One Year Of Carney: Thank Fuck For Him
On The Anniversary Of Carney’s LPC Election
“This machine will, will not communicate/the thoughts and the strain I am under”
It sounds crazy now, just how fucked the Liberal Party was when Mark Carney announced he was going to run for Liberal leader. A week before his mid-January launch, I wrote a column arguing not that Carney shouldn’t get involved, but that I didn’t get the point of getting involved now, given the obvious electoral implosion coming for the Liberals. The premise of my point was that I doubted Carney would want to be opposition leader for 4 years, and given that that was the best the Liberals would ever do in 2025, it didn’t make sense to run now.
Boy, how bad has that column aged?
I have had a complicated relationship with the idea of Carney being Liberal leader - I was opposed to it for a long time, and even when it was clear he was the best choice, it was an argument that came from a place of pure pragmatism, not one of passion. There are columns that flow easily, and there are others that feel like walking through quicksand, even though intellectually I believe what I was saying. Writing my initial endorsement of Carney felt like that - a cold embrace of calculation, even though I knew he was the best choice as people declined to run. But then at some point it changed.
It’s undeniable that it was partially the polls getting better - my concerns with Trudeau were mostly that I didn’t want the party to get destroyed, so a leader who was boosting us in the polls was undeniably good news. But at some point it just got easier to make the case for Carney, bit by bit.
I’m never going to be Carney’s biggest fan - he and I are from different wings of the party, and that’s just a plain reality of the situation. It’s also absolutely the case that I stand by the pointed criticisms of last week. But as we sit here a year into his leadership of the Liberal Party, it’s worth attempting to communicate the strain the Liberal Party was under before Mark Carney, because it’s worth remembering that we were staring down the barrel of 250 Conservative seats before him. Carney took over a Liberal Party that was going to be dead for a generation and kept it in government.
That matters because the truth that is self-evident to me watching Carney - even at his most angering - is that it is so much better having an imperfect Liberal government than any flavour of a Conservative one. We want a perfect government, and we want to defend the one we support to make it seem like it’s perfect, but it’s not. But at the end of the day this government is far far better than the alternatives, because it is a government that will at least listen to the left and respond to criticism. And that, even more than a government that is closer to my ideological project, is what we need to be grateful for.
Carney’s government has fixed a lot of Canada’s problems - we’re moving away from a bail system that’s not working, we’ve stabilized an economy that was expected to be in recession, we’ve achieved real progress in expanding our export markets, and we’re doing it all in a set of circumstances that are far harder than anything Trudeau dealt with outside of COVID. It’s also happened while making the Liberals the strongest they’ve been in any of our lives in the trio of Prairie provinces and defusing the looming national unity crisis of a recalcitrant Alberta with another Liberal PM.
Carney’s done all of this without a Parliamentary majority and a crazy person leading the US, two facts that need to be understood as constraints on his position. And despite those constraints, he’s been remarkably effective. Carney has to be judged through the strain that he was and is under, and by that test he’s been about as good a PM as he could have been.
When he’s fucked up, he hasn’t allowed himself to be locked into those bad positions. His immediate effort to end the labour strife at Air Canada was nonsense, idiocy on stilts, but the fact that he bailed out of it as quickly as he came to it is a sign that he is the leader this party needs. The last administration’s biggest mistake was the ostracization of its critics, and as someone who has been tough on Carney when the moment required it, I’m delighted that they aren’t making that mistake.
There are plenty of potential landmines for Carney to manage in the coming months and years (hopefully) - from election timing to managing the American relationship and a million issues in between, Carney is not guaranteed a decade in office. If the Poilievre experience has done anything, it’s reiterated how hard it is to convert obvious advantages to wins. But there’s also nothing that really screams a warning sign to me, because only the diehards are really defending the lacklustre communications policy.
There will be many lessons from the last year bandied about, but to me this isn’t about centrism or moderation or any specific policy, this is about a broader way of doing politics. The problem with Trudeau’s end days, and with Starmer now across the pond, is that there was never a holistic approach to politics. Trudeau bounced from pro-corporate immigration policy to imposing costs on businesses through green regulations, he went from big government statist with the child care deals and the school lunch announcements to a right wing populist offering GST holidays, and then wondered why nobody believed him. Starmer’s many pivots, backflips, and contradictions similarly have landed him in no man’s land, hated by his left flank and disbelieved by the right flank he’s trying to win back.
Carney’s executing a coherent thesis of politics. Liberalism, but a brand of it that is less about words and more about actions. Carney is responsive to critics, he engages with the broad tent of our party, and has us well positioned to govern for years to come. He has survived the immense strain that he is under, and has made Canadians, and Liberals especially, proud of our leader
To many more years.
Oh yes … to many more years!
I appreciate this perspective from a Trudeau era Liberal. I wasn’t one. I never liked JT I found him placating and pandering and too much marketer and willing to “fight” and be performative in public while not seeming to spend enough time governing.
So I’ve been irritated by the petty criticisms of Carney. No more so than in this last week when things are serious and the last thing any of us needs is to be worried exaggerations and hand wringing over his word choice.
So this was refreshing.
And, you know, my only question for Carney’s critics now is when they might start second guessing their opinions about Carney before they start putting out pieces that second guess his character and judgment. It’s not that I don’t want people to hold him to account. It’s that the “gotcha” style bullshit I watched go by in the press seemingly aching to find some way to undermine him has been really something.
The bad boss narrative who had a bad temper and made people cry: nothing burger.
The airline strike: a nothing burger. The cuts to women’s services: a nothing burger the funding was made permanent
It’s just been one thing after another that right from the beginning. I’d like to know what it will take for him to have finally earned the benefit of the doubt so that what we see from are press are questions that help us understand what’s happening rather than taking the approach that everything is a risky mistake.
It’s exhausting. So it’s nice to hear someone simply acknowledge what the polls suggest most Canadians already know. We’re really really lucky that we had someone as smart as competent and as confident as a leader waiting to step up when we really need him. I don’t think he’s perfect but I trust his instincts his intentions and his willingness to admit when he’s made a mistake or he needs to make a change. It doesn’t mean don’t question but I think it’s time we see more questions asked in genuine good faith.