My old tennis partner just became prime minister

Carney is profiting from a shift in the public mood from the politics of anger to the politics of reassurance

It’s not every day that your former tennis partner is sworn in as prime minister.

I have always assumed there would be no professional disharmony with Mark Carney’s political ambitions because I didn’t think he’d ever take the plunge.

Hamlet-like indecision and a fantastic career opportunity in the UK, as Governor of the Bank of England, persuaded those who have known him for years that the day would never come. Even on his return from England, he twice turned down the opportunity to become finance minister in the Trudeau government - in large measure, I think, because he disagreed with a ministry that spent so much and invested so little.

But it turns out he was more like Macbeth than Hamlet. He seized the moment, after Chrystia Freeland struck Justin Trudeau the fatal blow, with almost indecent haste.

It creates an issue for any journalist to have friends in high places. But we are not wallflowers at the orgy, to use Nora Ephron’s memorable phrase. There are kindred spirits on all sides of the political divide and, if we are doing our jobs properly, we remain committed to the public interest regardless - offering loyalty to country always, and loyalty to governments when they deserve it.

We don’t know how Carney will perform in the gladiatorial amphitheatre he formally entered on Friday. He was in good humour as he encountered reporters outside Rideau Hall, having wandered the short distance down the hill from his home. On a good day, I could hit the Governor General’s residence with a five iron from his back yard.

I wish him well but he will do his job and I will do mine, with “rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability”, in the words of one of my esteemed peers.

Carney’s cause has been aided greatly by a discernible shift in the public mood, from the politics of anger and resentment that characterized the latter Trudeau years and propelled Pierre Poilievre’s ascent; to the politics of reassurance, where normal people seem to want someone who understands how the great wheels of trade and commerce turn, and who has a plan to return their world to the way it was just two short months ago. Political instability has inspired feelings of personal and financial insecurity. The former bank governor’s arrival on the scene seems, for many, to be serendipitous, if not providential.

As former Jean Chrétien communications director, Peter Donolo, said on CPAC, Poilievre is running a 2024 campaign against “Carbon-Tax Carney” and it’s 2025.

Carney has promised a “government that meets the moment” - a smaller, experienced cabinet that moves faster than Trudeau’s.

His big advantage is that he scores much better with Canadians when they are asked who between the new prime minister and the leader of the opposition would be most likely to roll over for Donald Trump.

His biggest drawback, as the Conservatives pointed out, is that 20 of the 23 ministers were part of a cabinet that was not associated with speed or efficiency. That may not satisfy the desire for change, which remains sky high.

With Lincolnian generosity, Carney has brought his leadership rival, Chrystia Freeland, back into cabinet as transport minister. That hardly screams evolution. Steven Guilbeault, the former environment minister has been put back into the culture ministry, where, as my colleague Lorne Gunter said, he is likely to do for free speech what he did for oil and gas. Many of the other senior players like foreign affairs minister, Mélanie Joly, will carry on regardless in their existing portfolios.

Like the Trudeau government, Carney is light on commitments to defence and heavy on talk about climate change, which will hardly be a problem if we’re all driving around in Bennett buggies.

The pledge to reach 2 percent of GDP spending on defence by 2030 looks much too little, too late in a moment when Poland is requesting NATO to increase its floor on spending to 3 percent and is making military training compulsory for adult males.

But these are issues that are unlikely to shift votes until after the storm has passed.

What is clear is that the Liberals are back in the game and it is in large part down to to Carney. Canada’s future is in the hands of the erratic resident in a comfortably padded lunatic asylum in Washington. The most encouraging thing I have read recently was a post on social media by Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino that said people in Trump’s circles on Wall Street and in D.C. are talking about the need to resolve the tariff disputes with Mexico, Canada and the E.U. in one universal, face-saving, compromise agreement.

Trump didn’t talk about the 51st state before Trudeau’s visit to Mar-A-Lago in December, when the prime minister told the president that the Canadian economy would be devastated by tariffs. That seems to have been the genesis of Trump’s deluded economic war. The idea that Canada would be easier to annex if its economy was forced to collapse has wormed its way into the president’s brain and is eating up what’s left of his sanity.

The consequences are tangible. Trillions of dollars in wealth have been incinerated as stock indices have tumbled - the S&P500 is down more than 8 percent in the past month; the Dow Jones by 7 percent (intriguingly, the TSX is off by just half that). Americans will put up with a lot of political gibberish but they will surely not tolerate plunging 401(k) retirement plans.

It will be domestic pressures that dissuade the president from the annexation madness, if he is to be dissuaded.

The Canadian prime minister, whoever it is, has a role to play by being resolute, consistent, respectful…and patient. There is no such thing as a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever, and one way or another this will end.

That’s when Carney’s problems might really start.