Prime Minister Mark Carney waits to deliver remarks during Vaisakhi and Sikh Heritage Month celebrations at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa on Monday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
In the 2025 election, the firm of Carney Construction & Renovation Inc. put in a bid to remake the Canadian economy for a remade world. Twelve months later, they’ve been handed all the necessary permits, a blank cheque – and three years of runway.
A majority government.
A majority government gives its holder freedom and power. It means the freedom to go for a long period of time without having to face the electorate. It means the power to tackle hard choices – or retreat from them.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals have officially secured that freedom and those powers. They won the by-elections in two safe Liberal seats in Toronto, pushing them into majority territory. They also won the Montreal-area riding of Terrebonne, taking them even further into the endzone.
A majority comes with the tools to set the parliamentary agenda and timetable, and to push through legislation. Above all, it means that Mr. Carney will not face a general election until the fall of 2029.
What will he do with that power, freedom and time?
Governments in possession of these things have two broad paths before them.
The first treats a majority as merely a means to a bigger end. The second has majority government as the destination.
The first path includes an urgency to take actions that, though they may be unpopular in the short-term, will further an agenda and deliver long-term benefits to the country. The second path is the opposite: A majority gives you leeway to put off decisions, especially unpopular ones.
The PM got his job by presenting himself as Cincinnatus Carney – an honest man of common sense, above partisanship and outside politics, come straight from his plow in the (Brook)field of private equity.
He got the job by pitching the first path, not the second.
His promise is immense – but so too have been his promises. With a three-year cushion, Mr. Carney has the opportunity to live up to his promise by being ambitious, but also by honest-sizing some of his promises.
For example, he’s spent the last year talking about spending a lot more – infrastructure, housing, national projects, national defence – while taxing less. Voters know that’s too good to be true. They know that economic success can’t come from borrowing to give everyone a pony.
One example that may be a pony: The proposed Toronto-to-Quebec City high-speed rail project.
If what Team Carney is aiming for is an accelerated regulatory process, so that the private sector will finance, build and operate European-style fast trains, that would be an economic and fiscal positive. But a project cost of $90-billion has been bandied about, and it’s unclear whether most of that is to come from taxpayers.
Keep in mind that air travel in Canada comes at no cost to taxpayers. The major airports, and their tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure, are financed by fees paid by travellers. The air traffic control system, privatized a generation ago, runs on user-pay. The airlines are private businesses.
If Ottawa clears the path for private investors, arms-length public pensions and foreign investors to willingly sink tens of billions of dollars of profit-seeking capital into passenger rail, that would be a game changer.
What’s not a game changer? A huge subsidy from Ottawa, committed with no hope of return. That’s Via Rail on steroids. That’s Canada Post on steel wheels.
It’s just one example of where Mr. Carney may have to face disappointing some voters and interest groups for the sake of the national interest.
The last budget showed an unwillingness to do that. It talked a lot about huge new investments in economic transformation, but so far the government’s most expensive new spending initiative is a one percentage point cut to the bottom income tax bracket, at a cost of $27.2 billion over five years.
It was popular with voters, and surely helped in the 2025 election. But it will boost economic productivity by zero-point-zero per cent.
Meanwhile, the Carney government has a growing list of initiatives it wants to spend on. Something is going to have to give.
A majority gives Mr. Carney the freedom to level with voters, and his own party, about the things he can’t do, in order to afford what must be done.
At last week’s Liberal Party convention, the self-proclaimed Canada’s New Government allowed phantom of the opera Justin Trudeau to make an appearance for a mere two minutes, via video from a secure offsite location. Aside from the fact that his main message was that getting to party in the party city of Montreal would be, like, totally fun for Liberal delegates, the image of the former PM being treated as persona non grata was jarring – and understandable.
Seeing him again was like being reminded of your most humiliating mistakes. Like that time you joined a cult. Or when you put your life’s savings into Bre-X.
Once the most popular federal politician, he is now a source of regret and embarrassment – the Trudeaupox, under indefinite Liberal quarantine.
Mark Carney has three years. He must use them wisely.