Prime Minister Mark Carney.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The Mark Carney government is at its finest when it’s Mark Carney, standing alone, in front of a microphone. There are good things about that. There are also downsides.
On Wednesday evening, the Prime Minister was in the comfort zone, standing alone in front of a microphone. He said he’d given cabinet a collective mandate letter, listing the government’s priorities. You remember the election, so you know what they are.
Notable and new, however, is the last third of the letter, headlined “Working Together.” It features aspirational language on the return of cabinet government, after decades of presidential prime ministerships.
“We must deliver for Canadians as a team committed to real Cabinet government,” it says. Success “will require collaboration and coordination within Cabinet,” and ministers “will be expected and empowered to lead.”
But when the empowered Finance Minister led off his new mandate by saying there would be no budget this year, François-Philippe Champagne found himself big-footed by the empowerer-in-chief. Mr. Carney, speaking from Rome, several thousand miles from the cabinet table – standing alone, in front of a microphone – announced that there will be a fall budget.
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When Mr. Champagne was handed the file in March, there were suspicions that he would not be a finance minister in the semi-autonomous manner of Jim Flaherty or Paul Martin, but would be more like Baby Duck is to the méthode champenoise. The assumption was that Mr. Carney would be de facto finance minister.
That impression is reinforced by the PM not even leaving it to Mr. Champagne to reverse himself. It’s not “real cabinet government,” but then again, on the substance Mr. Carney got it right and Mr. Champagne got it wrong.
Other ministers in need of prime ministerial guidance included Minister of Housing Gregor Robertson, who said more affordability for new home buyers doesn’t mean lower housing prices, and Minister of Canadian Identity (yes, that really is the title) Steven Guilbeault, who opined that the PM’s plan for more pipelines is moot because Canada doesn’t need more pipelines.
Then there’s this business of the PM inviting the cameras to watch him sign things – executive orders or something – as he did last week with an income-tax cut. It’s a pantomime plagiarized from a certain U.S. president, which is weird enough for someone elected on Elbows Up. More importantly, a PM isn’t a president. Parliament has the power of the purse. He might as well have been doodling on foolscap.
And isn’t announcing a tax cut the finance minister’s job? Even a little bit?
Mr. Carney also came into office in March promising to pump Ozempic into the hide of government. To signal his intentions, he made a great show of unveiling a slimmed-down, pre-election cabinet.
But postelection, the wonder drug is missing, appetite has returned, and Carney cabinet 2.0 has the same BMI as the last Trudeau cabinet, tipping the scales at 39 members.
I don’t know how much cabinet count matters for national health, and far be it from me to fat shame a government embracing its cabinet body positivity. But Mr. Carney is the one who talked up the necessity of weight loss and enticed voters to swipe right with that lean first team. He more than implied the look was here to stay.
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As I write this, the PM still has not named a permanent chief of staff, which is the most important job in his office. He badly needs many other friends and loyalists with experience keeping the agenda moving in Parliament and keeping caucus on side.
Mr. Carney was once a senior bureaucrat, so he knows a great deal about how things get done by the executive and civil service. He may not fully appreciate how many other moving parts there are between him and getting anything done, or how the government sausage factory runs through Parliament. Unless and until it delivers, nothing ships.
Heading a central bank is more straightforward. There’s an interest-rate lever, and eight times a year you have to decide whether to push it up, pull it down or leave it alone. In an economic crisis things get more complicated, but in normal times it’s up, down or don’t touch, every six weeks or so. Then a press conference, where you get asked why you went up or down or didn’t touch, what the data say about up/down/don’t touch and what your predictions are as to the future of up/down/don’t touch.
It’s a good job for one smart and confident man, alone, at a microphone.
A PM’s job starts there, but it will finish anyone who thinks it ends there.