Prime Minister Mark Carney in his office in Ottawa on Friday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
There were several rounds of chatter over the summer and into the fall about whether the honeymoon was over for Prime Minister Mark Carney – and if not yet, when that moment would come.
Elbows sagged; President Donald Trump went on blowing up like a puffer fish; tariffs were carving up certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; CUSMA hadn’t been rescued; the only shovels in the ground on major projects would have been digging anyway; groceries, gas and mortgage payments were still gouging.
And when would we get to those sweet nothings about how we could give ourselves more than any foreign country could take away?
Surely at some point, the honeymoon-is-over argument went, voters would look across the breakfast table in the bright morning light and realize they weren’t so besotted with what they’d brought home. Even now, one year in, the polls make it clear that Canadians are still googly-eyed for Finance Daddy – more than they were on election day, in fact.
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But most honeymoons don’t end with acrimony or disillusionment, or anything that dramatic. They end when you go home and figure out who stacks the dishwasher badly, how to get groceries on a Wednesday when you’re both exhausted and which stupid TV show you enjoy watching together in your pyjamas.
The honeymoon is over when you figure out how to be real people together, in other words, because you can’t keep being your date-night selves for eternity.
And that is where things are right now for Mr. Carney, his government and Canadians. Not turning on each other – though political divorce statistics being what they are, that will probably come, one day – but getting to the unglamorous, real-life hard work of fixing up this house we share.
He has his majority in the House of Commons now, which means more legislative muscle and more time in which to get things done. This week, he sent his second fiscal manifesto out into the world with the spring economic update. And his government just passed its one-year election anniversary with all the new agencies designed to tackle its priorities up and running.
Now, everything shifts from the future tense, written in hope and promise, to the present, where results live.
In the parade of announcements over the past year, Canadians were introduced to Build Canada Homes, the Defence Investment Agency and the Major Projects Office. There are the trade and security agreements that Mr. Carney rhymes off like an infomercial telling you how many bonus attachments you get with that food processor.
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The sovereign wealth fund unveiled this week sounds like an odd chimera combining the Canada Infrastructure Bank and war bonds, but you’d better believe the word “catalyze” was used.
But even if it all works exactly as intended, the challenge – politically, for the Prime Minister, and practically, for anxious Canadians – is that these are massive economic currents he’s trying to redirect to make a palpable difference.
It reminds Peter Donolo, former director of communications to prime minister Jean Chrétien, of the moment when his crew took office in the 1990s.
The International Monetary Fund was “knocking at the door” over Canada’s grisly debt, and the country had nearly splintered over the failed Meech Lake Accord. All of that created urgent consensus among Canadians that amounted to a permission slip for the government.
“It was a burning platform, and people were ready for decisive action,” Mr. Donolo said. To him, that parallels the present reckoning about the perils of such close ties to the U.S. and the need to fix the chronic weaknesses in the Canadian economy.
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In the 1990s, as with the economic renovations Mr. Carney is now attempting, fixing Canada’s debt and employment numbers were long, uphill climbs, and the Chrétien government benefited from public goodwill toward the prime minister as they worked through it, Mr. Donolo said. Then, trust came from familiarity with Mr. Chrétien, rather than the technocratic halo that currently hovers above Mr. Carney’s banker haircut, but both buy you the same benefit of the doubt.
“Every month, we lived or died by what the unemployment numbers were, by what the interest-rate numbers were,” Mr. Donolo said. “People weren’t expecting overnight results, but they were expecting a sense of progress.”
The current Prime Minister needs to keep asking for patience from the public, Mr. Donolo said, because that underlines the sense that everyone is in this together. To that end, he really liked the 10-minute video statement Mr. Carney issued a couple of weeks ago, though he’s surprised it took him so long to do it.
“I promise you I will never sugarcoat our challenges,” the Prime Minister said, in the fireside-chat-without-an-actual-fire. “Instead, I will talk with you directly and regularly about our plan, why we’re doing what we’re doing, what’s working, what isn’t, and what we’re going to do next.”
The video was titled “Forward Guidance,” and Mr. Carney likened it to the public reports he made as Bank of Canada governor during the financial crisis. He pledged to continue offering regular updates.
This week, someone else had something interesting and important to say in Ottawa, too. On Wednesday, Maggie Helwig, an Anglican priest, won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for her book Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community.
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Her award was announced at the annual Politics and the Pen gala, which was stuffed with powerbrokers in evening clothes, including the Prime Minister. Ms. Helwig did not waste the opportunity to say her piece.
“There is a tendency among politicians these days to speak as if you were helpless, as if you had no real volition or power, but are only slaves of the god of the economy,” she told the ballroom at the Fairmont Château Laurier. “But the god of the economy is a human creation, and you do have power, and you do have choices about how you use it.”
The Prime Minister had left the party by the time Ms. Helwig offered her own forward guidance.
There’s another way to know the honeymoon is over: the to-do lists get longer and the choices more difficult.