Carney’s Condo Comms Catastrophe

I Am Still Begging For A Comms Plan

“I know that I am banging the table for this but at some point it becomes obvious that this government’s stubborn refusal to do the basic blocking and tackling of governing a country - media management - is going to be its downfall.”

I know I like being right, but I’d rather the PM fix the problem than admit I was right.

Mark Carney’s condo bailout that is not really a condo bailout but also might be a condo bailout is going over swell with people. I haven’t really dug into the policy issues this week - between watching a ton of the World Cup and working on something I’ll be able to announce soon, my time has been more divided this week than usual. It’s made me something closer to a normal news consumer for a week, and on this story I’ve simply failed to see the logic in this move. I see … more of a logic now that the Feds have announced that it’s $145M of Federal money only, but it’s Friday and I’ll allow Housing experts to fight about the merits or dismerits. Where I am an expert, or at least something closer to one, is comms, where Carney had a hell of a quote Thursday.

“I don’t think we have done [a] good job rolling this out and explaining what this is” is, in classic Carney form, a fairly subtle way of saying that the government has fucking botched this. But this isn’t the first time the government has botched shit, it’s just the latest one. The quote I wrote in July 2025 that leads this piece was written when Carney allowed the narrative he was defunding women’s groups across Canada to flourish, all because he was cutting bureaucrats at the tiny government agency that managed the dispersion of grant money. As far as we can tell, 11 months on, there haven’t been notable cuts to those grant programs, because it was just essentially a clerical shuffle - moving responsibility for dispersing funds to other departments. But weeks of headlines about Defunding Women were avoidable and yet not avoided.

Remember when he said he couldn’t rule out Canadian military assistance in Iran? Remember when we supported the war, then “regretfully” supported the war? Remember when we had to put two statements out on the same day about Venezuela? Remember when Tim Hodgson had to do clean up on the MOU because he thought a promise of a Zoom meeting with First Nations would be enough? This is a systemic governmental problem, and it’s nice that Carney’s finally admitted it.

The problem with Carney is that he should know better. His signature accomplishment as a central banker was Forward Guidance, a belief that markets would respond best when the Bank of Canada (and then the Bank of England) laid out their thinking in greater clarity and greater detail, so that Bank decisions were less a roulette spin and better understood. And now, he’s leading an almost comically opaque government who views explaining itself as a failure. The Take It On Faith school of comms isn’t working.

The country voted to trust Carney, but they did not do so blindly. They did so because on balance, they believed he was the least bad of a pair of suboptimal outcomes - they didn’t want another Liberal government but they wanted Carney. They understood the scale of the crisis we faced, and they wanted a leader who could solve them. The problem with how Carney is handling that mandate is there is every reason to think the country would respond to seemingly off the wall solutions to crises. Canadians have risen to the occasion in this crisis, and even when it comes to something like immigration policy, Canadians have listened to and accepted an argument that goes against their instincts.

If this mystery might be a condo bailout is a good idea then explain why. If the argument is complicated make it anyways and then make it again. The country has listened to arguments about tariff treatments and the need for a pipeline potentially and the rolling back of regulations that many of us cheered the enactment of. When the government has made tough arguments, the public has followed them. And yet too often the government doesn’t even try to make a case, they just hope that we agree because it’s being proposed by good people.

The bailout is yet another example of how, no matter the ideological differences with Trudeau, Carney is as Liberal a PM as it comes, in that hubris will defeat him. Carney is being let down by a strategy to at isn’t taking advantage of the fact that we elected a Serious Leader for our Serious Times. Carney needs to do more - more media, more long form interviews, and more direct to camera digital that serves to explain difficult concepts and explain the government’s thinking.

Right now I can’t judge many of the government’s stated ambitions, because I have no details and bi benchmarks to hold the government to. It’s fuzziness designed to avoid giving a hard and firm deadline or benchmark to judge against, so that when we fail to meet whatever benchmarks we do have privately, it’s not a failure. But it’s not good enough. Carney is talking about doing a lot of hard and difficult things, from reorganizing defence procurement and realigning with Europe on security and away from America, negotiating with foreign and often hostile governments on tariffs and product access, and those things are going to be complicated and involve tradeoffs. Canadians can accept those tradeoffs when they know the tradeoffs, but they won’t when all they’re told is a pithy quote that sounds bad from the opposition and nothing to correct that.

The government needs to stop viewing communications and politics as a separate job from governing and policy. They are one and the same, because if you botch the politics of a rollout you won’t get to fancy the policy, no matter how brilliant. Canadians will not accept even the most brilliant policy if their understanding of it is not correct. And it is on the government to make sure that the public understands the policy.

The Carney government will be rebuilt this summer, thankfully, and that means the first year can be ensured to be an aberration from which they learned and grew. This government cannot allow this to continue. They cannot allow themselves to be the victims of news cycles dominated by opposition characterizations of their policies. They cannot allow themselves to be content with the fact that a story is misleading, which seems to be how they’ve taken many of these stories. Yes, the stories about the gutting of Women And Gender Equality Canada were misleading, in the sense that there were not the cuts to women’s shelters or female entrepreneurship programs that were thrown about. But it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been damage done to Carney’s reputation because of it. Right now none of it looks like it’s going to stick, because the Conservatives are sticking with an unpopular leader. But “The Opposition are incompetent, we’re fine” was a trap I and others fell into thinking about the CPC in 2022 and 2023, and it took a miracle to win the last election.

Poilievre’s Conservatives are not currently making us regret the abysmal state of the LPC’s comms, but that doesn’t mean the Conservatives won’t be able to. Either Poilievre will get his shit together and pose a real threat, or the Conservatives will contest the next election with a leader who gives them a chance. In both scenarios we have to have our shit far more together than we do currently.

The condo bailout is yet another failure of this government’s comms crisis. This government will not be able to muddle through with a take it on faith approach any longer. I’m just glad it seems the PM has gotten to the self evident place I’ve been for almost a year.