It can be difficult to know who the Prime Minister is aiming at with his policies, announcements and now his budget, writes Doug Saunders.JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images
It often appears as if Mark Carney is pointing in three directions at once. In the thickets of his often contradictory budget, in his string of early-term policies and crisis announcements, it can be difficult to know who exactly the Prime Minister is aiming at: His party’s core supporters; his own values and ambitions; the Conservative Party’s voters, regions and MPs he has said he wants to attract and convert (including the Tory MP his party gained this week); or the U.S. President whose delusions the Prime Minister has suggested he has to placate in order to secure a deal.
We’re living through a moment in which many leaders of centre-left parties, holding power in the face of a conservative-minded electorate and a threatening U.S. executive, have decided it’s necessary to aim their policy blunderbusses in three directions.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer has done it to a dramatic degree, adopting policies friendly to President Donald Trump and his country’s hard right without much political success. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung have done it to lesser degrees, with greater political success.
Let’s call this approach “quadrangulation.” Yes, I know a quadrangle is better known as a square, and indeed those leaders might want to think of it as a squaring up to political realities. But the idea has a history.
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Thirty years ago, the oleaginous political consultant Dick Morris uttered the electoral term “triangulation.” His client, President Bill Clinton, foresaw difficulties winning a second term the next year because a very right-wing Republican Party (by 1990s standards) was surging. The chosen solution was to aim some platforms and policies toward classic Democrats and others sharply rightward to draw in folks straying to the bitter pastures of the GOP. This was the moment he joined forces with Newt Gingrich’s Congress to “end welfare as we know it,” in Mr. Clinton’s words, with a brutal service-cutting bill passed the next year.
There was nothing new about a politician facing two directions to stay in power – it’s often called “centrism.” But triangulators weren’t mere centrists: Rather than quietly making compromises, as any leader needs to do, they publicly embodied this split identity, often becoming the right-wing politicians whose ideas they adopted. It was adopted with gusto by liberals and social democrats of the late 1990s, including former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany and former prime minister Tony Blair of Britain, who won his first election in 1997 in part using the triangulationist slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” All three won multiple elections. All are also remembered as deeply amoral figures who compromised their party’s values.
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Quadrangulation adds an additional set of policies aimed at pleasing, appeasing or distracting Mr. Trump, at least long enough to get a tariff deal. The “quad” version of Mr. Blair’s slogan would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, toughly pretending Mr. Trump’s non-existent border-crime problem is worth spending money on.”
That is Mr. Carney’s approach to that issue, combined with justice policies to address a largely imaginary crime wave that Conservative voters believe in. Tax cuts and the abandonment of consumer-sector carbon policies are also clearly aimed at convertible Tories. His immigration policies are meant to send a restrictionist message to right-leaning people on both sides of the border, though they are likely to be overtaken by economic realities that will flatten the square.
He is more fortunate than other leaders, because swaths of his agenda encompass things either he believes in or that appeal to multiple constituencies. Much of his career, and his book, have been devoted to the question of how to confront global-scale emergencies by mobilizing public resources to create economic activity. He has portrayed the Trump moment as an emergency on the scale of the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring similar sacrifices – and Canadians across the spectrum seem to agree, for now.
Some of his quadrangulations are arguably “triple-use” policies. The Prime Minister has evidently recognized that Mr. Trump’s demand for NATO countries to spend an absurd share of their economy on security happens to coincide with a moment Canada needs to make big one-time purchases to update its failing miliary hardware and devote more resources to arming Ukraine. Those two temporary necessities will boost Ottawa’s spending above Mr. Trump’s threshold for a number of years, making the Prime Minister look golden to those at home and abroad who value such numbers, without ruinous long-term commitments.
But most of it depends on maintaining an illusion, withholding inevitable disappointment under the blinding lights of a national emergency. Any act that juggles three audiences runs the risk, eventually, of tripping over its contradictions and dropping them all.