9 months.
It was 9 months ago yesterday that Chrystia Freeland resigned as Finance Minister, ending Justin Trudeau’s Prime Ministership and in the process saving the Liberal Party. It’s a complicated legacy for Freeland, one that is both littered with failures and yet we also owe the great political victory of April to, amongst others, her. Others with a more even-handed ability to assess Justin Trudeau and his time in office are best to handle her legacy, if only because my contempt for her boss means I’m not able to accurately judge how much of the hole we were in 9 months ago was also her fault.
It’s an interesting time for this to be happening to the Carney government - clearly they’re not that sad, given the seemingly offered diplomatic post in May. Freeland, despite her personal relationship with Carney and her act of political guts to save the party, is still the Finance Minister of Cancel Disney+ To Fight Inflation. But it's also not exactly been a clean start for the Carney crew.
The government’s decision making has been suspect - giving up the Digital Sales Tax and repealing some retaliatory tariffs without a tangible, announceable win is defensible though not without risks, attempting to kill the Air Canada strike action immediately was a disastrous decision, and the decisions to find all the money in the world for immediate defence spending increases while talking cuts elsewhere is certainly questionable. What’s been even worse is the Comms, or the entire lack of them.
The government’s decision to announce spending restraint through leaked memos with gaudy percentage cuts that completely distort the actual size of the cuts is unacceptable. The decision to let an alleged 81% cut to Women And Gender Equality Canada’s budget go unanswered at a time when Carney’s already under fire for being unconcerned with such issues is malpractice. There are answers to both of these problems that can be made - pointing out the cuts are against the Trudeau-era baseline increases, not to the current spending total, and pointing out that WAGE Canada mostly dispenses funds to various groups (female entrepreneurs and business owners, victims of violence, etc) and the cuts to the bureaucracy of WAGE Canada isn’t cuts to those programs - but they’re not bothering to make those cases.
Does whatever shuffle is going to come make that better? I don’t know. My capacity for any kind of optimism about Carney is not high these days, but I’ve underestimated him before. The announcement of Build Canada Homes is a start, and the fact the government is trying to straddle both a public builder of mostly non-market housing and is tentatively moving towards better positions on upzoning and the various YIMBY suite of policies they ran on is at least interesting. But man, the problems aren’t going to get easier from here.
The government’s got a very difficult balancing act to pull off this session - a combination of handling the American relationship and building a more resilient, and Trump-proof, economy, walking back the Trudeau era mistakes on criminal justice and immigration, rebuilding relationships and trust with the Jewish community and fighting against antisemitism while respecting free speech, and doing all in the backdrop of a UN General Assembly that is going to be almost entirely about Gaza and recognition of a Palestinian state. That would be a nearly-impossible task for a government running at full efficiency, let alone one full of rookies who still don’t know their briefs yet.
If the government is going to get its head out of its ass, it’s going to need to use this Freeland Cabinet resignation as an opportunity to reset not one face, but their entire attitude. The Take It On Faith approach that has marked this government so far has to end, and it has to be replaced by a government that views Canadians as adults who can understand a concept that’s more than 4 words long. At a time when the Conservatives are continuing to lean into Verb The Noun and other 3 word slogans - I guess this week’s is “Just Another Liberal” - Carney needs to respond by elevating the debate. You make the Conservatives’ sloganeering look like shit not by fighting fire with fire, but by showing them to be shallow morons who don’t understand the issues they talk about.
Carney isn’t a flashy PM and he’ll never be one - he’s the central banker Prime Minister and he’ll never win a charisma contest against any normal person (though he does beat Skippy), but that’s an advantage. That's an advantage if we have the ability to use it, and to exploit the opposition’s fundamental unseriousness. I'm just not super optimistic.
This is a crucial sitting for the government, one that has to be marked by progress, and not announcements. It’s unfair in a lot of ways to criticize a lack of concrete follow through - it’s been less than 5 months since the election, and while that is a long time in actual life, the ship of state doesn’t turn that quickly, or with that much nimbleness. Should it? Maybe, but being mad at the contractor who has delays to his plans because he finds asbestos in the walls is a stupid response.
The honest question about Carney’s next few months is how much he can avoid what killed Freeland’s old boss’ career. His government can either be insular, push out good faith critics and friends of the government who won’t always say nice things, and go down a bad path, or they can embrace dissenting views and actually find the value in them. It’s decidedly unclear where they’re going.
Carney is objectively one of the smartest people to serve as PM of this country and frankly of most countries. He is also a political neophyte who, while running a good campaign in 2025, needs to remember that how you do things can matter as much, if not more, than outcomes. In the business world, skipping to the end of a process is a good thing. When you’re immediately sending a strike action to arbitration, you’re fucking the dog royally. There’s a political instinct that technocrats often miss, and that will be crucial.
If Carney wants to be a successful PM he will need to listen to the kinds of voices that Freeland and her old boss marginalized - progressive, but by no means sycophantically Liberal, voices who want the government to go well but also want good governance. Whether Carney can bring himself to listen to that dissent will decide the course of the next half decade. Let’s fucking hope he does.
“Being mad at the contractor who has delays in his plans because he finds asbestos in the walls” is something we don’t often accept as reasonable. We are so damn impatient. Here’s a man we can all agree is pretty smart, a man with significant expertise in business, negotiations, and politics (yes, we disagree on this; I think he has had to manipulate politicians and policy a hell of a lot more than we give him credit for). He takes control of government and faces a crazed leader of the most powerful and influential nation in the world (that just happens to most dominant in our neighbourhood); he inherits an economy that has been allowed to be dependent on that nation, and a crew of mistrustful premiers, many of whom have spent the recent past discrediting the federal government he now has to remake in order to meet serious, very serious, challenges. And after five months, we wonder what’s taking so long. Bullshit! If progressives - and I count myself as very left - cannot accept that serious compromises have to be made to dig ourselves out of this mess, we’re doomed. I love your dedication and I agree with much of your vision, but I despair at your impatience or when you take a fairly minor event and blow it up into bad policy. With 25-plus cabinet ministers and a huge bureaucracy, there are going to multiple fuck-ups. But as long as they’re minor, I need to keep my eyes on the bigger picture. As Charlie Angus would say…the survival of my country as a democratic entity that does not cede control, economic or otherwise, to our insatiable neighbour.
I would add two things to this sound advice.
First, Carney should treat Canadian as adults. It is time for a serious conversation as the US goes into a recession and/or hyperinflation. Explain to Canadians that the economies are linked, and that if the US goes into a recession, Canada will likely go as well and mostly likely first. I believe we are already seeing this when the US is buying less from Canada, not because of tariffs, but because production is going down in the US and fewer input goods are needed.
Second, Carney needs to take velvet gloves off when it comes to provinces. Bail reform is fine, but if the provinces do not have the jail capacity, nothing is going to happen. Housing starts are up in most provinces, Ontario is falling behind. Why is this happening? Why does Doug Ford get a pass? Call it out, in a professional way. Because if you don’t, the federal government will get the blame.