Carney, Shanahan, And The Perils Of Continuity

On How To Succeed

It was always (at least) a year too late.

The Leafs fired Brendan Shanahan this week, a necessary decision that comes somewhere between 2 and 4 seasons too late. It’s symptomatic of Shanahan’s whole tenure as Leafs President - despite doing a bunch of good at the beginning around cultural renewal and institutional rebuilding, almost every major decision was a day late and a dollar short, and the Leafs have paid the price for it at every step.

The decision to keep Mike Babcock after 2019’s blown 3-2 series lead to Boston before firing him that fall cost the Leafs the 2019-20 season. The decision to empower Kyle Dubas to allow key vets like JVR, Bozak, and Hyman to be “own rentals”, and therefore walk out the door for free instead of getting assets, cost the Leafs key picks and prospects to replenish the talent pool and left the Leafs over reliant on aging talent. The decision to keep the core together in 2023 and fire Dubas when he was going to trade someone (obviously Mitch Marner) before No Movement Clauses on Mitch, Auston, and Nylander kicked in will end up costing them Marner’s services for free. It cost them the last two seasons, as a core that never had any chance of winning was retained beyond the definition of insanity point.

I could go on (and on and on) about this - seriously, how the fuck did MLSE let Shanahan win that power struggle in 2023? - but that’s not the point of this site’s politics coverage. What is is that Shanahan represents the trouble with moving too late, and ignoring the warning signs of potential danger in lieu of supporting the crest and essentially taking the position that there’s no point criticizing until things blow up.

One of the biggest problems with all powerful institutions is the idea that we owe them deference. We don’t. Political parties, governments, hockey teams, companies, they all like to think because of the fancy titles and big paychecks they’re immune to criticism, or at the very least we must be deferential to their knowledge and wisdom. The idea that we should wait for more before we try to push Gregor Robertson to a better position on housing, because somehow Carney must know something to have appointed him to the job and we owe Carney some deference, is the kind of thinking that kills us. We need to be honest, whether said honesty is popular or not.

Look at the NDP, which roundly ignored criticisms by me (amongst others) about Jagmeet Singh and then acted shocked when they lost official party status. Or the Alberta NDP, who were making mistakes as of November 2021 and whose leadership didn’t engage with the many critics - myself included - who were pointing that fact out for over a fucking year. Or the Trudeau Liberals, who refused to engage with critics and nearly left the Liberal Party in ruins. Do I need to continue this bit, or have you gotten the point yet?

The tendency to trust the leaders that they know what they’re doing ends in disaster. We need the Carney era to be the era of constructive criticism, but moreso of active engagement with the broad suite of public intellectualism and critics. In the Trudeau era, and certainly in Ford’s Ontario and Smith’s Alberta this is still true, that Ministers and the PM didn’t feel the need to engage with the criticism. Their hand waving away of their critics was often all they’d bother doing, as opposed to explaining themselves.

Will every idea I throw out over the coming years be smart? I’m sure not. Will every policy proposal from Moffatt or the More Neighbours crew or the various defence thinkers or supporters of Canadian industry or whoever else will try and influence this government be smart? Definitely not, and I say that with all love to those people. We’re not infallible, and we’re never going to be. And I’m not saying that every one of my ideas columns deserves a Ministerial response, even though I’m sure some bad faith critic will say that’s what I’m implying. But I want a government that feels responsive to their critics, and if they think we in aggregate are wrong, explains why.

We have Ministers at Finance, Foreign Affairs, Defence, Justice, Industry, and Housing who have never stood in the House in those jobs. None of those Ministers were in those jobs on December 15th, 2024, the real last day of the Trudeau era, and those are probably the six most important jobs in government right now. That means there is an enormous opportunity to mold and shape the future of government policy in those areas. But, if we take the lesson that there’s no point applying pressure until after the decisions are taken we might as well twiddle our dicks for all the impact it’ll have.

We also have to acknowledge that doubling down on progressive orthodoxies hasn't worked. In the way that Shanahan doubling and tripling down on this core hasn’t worked for the Leafs, the Liberals cannot just slap a fresh coat of paint and a few new faces on their problems while keeping the core of Trudeauism alive. (Does this analogy mean Gregor Robertson is Scott Laughton? Honestly that might be meaner than anything I’ve said about the guy so far.)

The reality for the Liberals is that winning this election could be the start of a new decade of Liberal rule, a period of increased seriousness in public life and of better outcomes that built off the well intentioned Trudeau era and its successes, or Carney could be Couillard. (Carney getting Wynne’d would require the NDP to get its shit together to such a degree I don’t think it’s possible.) Hilariously, I found myself the optimism in a conversation for the first time in probably 15 years, because I genuinely believe that Carney can be a transformative PM and someone who can deliver immense positive change. The opportunity is there, and on the whole Carney’s campaign and decisions have proven an ability to bail out of bad decisions (Paul Chiang, anybody?) in due time. Would I like him to be faster at times? Sure, but let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Carney surrounds himself with good people, and people who don’t require a purity test. His Cabinet has the potential to do great things, and the early reports that he’s willing to chew Ministers out for fuckups is a good sign. We need to see results, but right now I’m more optimistic about the future of this country than I’ve been since 2016, and I’m eternally hopeful Carney justifies that optimism. But I’ll still be critical where I think it’s worth it. If Carney is the PM he claims to want to be, he’ll embrace it.

We need to be early, not late, on making key decisions. We need to be proactive and not responsive. We have to be willing to take tough decisions and not merely react. There is endless capacity for Canada to flourish in the next 5 years. Let’s not fucking waste it.

(As we ramp up coverage of the Carney era, national unity threats in Alberta and Quebec, and attempt to use whatever influence I have to influence this new government, consider a paid subscription. All work will remain free but a paid subscription is a way to support my work and enable me to continue to do what I love.)