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Trudeau’s Liberal Party and former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney have been engaged in a strange dance in recent years.

Carney declared himself a Liberal Party of Canada supporter in 2021. His priorities – notably fighting climate change – are Liberal Party priorities. Some Liberal MPs want him in Parliament with them. And on Sunday, according to the Globe and Mail, the prime minister himself and Carney “had a conversation” – was it a conversation? A summit? Is a lawyer present? The Globe did not say that Carney would “join the administration” in an unspecified role.

Carney no longer works for the Government of Canada in any capacity. He is busy with other work. But many in the Liberal Party want him to and believe that his arrival as a Liberal MP will revive the political glory of Trudeau’s faltering government.

But let’s put aside these unproven hypotheses for a moment and consider the candidates who are recruiting preferences within the Liberal Party and their main opponent, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party, and what we can infer from the two parties’ relative standings in opinion polls.

While the Liberal Party has criticized former central bank governors like Carney for moving easily among the global elite, the Conservative Party on Friday criticized the man running to represent a working-class neighbourhood northeast of Winnipeg. Colin Reynolds, a construction electrician and “proud” private-sector union member, is the Conservative nominee in the Elmwood-Transcona byelection, now without an MP since New Democrat Daniel Blaikie worked for Manitoba Premier Webb Kinew. Reynolds is the figure the Conservatives want in the coalition Poilievre is trying to assemble.

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Forget that Poilievre has been a career politician his entire adult life whose work uniform consists of a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. Today, he is the “Blue Collar Pierre” in short sleeves and a yellow safety vest, walking into stores across the country and greeting people — as traditionalists call him — who have worked hard for the day’s shower. Journalists have never been invited to these events, but Poilievre’s staff photographers — also former award-winning Globe and Mail photographers — have captured every detail of Poilievre’s transformation for the thousands who have followed the Conservative leader on their party feeds.

Getting people who “fail at the end of the day” to vote Conservative is exactly what Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives couldn’t deny in the last provincial election. Premier Doug Ford sent Monte McNaughton to build bridges and form a coalition with Ontario’s private sector unions, representing construction workers, plumbers, truckers, etc. And it paid off handsomely. Whereas private sector unions used to spend millions of dollars campaigning to defeat Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, McNaughton’s hard work resulted in private sector unions actually supporting Ford and the Conservatives.

Tim Poilievre, whose brainchild came from the same people who advised Ford, saw the genius in this strategy and has since continued to pursue working-class voters with relentless zeal.

Last Sunday, Poilievre was a guest speaker at the annual LiUNA Local 183 Family Day Picnic in Toronto. LiUNA has 60,000 members, making it the largest construction local in North America.

A week ago, he was hanging out on a job site with workers from Orion Construction in Richmond, B.C. Earlier this month, at the Calgary Stampede, Poilievre made pancakes for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, Local 2103, whose members, Poilievre said on social media, “I’m going to build a lot of houses when I fire the janitor.”

You can explore the events leading up to the start of his leadership campaign. He had been working as a roadside labourer for two years. And the reward was candidates like Reynolds in Elmwood-Transcona, who, in social media postsStating that “the expensive coalition of Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau does not represent unions like mine.”

Now the question for Liberals wondering why their numbers are dwindling: Will Mark Carney represent a union like Reynolds? It’s hard to see how.

David Akin is Global News’ chief political correspondent.