The Carney government acknowledges that a new era requires a new national strategy, writes Alasdair Roberts. But does the government really have a plan?Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Alasdair Roberts is the author of The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive The Twenty-First Century, which is a finalist for the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.
The United States once had a president who was acknowledged to be an honourable man and a competent administrator, but who suffered from one fatal flaw.
His name was George H.W. Bush. He served as vice-president under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and then as president for one term. Mr. Bush was trounced in the 1992 presidential election, winning just 37 per cent of the vote. Herbert Hoover did better against Franklin Roosevelt in the trough of the Great Depression.
Mr. Bush knew his weakness. In his own words, it was “the vision thing.” He was solid in a crisis, but he could not present voters with a story about where the country should go.
Canada today is suffering from the vision thing. This is not a criticism of any one person. It is a criticism of an entire political system that is incapable of generating a vision of where we are trying to go as a country.
Most Canadians understand that our world changed in early 2025, although we are still grappling with exactly how it has changed. As Prime Minister Mark Carney said in April, the country confronts “one of those hinge moments in history.” An era of close Canada-U.S. co-operation is over. Other transformations – climatic, technological, geopolitical, demographic – are on the horizon. We are living in a “new age,” as Mr. Carney said in June, one that will demand “difficult choices” for all of us.
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The Carney government also acknowledges that this new era requires a new national strategy – a recalibrated set of long-term goals for the country, along with policies to achieve those goals. “Plan beats no plan,” as Mr. Carney said in March. The Throne Speech in May also outlined “a bold, ambitious plan for our future.”
But does the Carney government really have a plan? It emphasizes the need to accelerate “nation-building projects”– but we have not discussed what kind of nation we are trying to build, or whether we are building one nation or many. There is more money for defence – but we are hazy on the long-term threats. And there is no road map on climate change, a topic that got lost in the rush to manage Donald Trump.
And even if the Carney government has a plan, when did the rest of us agree to it? If Canada is really at a crossroads, you would expect a serious national conversation about which road we should follow. Canadians didn’t have that conversation during the 2025 election, which lasted only 36 days. Nor did we have it during the rush to adopt the Building Canada Act in June.
In truth, the country is suffering from cognitive dissonance. On one hand, Canadians understand that our world has changed profoundly, and that we need to step back and reflect about how to move forward. On the other hand, we are still conducting politics as usual. Much of what we call planning is a short-term reaction to Mr. Trump’s actions on trade and defence. Canada’s response has consisted largely of elite negotiations among politicians and technocrats. The Building Canada Act is emergency legislation, suspending the usual rules for the duration of the crisis.
Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the House of Commons in Ottawa, after Bill C-5 passed in the House in June, 2025.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
We are doing what it takes to get through the moment, just as we did during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. But this isn’t a passing storm, to be addressed with temporary fixes. We are living in a different world, and we need to talk about what that means for all of us.
Here’s what a better response to a “hinge moment” would look like. We would recognize the need for a countrywide dialogue about the generational challenges facing Canada. We would provide Canadians with the information they need to make thoughtful choices about their country’s future. And we would recognize that serious conversation takes time.
Consider what Canada did the last time it faced hinge moments, like the end of the Second World War, or the debate over continental integration in the 1980s. In both instances, we set up national inquiries – like the Macdonald Commission, which ran from 1982 to 1985 – to explore the issues facing the country. First ministers also had lots of high profile meetings that focused public conversation. Granted, Canadians never reached consensus on the path forward. But they did make informed choices about the kind of country they wanted to build, and they understood where they differed with their compatriots.
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For several reasons, it’s harder to have a countrywide conversation today. The Canadian media environment has decayed, so that Canadians are swamped by American news sources and social-media feeds. And we have abandoned routines that helped to structure conversation in the past. Years ago, we gave up the practice of regular first ministers’ conferences. We shut down advisory councils and abandoned royal commissions, insisting that they were too slow and ponderous for the internet age.
Since the 1990s, Canadian politics has been more deeply infected by short-term, knee-jerk thinking. The political rewards are for appearing to take action, rather than thinking about what actions to take. We can see that dynamic at play in the current moment. We are pouring the foundations for our future home without seriously discussing what it should look like.
Admittedly, some items have to be on the fast track for government action, like trade negotiations with the United States and help for hard-hit industries. And some items can be fast-tracked because they are generally agreed to be overdue, like eliminating trade barriers between provinces. But there needs to be a second track too: one that operates on a longer timeline and is concerned with building agreement, so far as we can, about long-term goals.
There are many ways in which federal and provincial governments can promote a national conversation about the future. One approach is to convene national leaders’ summits – a domestic version of G7 summits – that are designed to focus public attention on long-term problems. Another is to set up something like the Macdonald Commission of the 1980s, but retooled for the digital age, so that it allows for broader public engagement. A third option might be a series of citizens’ assemblies on national challenges.
Even without the current crisis, these would be useful initiatives. There is plenty of evidence that Canadians lack knowledge about the long-term problems facing their country. Civic education in public schools and universities is notoriously weak – and millions never even got that, because they immigrated here as adults.
Investing in national conversation won’t yield results tomorrow. And it won’t produce universal agreement on the path forward. Nevertheless, it will pay off for everyone – including politicians – because Canadians will have a better understanding of the hard choices facing their country in coming decades.
It’s also easy to foresee what will happen if we don’t invest in a national dialogue about long-term challenges. Right now, Canada is surfing on a wave of elbows-up patriotism. But that wave will soon break. Without effort to promote discussion about long-term goals, politics will return to its pre-2025 condition: fractious, cranky, and unduly swayed by American and other influences.