Matt Gurney: The Carney salvation will be arriving 'slower than anticipated'

A man who ran as a national saviour is governing like an incremental optimizer. And we really shouldn't be surprised.

By: Matt Gurney

There’s a saying a buddy of mine likes to throw around. He says it’s a Joe Biden-ism, but apparently it’s a lot older than that — Biden himself seems to have picked it up from some local Boston politician more than 50 years ago. The saying is this: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.”

When Mark Carney was elected in his own right on April 28 of this year, I made a pledge to The Line’s audience. I would withhold making any judgment for six months. That was last week. I waited another week to see his budget. And now I’m stuck on the Faux Bidenism. I don’t think Carney is comparing well to the alternative — and the alternative isn’t Pierre Poilievre or even Justin Trudeau, but the version of Mark Carney Canadians voted for six months and change ago.

I like Carney more than the last guy. He doesn’t preach as much. He’s not treating his entire government as a gigantic comms exercise aimed at below-average schoolchildren, and that’s refreshing. Carney’s worldview — particularly on matters of defence, geopolitics, and economics — is much more in line with my own views than Trudeau’s ever was.

So I like that. And the man has done some good stuff so far. He’s killed some dumb ideas. Bringing over the King to read the Speech from the Throne last spring was a genuine win. His early decision to raise military pay was excellent and long overdue. If offered a choice between Carney and Trudeau, I’m taking Carney 100 times out of 100.

But here’s the problem. Better isn’t good enough, and Improvement Over Trudeau wasn’t the sales pitch. Carney set the standard by which he’ll be judged — he and his campaign went out of their way to raise the bar, turning an election about political change into an election about our existential survival.

It worked. The Conservatives had no reply and just stood there slack jawed as their 20-point lead evaporated, taking their leader’s seat with it.

But now Carney will actually be expected to clear that bar. Right now, he’s not — and it’s not even close.

Consider the budget. You can really see Carney’s roots as a business and finance guy here. Indeed, this really doesn’t look all that different from what we probably would’ve assumed a Mark Carney budget would’ve looked like if we’d all sat down to brainstorm what he’d put in it five years ago.

It’s not that Carney hasn’t acknowledged reality. The hypothetical budget we all could’ve imagined for him back in, say, 2020, would have had a lot more eco-green and less army-green. But overall, this is a technocrat economist’s idea of Real Change. As I joked with a friend a few weeks ago — if this is a wartime effort, we’re going to lose the war. We’re getting incremental changes — this is not anything close to a response to an existential threat, unless we think we’re being invaded by pissed-off auditors.

We have no business being surprised. If you haven’t read the long profile of Mark Carney prepared by Stephen Maher for Maclean’s about a month ago, you should. It’s eye-opening. The important part I want to highlight for you today is that Maher found plenty of proof that Carney has been thinking about being prime minister for decades. It really is one of the central themes of the piece.

Dreams can come true! How nice. But I can’t help but hazard a guess that this wasn’t exactly the scenario Carney had in mind. He probably spent the last few decades thinking he’d swoop in and give Canada’s economy a bit of a kick in the rear and fix some of the dumber productivity-sapping and wealth-blocking policies his predecessor was so fond of, but that, overall, the country would be fundamentally sound and secure in an endlessly enduring post-Second World War liberal order. His job would have been fiscal optimization, not national salvation.

Well now! The United States has gone nuts. Russia has invaded Europe. The Chinese are looking surly. The Indians have decided, apparently, that it’s A-OK to whack people on our soil. And the Middle East has somehow become even less stable and more violent — and that’s saying a lot. On top of all this, we have numerous social problems: a ruinous housing crisis, deep political polarization and division, stark generational divides, eroding public safety and law and order, and the unpredictably destabilizing forces of algorithmically torqued social media platforms becoming the central nervous system of our civilization, combined with the completely unknowable reality of emerging artificial intelligence.

And in Carney’s budget and his tenure so far, we see … like, some evidence of this, I guess? He made Evan Solomon AI minister, and he visits Europe a lot. Great? Anything else?

Watching Carney in action, one gets the sense that he came up with most of these ideas 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. It doesn’t mean the ideas are bad, but it does suggest that they’re not exactly tailored to the specific moment we’re in — with the admitted (and welcome) exception of the defence plans.

This would probably be fine, if it were still 2015, Year of the Theatrical Shrug, where gender parity in cabinet was considered major news. I miss 2015 too! But we’re in 2025 now, and things aren’t looking great, and we should probably be doing something about that, no?

You know who’d agree with me? Carney the candidate. He still had the best summary of the problem we face today with the United States: “They want to break us so they can own us.”

And how are we meeting the threat of America trying to break us? We’re going to double exports to non-U.S. destinations over a decade. We’re going to modernize our port infrastructure and see just what the Major Projects Office is capable of — starting in a few years. We’re going to throw a lot more money at defence, and though I wholeheartedly support this, the military probably can’t even spend all that cash, given its bureaucratic problems. Oh, and now we’re breaking down deficits into capital and operational, and we’ll let go of a bunch of civil servants.

But, like, slowly, you know? Through attrition.

That oughta do it. Nothing guards our sovereignty like a gradual and humane 15-per-cent cut in public-sector payroll.

And that’s before we get to the kowtowing — and let’s not mince any words on that front — to Trump. Like Jen said in her column earlier this week, maybe there’s some strategic necessity at play here. But it certainly doesn’t suit the national mood, and it also represented the first time since he took office that some of my Liberal friends have seemed genuinely worried and disappointed in the man they’re still publicly backing.

I’m glad Carney’s running this country, compared to Trudeau. But he’s not getting the job done, as he himself defined it, and we’re past the point where I think we can afford to assume that it’s just because he hasn’t had enough time yet. He’s had six months and a budget, and what I’m left with is an observation best captured by economist and housing policy expert Mike Moffatt in his own review of the Carney budget published earlier this week. Mike noticed that roughly half the money allocated to building homes in the Liberal plan was missing from the budget, and looked into that: “I asked officials about the discrepancy,” Moffatt wrote, “and was told [funds] would roll out slower than anticipated by the platform, but investments would ramp up in later years.”

Moffatt was talking about housing. But I actually think he’s put his thumb on the overall experience of Carney as PM: It’s not that we’re on the wrong track, per se, it’s just that the grand Mark Carney vision of national salvation is going to roll out “slower than anticipated.”

Oh. Okay, then.

So here we are. I can’t tell you I’m surprised. So I’ll simply say this: I think other Canadians are disappointed, and they’re only going to get more so, as more and more of what was offered arrives slower than anticipated. And when that disappointment and even anger sets in, it won’t be because they’re comparing Carney to the Almighty — just to the alternative he fooled a lot of people into believing that he would be.

But like I said above — he set the bar. He’ll have no one to blame but himself if the plan he’s been working on in his head for a few decades doesn’t exactly “meet the moment” in which he actually achieved his dream. Good luck with that, sir. We’re all going to need it.

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