Carney’s Categorical Comms Cockup

Damn Silly Things And Damn Silly Ways

Mark Carney has just refused to “rule out” joining military action against Iran in a press availability in Australia.

In the same spirit, I am refusing to rule out losing my fucking mind.

Carney’s having to weigh a lot of very complicated things as he handles Canada’s reaction to the events in Iran this past week, but at the end of the day he is coming out of this looking diminished and confused, all because he has no effective or coherent strategy on comms. He’s backed the strikes, but then ever so slightly hinted he did it regretfully, and now he’s saying he’s not ruling out intervention after Anita Anand said we had no intention of intervening on Monday.

Now, there are real reasons to think that Carney has more complicated considerations at play here. There is an economic relationship with the Americans at play, bombs are hitting other NATO allies which might necessitate some form of Article 5, and in general it’s worth noting the vast sum of things Carney knows that we don’t is immense. But it’s also unacceptable that I’m stuck pointing all of this out.

Carney could, and should, have said something much firmer that didn’t actually limit his mobility if things severely and substantially changed. “Barring substantial and immense changes in circumstances, we will not be involved militarily, as we haven’t been” does not “rule out” further actions, but it looks like it does, and doesn’t cause political problems.

Obviously if Iran bombs a Canadian embassy or there’s an Article 5 invocation, we’ve gotta be in this fucking mess. Those are obvious and not even worth talking about, and Canadians would understand that. But leaving the door open to intervention makes it seem like we’ll do it if Trump asks hard enough, which I’m confident is not what he means. But this is the problem for Carney - I can guess at what he actually means, but it’s on him to fucking tell us, not just expect us to take it on faith that the main meaning of his words isn’t actually what he means.

There are clearly moments when Carney wants the job of being PM to be separate from the job of politician. Carney wants us to follow where he leads, but he doesn’t get that that comes with expectations - answers to questions, and yes, scrutiny of those answers. Carney wants to be trusted and left alone to get big shit done, but he’s not giving us enough to trust him. On economic management, you could maybe argue he’s earned the room of a Take It On Faith approach to his decisions, but on foreign policy? It’s a contemptible approach to this work, and one that will end with us on the Opposition benches sooner than we need to be.

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“If you’re going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it in this damn silly way.”

I’m sure Carney - a graduate of Oxford and a former Bank of England Governor - will recognize this quote from Yes Minister. In a fight about reducing bureaucracy, Sir Humphrey decided to impart some wisdom on his political master, and it’s the only sentence I consistently think about when I think about Carney. I don’t think he’s doing that many damn silly things, but the number of things he’s doing in damn silly ways is immense. It’s far too high, because Carney is a PM focused on outcomes and not form. He has no problem appointing candidates for byelections, say, because he doesn’t care about local party democracy, he cares about getting good people into Parliament. An outcome, not a process.

That instinct isn’t all bad - Carney has and will continue to be more able to get shit done that Trudeau and Harper and Chretien never could, bound by the conventional political wisdom of their times. But it does mean he is unable to see when he is doing a damned silly thing in a damned silly way, and it is fucking infuriating to see as someone who wants Carney to be successful.

Comms is not something for other people to care about, it’s a crucial part of the job, and it’s a part that Carney’s outright neglecting. His treatment of the press this week was reprehensible, and the fact that he’s now taking such a cavalier approach to answering this question is yet more of a sign that the government isn’t spending enough time thinking about their message. Anybody just seeing that headline will think that we’re considering joining an ill-advised and absolutely bereft of exit plan military action without further provocation. “Well that’s not our policy”, I can hear advisers yell, to which my response is simple: don’t give an answer susceptible to fucking misinterpretation.

Knowing how the press will interpret the things you say is literally the job. If you don’t want it to be the job, you can leave and go make 7 figures in finance. But it is the fucking job. It is absolutely incumbent on Carney and his team to know that refusing to “rule out” strikes would lead to this shitshow, and either they knew and let him say it anyways, or they didn’t. Either way, it’s not acceptable. Carney’s entire argument is that he’s a serious man at a serious time. You can’t make him look like an indecisive flip flopper and expect that argument to hold. In its full context, the answer is not actually a problem. But assuming that the press will not take the most salacious parts of the answer is an assumption we cannot make.

Carney understood the power of statements when he was a central bank governor - he spoke rarely, but the whole concept of Forward Guidance was that the markets would hop skip and jump into place at any word Carney said if he told them what he was going to say was important. He needs to remember that ethos now, because he cannot be this fucking loose with his words.

I like Carney, and my instinct isn’t to criticize him. But at the end of the day, I am not the person that Carney needs to worry about losing - there’s a wide swathe of the country that will not have endless patience for the incompetence and arrogance of thinking that the country will take what they can get, and not demand more. I proudly voted for Bruce Fanjoy in April 2025, and if there’s an election any time soon I will do so again. But if the image of this government as smug bastards who do what they want for whatever reasons they fucking feel like cements itself, Bruce, and about 50 other good MPs who have done nothing wrong, will go from the government benches to the unemployment offices. It’s plainly fucking unacceptable to make these mistakes just because Carney doesn’t care about process.

I don’t think Carney’s preparing to offer Canadian troops to Trump’s nonsense willingly, but that’s not what he said. He said he’s not ruling it out. The fact that so many Carney press conferences need to be cleaned up isn’t acceptable. It’s not. And if there’s nothing else I can do for this government, then I’ll happily do my best Sir Humphrey, and simply tell them to stop doing damn silly things in damn silly ways.

Will they listen? For all our sakes, they better.