This post starts with Mark Carney’s speech and ends, as Tuesday did, with Stephen Harper’s.
1. Wake up, go go
These days Mark Carney’s on a history kick, rarely beginning a speech or a Forward Guidance video without spinning a folksy and easily instrumentalized tale of Canada’s past.
“I want to begin with harbours,” he told a room full of financiers and politicians at the Four Seasons in Yorkville on Tuesday. As one does. “The origins of the nation of Canada began in the summer of 1604,” when plucky Sam Champlain found “one of the finest harbours” he’d seen at Port-Royal in what’s now Nova Scotia.
Port-Royal offered shelter. It was as clement a cove as a heart could desire. But, the prime minister noted, it was also “a base perfectly situated” for exploration and trade.
And do you know what else Port-Royal was? That’s right, it was a metaphor. A metaphor that waited four centuries for Mark Carney to come along.
“A ship is safe in harbour,” he said. “But” — wait for it — “lying in harbour is not what ships are for.”
Oh my God. The harbour is Canada! The cozy safe haven tucked away from the world is Canada! Ready to take on the world! The tables are turned! The hunted becomes the hunter! We are grown bold in the matter of our ice hockey squadrons! Sorry, mixed metaphor.
If what everyone on the Four Seasons stage was calling the “inaugural” Canada Investment Summit is to have any effect or worth, it is precisely to achieve an effect I described, very much in passing, in the curtain-raiser post I sent you on Sunday. I mentioned some international investors I met for lunch a few years ago. I said they were bored, bored of the very idea of Canada, bored to their souls. My paraphrase of their attitude: “The very strong vibe was, ‘Wake us if this turns into a different country.’”
On Tuesday Carney delivered the wake-up call. Whether it will work is a matter of pure speculation. All will depend on financial transactions that may take months or years to take shape, and that will rarely be directly traceable to the Four Seasons if they happen. But I have rarely seen any prime minister try as hard as Carney is trying.