Prime Minister Mark Carney gestures toward his cabinet, not seen, as he prepares to speak to reporters following a swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, on May 13.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Maybe you, like me, had a friend who owned the board game Mouse Trap when you were a kid, and perhaps you also coveted that thing all the way down to the deepest chamber of your heart.
But in case you don’t know this mesmerizing little wonder, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine turned into a kids’ game with janky little plastic pieces mounted on a cardboard base. If you land in the right spot, you get to kick off a chain reaction: boot kicks over bucket, ball rolls down ramp, lever rises, army guy launches through the air.
And if – only if – all of those mechanisms work exactly right, at the end a little net will descend on your opponents’ mouse figures, trapping them so you can win.
I started thinking about that game as Mark Carney assembled his cabinet and the first real sense of what his government might be and do began to surface from the election haze.
There are a few things the Prime Minister took pains to emphasize this week, like critic quotes on a movie poster that help you understand how you’re supposed to think about the things you’re seeing.
One of those ideas is that he is not here to putter. Mr. Carney underlined that his cabinet was sworn in faster and Parliament is returning sooner than those things usually happen after an election, and that the Throne Speech in less than two weeks will lay out his government’s mission.
“So we’re going to go hard,” he said on Tuesday at Rideau Hall, standing before his freshly minted front bench – the real one built for purpose, not the trivia quiz curiosity he assembled out of found parts when he took over as Liberal Leader shortly before triggering the election campaign.
Mussio: For Carney to succeed, he must convince Canada’s elite that it’s time for change
The second big understanding the Prime Minister wanted to land this week is that when the boss changes and focus sharpens, everything is different. CTV’s Vassy Kapelos interviewed Mr. Carney, and when she questioned how much would really change given that he has many of the same prominent ministers Canadians have been hearing from for the past several years, his answer was, “Well, first off, now you’re hearing from me. I’m a new prime minister.”
She kept pressing him on how his government would deliver something different when his top lieutenants were the people swearing up and down six months ago that Justin Trudeau was doing the Lord’s work. The Prime Minister said she was fixating on the wrong thing.
“If I may, you are going into process and personnel,” he said. “I’m going to results.”
He underlined this same idea throughout the leadership race and election campaign, when he would say repeatedly that his government would focus on outcomes, rather than programs created or dollars spent. This clearly implied, but left elegantly unstated, the fact that the Trudeau government really loved touting that it had created this program or shovelled that amount of money out the door. What became of it all after the giant novelty cheque handover and the applause was of much less interest.
That government, in other words, really enjoyed the ball rolling down the ramp and the little army guy flying through the air, and always wanted credit for that part of things. Mr. Carney is telling Canadians that the net falling on the mouse at the end is all that matters, and that is what he and his government are focused on.
And as for precisely which end results people should judge him by, he laid that out this week too. A reporter asked the Prime Minister what success would look like on the cost of living, or what barometer people should use to judge his government’s success.
“Canadians will hold account by their experience at the grocery store, when they’re paying their electricity bill, when they or their children are looking for a place to live,” he said, adding, “And then, of course, accountability comes at the ballot box.”
So Mr. Carney says that this government will do things better because it has different leadership – him – and is fixated on results, not seeking credit for effort along the way. He sets the bar for success on those results at Canadians feeling like they can afford their lives more comfortably – even as the economic damage and inflationary strain of U.S. tariffs is quietly accumulating in the national bloodstream at this very moment.
The Prime Minister led his party to a wildly improbable election win by promising to handle the greatest existential threat Canada has faced in decades. And he said he would do that while simultaneously refashioning the Canadian economy to work better for its citizens and to absorb the damage dished out by the White House mad king.
On Wednesday, when Mr. Carney’s new cabinet gathered for the first time, it was one of those rare moments when the ritual and rigidity of politics couldn’t slam a lid on the human stuff. Most of the new ministers and secretaries of state had first-day-of-school face: glowing, overwhelmed, frozen and vibrating all at once.
One of the journalists remarked to colleagues, in a bless-their-hearts voice, that this would be the very best day for the new cabinet members because it would only get harder.
Mr. Carney himself has not looked for one moment even slightly fazed to suddenly find himself Prime Minister. But even for the unflappable, the very beginning of things – when the game board is set up for you, when you can tell yourself that all the little mechanisms are going to function exactly as you expect, when the end result is still a possibility you can pluck out of the future air – is the easiest part.