Carney’s Enthrallingly Infuriating Tenure

On The Infuratingly Close PM

For everybody else, it’s the putt. But for me, it’s 4 shots before.

Thursday sees the British Open return to Birkdale for the first time since Jordan Spieth won it in 2017, and longtime readers will know the place Jordan occupies in my heart and in my mind. His win in 2017 was a masterpiece, but also a catastrophe - a comfortable lead thrown away, before arguably the greatest four hole stretch in the history of major championship golf. From the terrible drive on 13 onwards, he played boldly, and crazily, and as much fun as his Karen routine on 13 and the long putt on 15 punctuated by the famous “Go Get That” quote are, I’ve always been fascinated by something else - the iron he hit into 14, a 6 iron to 4 feet on one of the course’s toughest holes.

The putt is the narratively satisfying conclusion of the arc, but the resilience to hit what Spieth described as “one of the best irons I’ve ever hit” a hole after blowing the lead is what’s always stuck with me. Spieth is in so many ways a metaphor - for a rapid rise and an even more rapid fall, but also for resilience and for overcoming. Spieth is both the cause of his downfall and the source of eternal optimism, and it is the bane of my existence that I let him convince me that he can rise back to the mountaintop he once occupied.

In a lot of ways, how I feel about Spieth is how I feel about Carney. Spieth angers me in a way that few things and people do, because I care. Probably too much, if we’re being honest, but I care. And that is how I increasingly feel about the Carney government - because this government has immense capacity to be one of the greatest governments in Canadian history, but it could easily be this country’s greatest missed opportunity.

And I’m absolutely terrified we’ll look back at Carney the same way we look back at Spieth’s prime - a story of wasted potential as much as it is successful.

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Carney is as fundamentally fascinating as he is because of how much he is a break from Trudeau while not being nearly as much a break from him as some want to pretend. It’s in both TrudeauWorld’s interests to talk up the differences between Carney and Justin as it is for CarneyWorld. Carney looks like a moderate who is a true Different Kind Of Liberal, making it easier to win Conservative voters, while Trudeau’s reputation looks better with every Carney decision that can be spun as an abandonment of progressivism. It’s a weird thing where both sides of the party handover are incentivized to accentuate the differences, which is leading to a mostly botched understanding of reality.

Carney and Trudeau both believe in climate action, but both also believe that oil production is a means to national unity and that at the end of the day if oil is to be burned it should be done by Canadians for the purposes of making Canadians money. Both would love if Carbon Capture could be a thing, and both believe in the utility of carbon pricing, even if Carney had to throw the consumer carbon tax overboard for political reasons. Both believe that working with America where possible is fundamentally best, and both have understood that conceding on points of optics is better than digging in our heels at the cost of prosperity.

There are differences - Carney’s by no means as populist or as comfortable bashing the rich and the big end of town as Trudeau was, the crime policy is meaningfully more right wing, and Carney is certainly not as interested in the rhetorical flushes of wokeness as Trudeau was (take FeministForeignPolicy-Gate, where we had Carney announce that we have a feminist foreign policy but no longer have a Trudeau-era trademark Feminist Foreign Policy). Is it messy? Sure, but it’s clearly more consistently electorally successful than Trudeauism. But I don’t really get what this government is using its political capital for.

The problem for Carney is that his vision - as outlined in Values, or at least as I understand it from the maybe 25 pages I’ve read of it (so far) and his post-Bank of England work - and his actual governance work are at odds. The green climate guy is building another pipeline with government money, and we’re spending billions on defence infrastructure. There’s very little in terms of an overarching legacy being built, because Carney is still acting like a wartime consigliere, not a peace time Prime Minister. And that’s fine, I’m not mad that he’s treated this crisis for what it is. But I am unsure what comes next.

I don’t know what Carney would consider a success in five year’s time. I’m sure he’d say an increase in economic growth and a return of some high end manufacturing, but if it’s 2031 and Carney’s won re-election and whoever your favourite Democrat is in the White House and tariffs are gone, will the fact he managed us through the storm be enough? Does he want to just be a war time consigliere? Or does he have an actual vision for what Canada will look like when things are calmer?

The reason I am harsh on Carney is because I have hope for him. He is, far more than the last Trudeau years, clearly capable of being a radical positive force for our country. He is the best chance at being a liberal reformer, the kind of transformative politician this country to lock in the good of the Trudeau-era reforms while fixing the structural economic flaws two decades of putting out fires and not being to engage in deep thinking has produced. Is it fair on Carney that I’m holding him to a higher standard? Maybe not, but I know what he can do, so I expect it.

I don’t expect perfection from Carney, and it’s clear even just in what Carney clarified hours after my piece on the bridge deal that he is good at this. But he has the chance to be great. Carney has shown in flashes the combination of political instincts and policy ambition to be a great Prime Minister at a time this country needs one. But he also makes stupid mistakes that make that harder. That combination is why he is enthralling and infuriating in equal measure.

In so many ways, Carney is to our politics what Spieth is to golf. The question is, will we view the Carney honeymoon as the aberration that 2015 was for Jordo, or will Carney find the ability to do what Spieth hasn’t since Birkdale, and consistently rally back from mistakes with moments of greatness. The country’s waiting for a leader to be great, waiting for a leader to grab us and lead us into the future with ambition. To Carney, all I’d say is what Spieth said nearly 9 years ago: Go Get That.

God knows the country needs someone to.