Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to reporters following a swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, on May 13.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Our new government revealed its lithe, lean, slimmed-down figure on Tuesday. After much hard work and self-control, the Weight Watchers check-in shows Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet tipping the scales at a mere 39 members: the PM, 28 ministers and 10 secretary of state junior ministers.
As promised, it’s a remarkable physical transformation from the bloated and overstuffed Trudeau ministry, which in its final years had … let me check my notes … ah yes: 39 members.
I guess it’s the new math. Critics might call it Carney Math.
Here’s some more. The new cabinet was presented as a sharp break with the past, and there are 24 new faces. But with the notable exceptions of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson (former head of Goldman Sachs Canada; current presumed minister of pipeline deals), the new front bench is a mimeograph of the old Trudeau front bench.
Outside of quantum mechanics, a thing cannot exist simultaneously in two different states of being. Though it is possible in politics – and in Canada, often necessary.
There’s also a new calendar. The PM said on Tuesday that the government was determined to act with “urgency.” But on Wednesday, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne indicated that urgency does not extend to presenting a budget this summer, or this year, though there will be a fall fiscal update.
The promised tax cut, in contrast, is urgent. The biggest item in the Liberal platform, costing nearly $6-billion a year – a figure that will rise annually and in perpetuity – is set to be passed before the summer recess.
There are good arguments for delaying the budget for a few weeks, or even a couple of months. But without a budget, it’s not clear to voters what the government’s priorities are, or how many dollars stand behind each of them. The same goes for ministers.
We also may not know for some time how much of a deficit Ottawa plans to run this year and beyond. That means we the voters get to enjoy the tax cut, and whatever spending the government passes before the summer break, without having to be bothered with knowing what it means for the bottom line.
Then there’s this: Mr. Carney’s plan to divide budgets into spending-spending and investment-spending, cutting the former while increasing latter, and with increases outweighing cuts.
This may allow the government to claim that it’s more fiscally prudent than the Trudeau government while spending more than the Trudeau government. But depending on where the investment-spending dollars go, borrowing more to invest more could make fiscal sense. Or not.
Until we get an itemized breakdown of how much is to be spent/invested, and on what – a.k.a. a budget – it’s hard to say.
While Mr. Carney insists he’s not a politician, he’s already mastered some verbal equivalents of new math.
He’s willing to talk about building pipelines and expanding oil and gas exports, which is real and welcome change from the economic grande noirceur of the Trudeau era. But like the previous government, he’s careful with his words.
“Oil” tends to become the less polarizing “conventional energy,” and is further softened by pairing it with “clean energy.” Carney AI Translate renders “building oil pipelines” as “creating energy corridors for clean and conventional energy.”
In an interview with Vassy Kapelos on CTV on Tuesday, he said that, to make Canada an “energy superpower” (“in clean and conventional energy”) he might be open to modifying the emissions cap or amending Bill C-69 – the law Conservatives decry as the “no more pipelines law.” If necessary, but not necessarily, per Mackenzie King’s famous formulation.
It’s an old Canadian recipe, and I’m not going to knock it. Keeping a fractious country together, and moving forward, sometimes means baking layer cakes of equivocation.
There’s also grumbling about Alberta’s lone representative in cabinet, but come on: the province only elected two Liberal MPs. British Columbia elected 10 times as many. Quebec elected 22 times as many. Ontario elected 35 times as many. There are limits to how far this government can go to please Alberta, and the arithmetic goes way beyond seats at the cabinet table.
Speaking of equations that aren’t easy to solve, Mr. Carney, the man talking openly about oil and pipelines, is PM in part because NDP and other progressive voters overwhelmingly backed him. But to court those same progressives, the previous government put an omertà on the words “oil” and “pipeline.”
What’s on offer is different from the Trudeau government, but not a 180-degree turn. How many degrees? The answer will be the measure of Mr. Carney’s political geometry.