Carney and Freeland
So the federal Liberals had their leadership convention on March 9, and Mark Carney won in a landslide. It wasn't even close. Chrystia Freeland came in a distant second.
I feel this result was necessary, but unjust. I think this is the best result we could have hoped for, where "we" is defined as "hoping against a Pierre Polievre majority". I have mixed feelings about Carney, and I don't know that he is committed to staying on as Liberal leader when he loses the next election, but in a world of bad choices maybe he is the least worst choice.
Unjust
Chrystia Freeland deserved to become Liberal leader. She has been loyal to a fault. Apparently she was Justin's right-hand woman for years, and she held a number of important portfolios including Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister. She seems to have been a competent politician. It was only after she defected from Trudeau's cabinet (over the dumb GST tax holiday?) that Trudeau gave up on sinking with his Liberal ship in the next election. For that we should be grateful -- if Trudeau had stayed on as leader the election was guaranteed to be a rout.
Unfortunately, Freeland is closely associated with Justin Trudeau, precisely because she has been loyal. Had she won the leadership it is likely she would have lost in a landslide to Poilievre as well, because voters would have seen a Freeland government as a continuation of a Trudeau one. Freeland would have been the second female Prime Minister in Canadian history, but she could well have have been the Prime Minister with the shortest tenure in Canadian history as well.
But now that she has lost to Carney, it seems likely that she will never be Liberal leader and she will never be Prime Minister, as much as she deserves it. If Carney wins and/or stays on as Prime Minister then Freeland will age out of the role by the end of her tenure; if Carney loses and pulls and Ignatieff, then the Liberal Party won't be inclined to fall back to Freeland given that she lost to Carney in a landslide.
Freeland has three other strikes against her: she is a woman, she is short, and apparently she is not a good political communicator. Of these three I find the shortness most intriguing -- there is research (for example ) that suggests that tall people have better success in life than short ones. Although this is unjust and should not be a criterion for choosing a leader, I bet it would have been a subconscious factor for some voters.
Necessary
I do not know whether Carney will be a good Prime Minister. He might lose in a landslide to Polievre too, and thus earn the distinction of being Canada's shortest serving Prime Minister. I would place good odds that he will lose the election, but if we are lucky it won't be a landslide for Poilievre. The polls have looked better for the Liberals since he announced he was running, and he clearly has good support in the Liberal Party. Anecdotally I felt a palpable sense of relief when I heard he was running. Many of us were dreading a PP rout, and we were certain that if Justin Trudeau remained as leader for the next election he would have lost bigly.
Carney has a good reputation from his work at the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. I listened to his Rieth lectures and was pleasantly surprised that he seemed to take climate change seriously. It is clear that he is not as much of an outsider to the Liberal Party as he would like to portray (and PP is desperately trying to associate him with the Justin Trudeau government) but he currently seems distant enough that he is not tainted by the Trudeau government's stench. He also has reasonable media skills; he held his own during his interview on the Daily Show and was able to intelligently discuss policy issues on Nate Erskine-Smith's podcast.
It is also clear that he is a pro-business centrist, and it is has been really disappointing to see his backpedalling on the carbon tax. If he somehow gets elected as Prime Minister then I doubt I will love all of his policies, even though his political inclinations seem to match mine more closely than either Justin Trudeau's or Pierre Poilievre's.
Having said that, I still do not intend to vote for the local Liberal candidate in my riding. As I have written before, I hope Mike Morrice can hold the seat in Kitchener Centre. If I was in some other riding where there was no realistic non-CPC candidate to vote for, my decision would be much harder. I dislike the Liberals and will never trust a Liberal (particularly on electoral reform) but if the Trump election taught us anything it is that it matters who gets elected to office, and sometimes voting the least worst option is the best choice.