Mark Carney is still the prime minister of Canada, an office he assumed prior to this most recent federal election. But now, he’s also the MP for Nepean, joined in the House of Commons by 167 other Liberal MPs who learned of their victories on Monday night (or, in some cases, Tuesday). This is, astonishingly enough, Carney’s first job as an elected politician of any kind — until now, he’s held not so much as a school board seat. Obviously, voters didn’t find this to be a fatal defect in his sales pitch, but it does leave us without an evidentiary record about the kind of prime minister he’ll be.
What we do know is that the problems facing the country aren’t terribly different this week than they were when Carney was sworn in on March 14th. Donald Trump still exists and is still president of the United States; Canada is still dealing with a suffocating housing crisis; and Carney can’t call on the support of all that many like-minded premiers at the provincial level.
Taking these challenges in order: Trump, or one of his close advisors, had the minimal amount of sense it took to stay quiet on the North American front for most of the federal election campaign, but that sweet reason is unlikely to prevail in this White House. That is, Canada should not expect to see a general removal of the tariffs that Trump loves so much. Already, Trump has announced some measures to soften the blow of tariffs on the U.S. auto sector — but the measure will do little to nothing to benefit Canadian automakers, according to industry groups. Tariffs are still expected to take effect on Saturday, and the news is already bad in Oshawa where GM has announced layoffs Friday morning.
But who knows? This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. Maybe he’ll change his mind, once again. Which means we’ll be stuck in the worst of both worlds, with all the costs of uncertainty and none of even the imagined benefits of actual policy implementation. Pity the public servants at the Financial Accountability Office here in Ontario, who tried to model the economic impact of tariffs on this province (short version: it’s bad) and had to include the caveat that “there is significant uncertainty about the status of US tariff policy.” A masterstroke of understatement.
More broadly, even if Trump were to remove all tariffs on Mexico and Canada tomorrow (a profoundly unlikely event), so long as his trade war with China continues, Canadian economic growth is imperiled. In short, there’s very little Canadian policymakers can do if the president is hell-bent on engineering a recession in his own country — and the Canadian economy is still so dependent that when America sneezes, our workers all catch colds.
If his relative powerlessness on that front frustrates the PM, he’s not going to love the options before him on the single biggest (domestic) economic issue facing him, and one that he made a major focus of his election: housing. Carney and the Liberals well understand that the housing crisis is choking off Canadian economic growth, and they correctly want to both incentivize the building of homes and see the government take an active role in building more homes itself.
That’s all genuinely good news. The problem that Carney will face, and the one Trudeau faced before him, is that the governments with real leverage on the housing file are provincial, not federal. Carney can do a lot: the federal government can genuinely bring a lot of financial firepower to bear, not least because it regulates the banks. But houses have to be built somewhere in the real world, and the real world alas is heavily regulated by the provinces.
What is true of the housing file is true elsewhere in the country: there’s 13 provincial and territorial premiers, each with their own interest and constituents they need to answer to. That too is going to be a test of Carney’s political abilities. While nobody seriously questions his ability to understand complex policies, there’s a whole other side to politics: managing a caucus whose gratitude for your election win can evaporate overnight if they’re not carefully fed and cared for; keeping the acrimony with opposition parties from becoming so toxic that it paralyzes your ability to pass a legislative agenda; and yes, maintaining working relationships with premiers who can muck up your agenda even more surely than the opposition in Parliament can.
For anyone else, simply surviving in politics long enough to make it to the prime minister’s desk might itself be ample demonstration that they’ve got the “soft” skills to manage these kinds of essential relationships. Carney is obviously not without a record of managing productive relationships; being a central banker during both the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit wasn’t a dry technocratic exercise in spreadsheet-filling. But he has yet to fill out his record in this most political arena.
Winning in politics at the national level comes with a very Canadian kind of fame and truly impressive powers that can be brought to bear to solve some of society’s biggest problems. The downside is that those problems are indeed big, they stymied Carney’s predecessor more often than many people anticipated, and now it’s Carney’s job to fix them — or take the blame when this Parliament ends.