Michelle Wu scored big.

In broad daylight and in front of everyone, Wu, holding a chain saw, just “stole” Canada away from Gov. Maura Healey.

At least she did so in the public relations sense.

While Healey, 54, was bogged down over issues like Canadian energy, trade, tourism and tariffs, as well as meetings with Canadian premiers, Wu, 40, was in Nova Scotia felling a huge Christmas tree.

The contrast was striking.

There Wu was in Halifax last week, just days after an unchallenged reelection, sporting an orange hard hat, dressed in orange colored lumberjack—or “lumberjane”—gear, preparing to knock down a 45-foot white spruce Christmas tree that was headed for the Boston Common.

It was a media event that politicians dream of having.

Unlike Mike Dukakis in the famous—or infamous—photo in the staged tank event, Wu pulled it off, despite the risk of a young, slight, mother of three handling a chain saw. And she had fewer staffers with her than Duke had in the tank.

She did so because she made it look so natural, just as she did in making friends, visiting a community college and mingling with the people of Halifax as though she were campaigning in Boston.

And she had her husband and three children with her.

It was like an old Hollywood made for Christmas movie. The media loved it.

The tree, of course, is the annual gift to the city marking Boston’s assistance to Nova Scotia following a devasting munitions explosion in Halifax Harbor in 1917.

However, Wu’s four-day visit to Halifax is the first time a Boston mayor went to Halifax to attend and partake in the tree cutting, rather than just accepting its Boston arrival.

It was the type of media event that Wu is so good at.

And she made the most of it, just as she did when the huge tree arrived in Boston on Tuesday signaling the start of the city’s Christmas celebration.   With Wu was Canadian Consulate Bernadette Jordan. Healey was not present.

The tree will be lighted on Boston Common during still another media event December 4.

While Wu was hoisting a chain saw that day in Nova Scotia—and covered extensively by an admiring media—Healey was delivering an unheralded and uncovered speech to an energy conference of the New England-Canadian Business Council in Boston.

While politicians often combine official government acts with public relations, Wu has turned the combination into an art form.

The late philosophical Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, used to say, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

And while Healey was dealing in prose when it comes to Canada, Wu was campaigning in poetry.

Both Wu and Healey are successful politicians who are on different political paths. While they are not friends, neither are they election competitors. There is no chance they will ever run against one another.

But both have attracted national media attention and that is where the competition lies.

The Democrat Party is in such disarray— with its lack of leadership, issues and split between radicals and moderates—that it is looking around for new leadership.

Where better to look than Massachusetts? Healey, should she be reelected in 2026, will certainly be of national interest, given that she is an openly gay governor of a progressive state.

Wu will get a good look too, given her effective campaign style, her record, her family values and her Taiwanese descent.

And she can handle a chain saw.

Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

Gov Maura Healey speaks during an appearance at the State House last week. (Staff Photo By Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald)