Flipping the Line: Eh, Carney's doing fine

Was it really fair for Line editor Matt Gurney to compare Mark Carney to FDR?

The Line welcomes angry rebuttals and responses to our work. The best will be featured in our ongoing series, Flipping the Line. Today, Clarke Ries on why he believes Matt Gurney is being too hard on Prime Minister Mark Carney.

By: Clarke Ries

You know, I always thought it was Napoleon — the whole “hundred days” thing.

Unsatisfied with involuntary Mediterranean retirement, in the spring of 1815 the Little Corporal took a stroll through France.

He started his tour in the scenic French Riviera, announced to the several thousand armed men sent to arrest him at the foot of the Alps that they could shoot their emperor if they dared, strutted into Paris, overthrew the government, reinstated himself as supreme ruler of all he beheld, installed a new constitution, quadrupled the size of the national army, and fought the Battle of Waterloo, all in a blistering hundred days (give or take a few in the name of poetic licence).

Ever since, the phrase “hundred days” has carried a mystique associated with vigorous leadership. In one of his lethally effective “fireside chat” radio speeches a few months after taking office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt characterized his initial efforts using the phrase “hundred days,” and I assumed he was indirectly invoking Napoleon’s ferociously-paced generalship.

Matt’s comparison earlier this month of Carney’s and Roosevelt’s initial time in office is worth spilling some ink over — for what it implies about how and when we should judge Carney, and perhaps for what it implies about where Canadian conservatism has found itself this summer.

My first objection to Matt’s comparison is purely technical. In his fireside chat, Roosevelt does himself a favour and starts the clock on his “hundred days” from the date of his inauguration. But in typically antediluvian American fashion, the president isn’t inaugurated until months after the election itself, which Roosevelt won in a landslide on November 8, 1932.

Roosevelt enjoyed 117 days between election and inauguration in which he could focus exclusively on preparing to hit the ground running the moment the swearing-in ceremony concluded. His “hundred days” actually ended on Day 217 after his election.

Matt’s article on August 1 marks a mere 95 days since Carney’s sudden appointment to the prime ministership was secured via the general election he called a week later: the point at which Carney could, like FDR after his own election victory, actually turn his attention to governing.

Day 217 won't arrive for Carney until December. To have accomplished anything at all by Day 95 actually puts him well ahead of FDR’s ghost at this stage of the first lap. If after a summer of assessing the terrain and marshalling his forces, Carney comes out of his corner after Labour Day swinging, he’ll be shooting about par with Roosevelt (considered by many to be one of the greatest presidents in American history). He won’t be behind schedule, to a shameful degree or otherwise.

My second objection to Matt’s comparison is contextual: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was uniquely made for that historical moment. Nobody could have been as prepared as he was to explode into action. It’s not just a high standard to compare other politicians to, it’s an unreasonable one.

Roosevelt was American royalty. He was the scion of not one but two legendary New England dynasties.

His mother’s lineage traces back to the colonists who arrived on the Mayflower (the vessel that founded the Plymouth colony, and with it, what became the United States of America). His father’s half of the family tree has its roots in farmland now occupied by the Empire State Building.

Between them, the Delanos and the Roosevelts produced three other presidents, the namesake of Rutgers University, a co-founder of the Bank of New York, the author of Little House on the Prairie, Hunter S. Thompson, and an astronaut.

By the age of 28, Franklin was a New York state senator. By the age of 30 he was assistant secretary of the Navy, a post he held for the entirety of the First World War. By age 38 he’d been nominated for vice president on the Democratic ticket (his loss in that general election to Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge was his first career setback, and presumably built character).

This was a man with an eye for the top job from the very start of his career, and every expectation based on his family connections that he’d get a real shot at it. When he was elected governor of New York in November 1928, both Roosevelt and his political contemporaries knew that it was a stepping stone, and that he would be contending in the near future for the White House.

And then a remarkable thing happened — remarkably awful for Americans, remarkably career-defining for Roosevelt. Less than a year into his term, Wall Street experienced a catastrophic meltdown that rapidly metastasized into the Great Depression. As governor of New York, Roosevelt didn’t just witness Black Tuesday and the subsequent collapse of the American economy, that civilization-destroying asteroid landed directly on his desk.

When Roosevelt officially became president on March 4, 1933, it wasn’t his first day grappling with the problems he set about solving over the next 100 days, it was more like his 1,534th. His inauguration was a battlefield promotion in a war against the same economic depression that he’d been fighting for the past four years.

A young Julius Caesar once wept in frustration upon comparing himself to Alexander the Great, because at the same age Alexander had accomplished so much more. Caesar’s compatriots, eyebrows presumably raised as far as they’d go, surely tried to soothe him by pointing out the bleeding obvious: Alexander inherited one of the greatest militaries the world had ever known at the age of 20.

It was not a fair comparison.

You know whose first hundred days I would have held to Roosevelt’s standard? Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre’s been working a bayonet in the trenches of national Canadian politics for 25 years. He’s been a member of Parliament from such a young age that he qualified for a pension at 31. He timed his run for party leadership and the prime ministership with exquisite care, waiting until all forces internal and external were aligned in his favour.

Now there was a man (I increasingly find myself thinking about Pierre in the past tense) whose sales pitch was implicitly Rooseveltian: that he’d prepared his entire life for this moment.

But Poilievre, this election cycle’s true analogue to FDR in terms of supposed ability to hit the ground running, didn’t rise to meet that moment.

Roosevelt’s “New Deal” campaign policy platform was transformative and inspiring. To quote the warrior-poet Jen Gerson, Poilievre’s policy platform, which was released only a week before election day, looked like “what Aaron Wudrick and five interns would come up with if you locked them in a Parliamentary hall closet with an endless supply of Timmies.”

Roosevelt pioneered the use of radio to deliver, in effect, long-form podcasts to as many Americans as he could possibly reach. Poilievre kept his interviews safe and his audience narrow.

Roosevelt spoke to the American people in his campaign speeches and “fireside chats” like they were adults. Poilievre spoke to the Canadian people like we were Neanderthals.

In the end, Poilievre didn’t earn sufficient trust that he was mature enough, thoughtful enough, and compassionate enough for the responsibility he sought. He only managed the begrudging and transient support of the “I would rather [sit on] a cactus than vote for Trudeau again” wing of the Liberal caucus.

So now, because Canada’s FDR wasn’t up to the moment, we’re not getting an FDR. We’re getting the other guy. We have bid Mr. Smith to come to Washington.

Mark Carney is two generations removed from working-class Irish immigrants. He’s one generation removed from a man who hustled his way up from waiting tables in a railroad dining car, through teaching jobs in the Northwest Territories, to eventually become a professor at the University of Alberta. Carney is a true son of Canada, but he’s far from being Canadian royalty.

Nor is there any sign in Carney’s biography that he held the sort of lifetime political ambitions that marked Roosevelt’s ascent. From what I can tell, the dude was a middle-class striver who had a textbook — impressive, but textbook — investment banking career until, oh, about the age of 55.

If you asked 25-year-old Carney about his life goals, I’m reasonably confident he would have said something like “I want The Economist to print my obituary,” not “I want an oil painting of my face mounted in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill.”

For better or worse, Canadians knew they were signing a guy with an unparalleled executive skill set but no particular familiarity with Canadian politics. Or for that matter — given his time at Harvard, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, and the Bank of England — Canada itself.

We hired a hatchet man who has wandered through the halls of global power, earning the respect of seemingly everyone he encountered along the way, and turned him loose in Ottawa to spend the summer asking increasingly discomfited cabinet ministers and senior civil servants, “What would you say you do here?”

That lead time is a price Canadians have collectively decided we were willing to pay to let an outsider get up to speed. I expect results from Carney, but I trust him — for now — to deliver those results on a timetable that allows him to properly assess plans and people, and execute both as necessary.

And it seems to me that the early returns on Carney, assessed not by what he hasn’t got around to doing but by the actions he has taken, appear promising.

Carney seems to value and insist upon professionalism from his appointees. Evidence is growing that Carney expects results from them, too: for example, his order for cabinet to find major savings in their ministries by the end of summer, and presumably upon finding them, to shake their hand and wish them luck with their job hunt.

I am also surprised by how much of Carney’s effort appears distinctly conservative in character, like his June announcement of a plan for Canada to hit its long-neglected two-per-cent NATO spending commitment this year. He’s already earmarked the necessary funds and laid out a rough draft of where the money will be spent (new aircraft, armed vehicles, and ammo, repair and maintenance of existing ships, etc.).

How much more was it reasonable to expect between the start of May and the end of July? Especially when the Conservative party’s stated plan on that file was “we will work toward the 2% NATO spending target”, presumably in the same way reluctant bachelors promise their girlfriends they’re “working toward” the idea of marriage.

I suspect questions of that nature are going to cause some consternation among Canada’s conservatives.

Until the electorally devastating last-minute combination of Trudeau’s resignation and Trump’s inauguration, Canadian conservatives had justifiably high hopes that after 10 years of progressive rule, it was finally their turn to govern: to improve the lives of Canadians in a manner that aligned with their temperament and with an eye toward their priorities.

After the election, I suspect many Canadian conservatives understandably found themselves glowering from the top of Mount Crumpit at the Liberal Whos down in Whoville, and the infernally joyful noise they were making about the Right Honourable Prime Minister action figure they’d found under the tree (“Now With Dress Code!”).

But a spectacular irony has been taking shape in Whoville this summer: although a Conservative failed to take power, a conservative nonetheless appears to have wound up in the prime minister’s chair. Not a reactionary, not a populist, not whatever the Republicans have become, but an actual old-school conservative of a kind I’d feared had gone extinct.

For perfectly relatable reasons, many conservatives are primed to grouch at whatever the new Liberal leader does, and that dynamic appears to be leading in turn to the irony to crown all ironies: conservative criticism of the prime minister for governing as a conservative was once supposed to.

Seized with the knowledge, for example, that beginnings are delicate times.

Or for behaving insufficiently like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a progressive icon historically reviled by conservatives for his hasty demolition of the traditional in favour of the unprecedented.

For 10 years, Canadian conservatives prayed for a boat. God may have finally sent them one, and it’s the wrong colour.

Only time will tell whether that is what Carney proves to be, and if so, whether the focus of Canadian conservatives eventually settles on the boat’s paint job or its sailing qualities.

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