A Man for the Moment?

After a landslide leadership election, we now officially have a new Prime Minister in Mark Carney. Today, I want to look at him, review some of his first moves, and provide my reflections on whether he is the man for this moment before looking at a few reading recommendations.

A Man for the Moment?

Photo by Jason Hafso on Unsplash

Carney becomes Prime Minister with no electoral or political experience but with a substantial resume nonetheless. A former investment banker, public servant, and central banker in Canada and the UK, Carney has been a key figure in some major events over recent decades, including the financial crisis, Brexit, and the pandemic.

And, as I’ve argued often, we’re in the midst of a major moment right now. US threats to Canadian sovereignty obviously loom large, but that is by no means the only thing going on. As I wrote two weeks ago:

We are at a pivot point in history. The confluence of many intertwined factors and events has forever changed the ground we stand on. The collapse of international norms, the erosion of rights, a live-streamed genocide, environmental devastation and climate change, polarization, affordability crises, transformative technological change, the accumulation of unprecedented wealth and power to a select few individuals, the rise of China as a geopolitical power, the rise of an authoritarian, expansionist United States—all and more are inextricably linked and feed off of each other.

Steering Canada through these challenges is going to require some nimble brinksmanship. But we can’t just come out the other side. We also need to come out stronger from this and take steps to prevent ending up in the same place again in a few years. We need to tackle some of the underlying pain points and the big problems with new ideas.

Carney seems to be displaying some effective brinksmanship over the first few days. A quick trip to Europe to discuss security, military supply chains, and intelligence sharing seems well judged to me, aligned with the need to strengthen international partnerships. It also reflects a recognition that building up these external alliances and bolstering Canadian resilience are the ways to deal with Trump rather than get sucked into the uncertainty and be opened up to embarrassment and belittlement as Zelenskyy suffered at the White House.

Another nimble (or cynical) move has been ending the Carbon Tax. All of this seems to be paying dividends politically, with the latest polls since Carney’s victory showing a consistent Liberal lead — enough for Philippe J. Fournier of338 Canadato project a Liberal majority after the next election.

If this plays out, then Carney will have a mandate and the Parliamentary means to respond to the challenges we face. Is he then the man for the moment?

Unfortunately, I’m far more skeptical on this point. Carney’s past experiences, his writing, and some other early steps make me question whether he will bring the imagination and boldness needed to respond to the tectonic changes underway.

On his experience and writing, Marc Lee’s examination of Carney’s book Values: Building a Better World for All is a helpful crib sheet on Carney’s approach. In Lee’s view Carney “is a very competent centrist whose plans for Canada won’t depart much from the status quo.” The final section of Carney’s book exemplifies this. It sets out a plan for “How Canada can Build Value for All” but lacks policy detail and a real articulation of Canadian peculiarities economically and politically. For Lee:

It’s not clear how Carney would come to grips with the massive inequalities in our society, the rapidly declining state of the climate, and the dark side of new technologies and their potential to displace mass amounts of workers. Nor does trade factor in, as the second Trump administration collapses the whole basis for Canadian trade with the United States, and the post-war global order, with the United States as hegemonic power, starting to crumble.

While “Carney offers up a solid understanding of how we got here, and the complexities of building a modern mixed economy,” for Lee, he “skirts over more fundamental economic challenges.” Yet right now, those fundamental economic challenges really need to be the focus.

Competent managerialism might be better than what we are seeing in the US, but it isn’t going to address the underlying threats to our prosperity or our sovereignty. As Lisa Young has argued:

As Canadians contemplate how to navigate our new circumstances, we must start by understanding that America is no longer a functioning democracy. The rule of law can no longer be taken for granted. We are not riding out four difficult years. Our old friend is, in all likelihood, gone.

We need bold leadership to respond to this new reality. Dan Gardner explored this with a focus on Canada’s security picture,comparing our lack of urgency to what Europe is doing. For him, “Most Canadian politicians sound like they got here via a wormhole from 2017” and are “utterly delusional” about what is required to meet the threats we face. This is true regarding security and defence, and it’s true regarding trade, innovation, and so many other policy files.

Other moves by Carney reinforce a sense that he doesn’t understand the scale of the challenges and the need for tackling systemic issues.

Part of his slashing of the size of the cabinet included cutting the position of Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth. At a time when women’s rights are under threat, where 2SLGBTQIIA+ rights are being attacked, when DEI is facing a backlash, and at a time when ever more evidence points to how inclusion is a vital part of a vibrant economy, axing a dedicated ministry seems a startling retrograde move. As this open letter from a huge array of women’s rights organizations argues, this move:

undermines the focus, expertise, and resources required to tackle systemic issues effectively. Simply put, it will not work. Gender equality demands dedicated leadership, accountability, and sustained attention—none of which can be adequately achieved when it is treated as an afterthought within a larger, unrelated ministry.

We need that focus, expertise and resources at the highest level. We also need bold leadership and real imagination. As Ruha Benjamin has wrote:

For many, the idea that we can defy politics as usual and channel human ingenuity toward more egalitarian forms of social organization is utterly far-fetched! Instead, our collective imagination tends to shrink when confronted with entrenched inequality and injustice, when what we need is to pour just as much investment and ingenuity into transforming our social reality as we do our material reality.

Whether Carney represents a paternalistic, and outmoded politics as usual, or whether he can direct that investment and ingenuity into all the areas we need it to go is the key question. Right now, it seems it is politics as usual.

Reading Recommendations

Science Diplomacy and National Interest - In this piece, Frédéric Bouchard looks at Canada’s scientific relationships with other countries and maps out our declining relevance over time. This weakens our position. For Bouchard, “When Europe, the US, or other partners look for strategic innovation partners as their industrial and defence policies will require, it is in our best interest to be scientifically strong enough to be able to be key partners or to be able to compete in a credible fashion.” Much like what Gardener argued when it comes to the military - we need to do so much more to reestablish ourselves as a credible partner.

Cohere Says Command A Model Edges Out LLM Competition In Speed and Energy Efficiency - In a slightly different direction, this news from Cohere is great to hear. Cohere is Canadian AI leader, who has notably refused to go the capital intensive way of development that other major AI companies have gone, with their co-founder arguing that “‘innovation and efficiency, not excessive compute,’ is key to AI development.” It is really positive to see the fruits of this approach be realized.

UKRI’s economic mission is built on a delusion - Finally, a UK focused piece but one that I think has a lot of relevance for Canada. In it, David Edgerton, a professor of the history of science and technology, argues that looking to the UK’s “capstone” research and innovation agency, UKRI, for economic growth is a flawed approach. Instead, Edgerton argues that “the UK needs very different innovation and economic policies, ones directed at goals such as improving efficiency, dealing with climate change and improving wellbeing, not at growth per se.”

This move away from focusing on innovation is, in part, due to the fact that “most of the innovations that drive a nation’s economic growth will come from overseas. Even if all the UK’s growth were driven by putting innovations to work, they would mainly be foreign innovations.” If this is true for the UK, then it is even more true for Canada with our smaller population and economy—as I have previously argued.

For Edgerton:

Delusions of science-superpower grandeur and false assumptions about innovation and growth may be comforting, but will butter no parsnips. We need innovation in innovation policy, based on the evidence, to get a policy for growth with a chance of working.

That means finding ways to drive change, to create new products and ways of doing things that meet not abstract demands for growth, but the needs of the British people. It is not rocket science.

Canadian policymakers need to understand this, too.