There's a trick with a knife I'm learning to do

Part Caretaker Convention, part Great Reset

Later, we get to vote on whether he made it to the podium

The last Liberal leader promised real change too. Apparently this one uses a different definition.

“It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Mark Carney said after a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust. But there will be no turning back.”

Uh, sir, you’re sounding kind of categorical —

“The next government — and all that follow — will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States,” Carney said.

So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is — 

“Coming to terms with this sobering reality is the first step in taking necessary actions to defend our nation,” Carney said. “But it’s only the first step.”

In a career that now stretches back to before many of my readers were born, I’ve covered speeches like this before, of course. Maybe five. Well, two. No, strike that, this was new.

“Over the coming weeks, months, and years we must fundamentally reimagine our economy,” the rookie leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said.

Well, you know, “fundamentally” can mean a lot of things — 

“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”

Oh, so you mean fundamentally.

In French, a language that fits this Savile Row man like a hand-carved barrel — it covers the essentials while leaving the odd splinter — Carney did a version of the Doug Ford thing where he asked for a strong mandate to undertake negotiations. Unlike Ford he put no real effort into selling it. Was he being overconfident? Not at all, he said, as every man ever has in response to that question. He still needs to “win every vote,” he insisted.

But it “would be better” to have a large mandate “to have a large, comprehensive negotiation, the most important in our life.” Here he didn’t pause, really, so much as consider the ramifications of what he was saying while the words were still coming out.

“Especially in my life. When I was born the Auto Pact was created.” Which sounds grandiose, sure, but to be fair I believe Carney, who was born in Fort Smith in 1965, was merely asserting correlation, not causality. “And now it’s over.”

Wait, what? The AUTO PACT is over? That’s like saying it’s time to shut the ski operation at Whistler down, if Whistler contributed 11.5% to Canada’s manufacturing GDP. “It’s very serious, this situation,” he concluded, mildly.

Later, some of the early reaction to Carney’s remarks seemed to me to skip too lightly over the plain meaning of the Prime Minister’s words. And yes, it feels odd to call him the Prime Minister. We haven’t yet had a vote on the matter, although I’m told one will be held shortly. But the people in the cabinet room were people Carney had appointed, and the Parliamentary Protective Service let them in, so I guess in a rough-and-ready way, he really is — Anyway. It’s possible Carney’s words meant nothing. Or that he’ll be forced to eat them later. Or that, it being election season, he’ll never get a chance to implement them. In the latter case, the Carney Tariff Scrum of March 2025 would become an item of wonk trivia, like Kim Campbell’s genuinely impressive government reorganization of 1993.

But plainly this air-quotes Prime air-quotes Minister believed he was saying real things, and it probably helped that they were things many Canadians have been thinking already. “We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere,” he said. “And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations. But we can make ourselves more productive and therefore more competitive. We can break down internal trade barriers, we can build a stronger and more resilient economy. And that’s squarely what I’m focused on as your prime minister.”

Counterpoint: things previously thought impossible are sometimes impossible. The hardest speed limits to break are the ones that have held for generations. The laws of gravity are very, very strict, as the natural scientist Billy Bragg wrote. Mark Carney will know this better than most, having been the sometimes grumpy concierge for Brexit while he was Governor of the Bank of England. There are important differences between Britain then and Canada now, but for us as for them the easiest market is the continent of like-minded souls next door, and switching it out for some other market somewhere else isn’t a weekend handyman job. It may even be impossible, and not merely thought impossible.

But neither did Canada dive into this pickle on a whim. We thought we had a deal (Auto Pact, 1965). We thought we had a deal (CUSFTA, 1988). We thought we had a deal (NAFTA, 1994). We thought we had a deal (CUSMA/USMCA, 2020). Donald Trump has other ideas, and the Second Couple is measuring the curtains in Greenland, and the Secretary of Defence is a hand-engraved piece of work, and the Secretary of Homeland Security has been playing the Abu Ghraib home edition, and at some point one finishes counting the odds and starts backing toward the exit.

Carney gave only hints about what all this might entail. Donald Trump wants to move investment and production in five strategic areas home to the US, Carney said: pharmaceuticals, lumber, steel and aluminum, the auto sector and semiconductors. Tariffs are the main tool in all those sectors. In response to Trump’s five-point palm exploding heart technique, Canada needs to expand domestic production and third-country trade capacity in all of those sectors, Carney said. The automobile policy he announced just before Trump’s car tariff announcement is a rough model for action across the five sectors.

“The core of that is to build out the auto sector and our auto supply chain in Canada, as much as possible, instead of autos going back and forth across the border six times and getting a tariff each time,” Carney said. “And now, knowing that, integrating the Canadian auto industry and backwards-integrating into Canadian auto parts to minimize that—and backwards-integrating more, developing critical minerals, and developing the Ring of Fire.”

His sentences get long when he’s eager to explain something. “There’s a comma there,” he said sheepishly after one paragraph, to interrupt a journalist who was trying to ask a second question before he was done providing a (real! substantive! Very much not like Justin Trudeau!) answer to the first. To say the least, there’s a stark difference between Carney when he wants to answer a question and Carney when he doesn’t. His performance on Thursday at cabinet outs was masterful, a word I did not think I’d ever need to describe a Carney scrum. Whereas his performance on Wednesday fielding questions about a Bermuda tax shelter was so incomprehensible that I used AI to set part of those earlier remarks to music, as one does:

There are sturdy rebuttals available to Carney’s proposal for a continent-wide, rest-of-our-lives Battle of Five Points. One is: this is how Liberals talk when something surprising happens. In 2020 people started getting sick with a new virus, and suddenly progressives all over the world were dreaming dreams of high-speed rail. Very much including Canadian Liberals and the denizens of their ideological near abroad.

I’ve run through the quotes before, but it’s always worth remembering. “It’ll be a good time to be a progressive government. There are a lot of us who are dreaming big,” one source in the Trudeau government told Le Devoir. “Justin Trudeau seems to really grasp the immensity of the moment.” Indeed, Trudeau discerned an “opportunity for a reset,” to “reinvent economic systems.” Weeks after the lockdown began, the great public-service empire-builder of our time, Michael Sabia, was in the Globe urging governments to “begin thinking now” about “a new generation of infrastructure” and “spending on education” and “retooling our health-care system.” Two weeks after the ink dried on that op-ed, Sabia was board chair of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Trudeau fired his finance minister — because Trudeau was chatting on the phone with Mark Carney — and chirped about the “opportunities” created by a global pandemic. One needn’t indulge the more extreme reactions to this “great reset” talk to note merely that excited Liberals are not always productive Liberals.

The other rebuttal is that there’s this other guy, right over here, a fellow by the name of Poilievre, who has been proposing for years the remedies the Liberals are so proud to discover. Deregulation and resource exports, mainly. No less an authority than Brian Lilley has written that Carney is sounding more and more like a Conservative, albeit one who was endorsed by Catherine McKenna and whose Quebec lieutenant is Steven Guilbeault. It must be more than galling for Poilievre to ride into campaign with his pre-approved construction permits and his internal trade-barrier bulldozer, only to look around and discover that Carney has mowed his lawn like the grounds crew at the Royal Ottawa.

All he can do is ask whom Canadians trust to implement these ideas, the Parliament Hill lifer who was single-wicket before single-wicket was cool, or the dapper banker standing in the smoking crater where Justin Trudeau was standing just the other day. To Poilievre and all his supporters the answer is maddeningly obvious. He may be discovering that he miscounted his supporters, or that voters, like countries, are sovereign.

I will not tell you how to parse the competing claims. Today we’re a month away from learning what you and your neighbours made of it all. But it could not now be more obvious that the question of this election is, “If Trump, then what?” And that voters are evaluating everything — plans, personalities, records, interests, hopes and fears — by that stark unlovely light.