Chicken Little in a Suit: The Gospel of Panic That Won the Nation

Mark Carney didn’t campaign—he hyperventilated. Canada’s most polished fear campaign wasn’t about leadership. It was about inducing just enough national dread to make surrender feel like safety.

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Mark Carney didn’t walk into Canadian politics like a seasoned stable pony—he thundered in like a thoroughbred bounding toward the gates at Belmont, unnecessarily alarmed, and towering over a field that included a horse already saddled and 90 per cent favoured.

When Carney entered the race, Pierre Poilievre was a lock—polls showed he commanded nearly 90 percent of the public’s favour to win the next election, galloping ahead as if the barn had already closed.

But Carney unleashed a fear machine, calling Trump’s tariffs the economic equivalent of a train wreck and declaring, “President Trump wants to break us so America can own us,” a sentence meant to spook the electorate into believing they were seconds away from annexation.

As Politico dryly observed—like a footman announcing the guillotine’s schedule—Poilievre was “poised to be the next PM” until U.S. trade sabre-rattling tossed a wrench into the machinery and tilted the polls back toward the trembling embrace of Liberal technocracy.