Surprises from the throne

What if all the King's women and men mean what he said?

Mark Carney joins our visiting King in the traditional Making of the Small Talk

We’re like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, or I guess, since the new PM is said to prefer British spellings, Charlye Brownne with Lewsey’s Foote Ball. Each generation of Canadian leadership tries to find a new way to make throne speeches exciting. These attempts are forever doomed, because no generation of Canadian leadership is exciting and because the format — a statement of intent from a dignitary who is forbidden to harbour autonomous intent — tends to short-circuit the delivery.

This time the delivery mechanism was the King of Canada, Charles Philip Arthur George, popping over from his secondary residence at Buckingham. His French tops Mary Simon’s, though his Inuktitut is shaky. He did his best to sound excited, or resolute, about the CBSA’s “new powers to examine goods.”

A quarter-century ago the reliably impish John Fraser told me he was preparing a book called Eminent Canadians that would survey recent developments in four Canadian institutions. The institutions he’d selected were the office of the Prime Minister; the Globe and Mail; the Anglican Church; — and here Fraser urged me to guess the fourth. Canadian institution? I dunno, the armed forces? The NHL? “The Crown,” Fraser said with a twinkle. Thus was I prepped for this week’s extended round of you-know-he’s-really-the-king-of-Canada browbeating.

This throne speech was like many before it, though out of deference for the deliverer it was on the short side, 21 pages tucked inside wide margins. In substance it was a paraphrase of Mark Carney’s already-semi-legendary Single Mandate Letter for cabinet ministers. There were sections on redefining Canada’s relationship with the United States; on internal trade; on crimefighting and national defence; and on “spending less and investing more,” which, I mean, we’ll see.

The mandate letter seems to have supplanted the Liberal election platform as the main blueprint for Carney’s action. The two aren’t wildly incompatible, but the mandate letter/ throne speech is streamlined and puts stuff in different order.

I saw two surprises big enough to make me write today, but first I want to point to a few elements that are worth noting in the less-surprising stuff. That’s right, I’m trying to be useful, not just smart-assed, so here’s a way to thank me.

First, Carney (through His Majesty) makes claims for the “new economic and security relationship with the United States” that seem unrealistic. He expects “transformational benefits for both sovereign nations.” But surely any cross-border negotiation can only be, at best, an exercise in damage control? Any security costs that would be newly borne by Canada would represent a net cost. Trade arrangements short of the substantially free trade we’ve enjoyed for 40 years will also represent a net cost. The point of seeking “one Canadian economy” and taking relations with third countries more seriously is to offset the cost of a degraded Canada-US relationship, no?

Under “more affordable,” the throne speech repeats campaign promises for income-tax cuts and cuts to GST on new homes. The list of tangible financial benefits to individuals doesn’t go much past that. “The Government will protect the programs that are already saving families thousands of dollars every year. These include child care and pharmacare.” “Protect” is an old Ottawa word meaning “not extend.”

The goals for the “one Canadian economy” now include “free trade across the nation,” at both federal and provincial levels of government, “by Canada Day.” Which is 34 days away. The staffing and mandate of another new entity, a single-wicket “Major Federal Project Office,” may end up mattering more to this government’s success and Canada’s prosperity than the name of the PM’s next chief of staff, so put an asterisk next to that.

The government repeats a mysterious claim I’ve found shaky since Carney became a Liberal leadership candidate. It “will take a series of measures to catalyse new investment to create better jobs and higher incomes for Canadians. The scale of the Government’s initiative will match the challenges of our times and the ambitions of Canadians.” The challenges of our times, at least, are large.

So again: if the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund and the Freeland-Sabia investment tax credits are sufficient to catalyse (British spelling) new investment, why duplicate them?

And if they haven’t worked, why keep them?

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Two passages surprised me. If meaningless, they shouldn’t be in the speech. If meaningful… I can’t imagine how this government plans to deliver.

The first is on international relations.

Canada is ready to build a coalition of like-minded countries that share its values, that believe in international co-operation and the free and open exchange of goods, services, and ideas. In this new, fast-evolving world, Canada is ready to lead. This will be demonstrated in June, when Canada convenes the G7 Summit.

It’s news to me that Canada will “lead” a coalition it plans to “build.” Always try to use the best verb: the verb here isn’t “join” or “find” or “wave at” a coalition of like-minded countries, it’s “build.” I haven’t heard that France, Germany, Britain or Japan think there’s a missing coalition of like-minded countries or that Canada is well suited to lead it. I’ve heard some nervousness about how Canada has led the G7 all year. The “caretaker convention,” which after all is only a convention, was too scrupulously observed during the long Liberal leadership campaign and the general-election campaign for some allies’ taste.

But maybe there’s something that needs building that Carney can build! Excellent if true. Apparently this “will be demonstrated” in three weeks.

The other surprise had to do with what we used to call the knowledge economy. In the section about removing internal trade barriers, King and Carney say this new single Canadian economy will “build Canada into the world’s leading hub for science and innovation.”

Perhaps you have read me here before, explaining that Canada is not the world’s leading hub for science and innovation. It’s two years since I wrote this in detail, when I covered the report of the “Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System.”

That report, by Université de Montréal dean of arts and sciences Frédéric Bouchard, depicted Canada falling further behind other jurisdictions. “NSERC's budget is currently about 3.7 percent lower than it was in 2007 (in 2007 constant dollars),” Bouchard and colleagues wrote, “while the US National Science Foundation (NSF) saw its budget grow by 5.2 percent and the Australian Research Council (ARC) by 1.1 percent (in 2007 constant dollars) over roughly the same time period.”

“While Germany plans to increase research investment to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2025 and Finland to 4 percent of GDP by 2030, Canada currently sits at about 1.6 percent,” they added.

These are measures of science funding input, which isn’t necessarily synonymous with science output, and even less synonymous with “innovation” output. But it’s very hard to find any measure that puts Canada anywhere close to being “the world’s leading hub for science and innovation.” I wrote an extended lament about this state of affairs in this piece last year:

The end of the high-value economy

Chrystia Freeland’s last budget, a couple of months later, did provide for substantial new investment in university-based research, AI “compute,” grad-student pay, and other building blocks. But about 87% of the money it announced would only be spent in future years. And Carney has kept shtum about it since he announced for the Liberal leadership.

My hunch is that, for all of these reasons, when Carney makes the King say Canada will become “the world’s leading hub for science and innovation,” it’s just a rhetorical flourish. Or a bit of magical thinking: letting the oil sands rip and the provinces sell one another’s wine will unleash titanic forces we barely comprehend. I really doubt the new government means anything specific by what it had the King say, in these passages I highlight here.

But I’d be thrilled to be wrong.