the same Liberal ministers, the same Liberal staffers all over again for a fourth term?” he asked viewers.
For Poilievre, this election is entirely about “change” — change that, in Poilievre’s telling, is desperately needed. Holding himself out as an example of what’s possible in this country, Poilievre posits that the “promise” of Canada has been broken.
“Many of you are worried about paying your bills, feeding your families, even owning a home. You’re worried your kids are in danger,” Poilievre said in his closing statement. “But I’m here to say it doesn’t have to be this way.”
At Issue | Did the federal leaders’ debate change anything?
Poilievre’s response is to do things very differently — to cut spending, repeal regulations, build pipelines and wield the notwithstanding clause to impose harsher sentences on those convicted of crimes. Whatever Mark Carney promises to do differently or better, Poilievre contends that he cannot be trusted.
“You, sir, are not a change,” Poilievre said to Carney during one exchange.
But whatever Poilievre’s desire to cast himself as the candidate of urgent and dramatic change, the Conservative leader who showed up on the debate stage this week was conspicuously milder than the candidate he has often shown himself to be over the last two years, at least on some fronts.
The word “woke” did not cross his lips even once, despite his oft-stated objections to “woke culture” and his party’s stated commitment to end the “imposition of woke ideology in the federal civil service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research.” And where he has repeatedly mused at rallies about turning the CBC’s Toronto headquarters into housing, on Thursday night he held out the possibility that the public broadcaster would somehow survive, even if a Conservative government withdraws all federal funding.
Such omissions and adjustments suggest the Conservative leader may have come to understand, however belatedly, how much of a liability his populist echoes of Trumpism have become — either by limiting his own party’s ability to attract support or by galvanizing the non-Conservative vote behind Mark Carney.
From Carney, there is a stated intent to do some things differently — to refocus the government on larger economic issues, to accelerate the building of houses and national infrastructure. But nearly everything is framed in the context of a world changed by Donald Trump.
In making his own proposed changes, Poilievre argues, Canada will be better positioned to deal with the economic threats posed by Trump’s agenda. But it is Carney who forcefully argues that Canada’s entire relationship with the United States has changed or must change.
“We are facing the biggest crisis of our lifetimes,” Carney said in his closing statement. “Donald Trump is trying to fundamentally change the world economy, the trading system, but really what he’s trying to do to Canada — he’s trying to break us, so the U.S. can own us. They want our land, they want our resources, they want our water, they want our country.”
Did the leaders’ debates change anything for these voters?
Carney talks about diversifying Canada’s trading partners and working together with “like-minded” countries. More simply, Carney argues he is better suited and more qualified to lead the country at this particular moment.
Of the four leaders, Carney seemed most eager to discuss Trump — perhaps because the other three have calculated that it is not a particularly winning topic for them. An opening section that was nominally supposed to be about “Trump and tariffs” quickly devolved into a discussion about pipelines.
In the midst of that exchange, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francous Blanchet posited that by the time a new pipeline is completed — maybe a decade from now — Trump won’t even be president.
“He might be,” Carney quipped, smiling.
Even if Donald Trump isn’t still president in 2035, it would surely be Carney’s argument — and the argument of many other informed observers — that the world will not by then have returned to some comforting pre-Trump normal. And it is fair to say that this year’s election may have only barely scratched the surface of everything that might be debated about this new reality.
On Wednesday night, Canada’s safe-third country agreement with the United States was briefly discussed. But there was no real debate about whether that agreement is likely to survive or what Canadian leaders would do if it becomes politically or legally untenable.
Such questions may eventually become unavoidable. For now, there is the big question of how Canada should approach this moment and who should lead it.
