Timing has worked wildly in Mark Carney’s favour before, but now he has a problem

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So much of Mark Carney’s short, hectic political career has been about time and timing. Yes, all any of us on this Earth have is time, but I promise we’re headed somewhere other than Obvioustown, so stay with me.

First, there was the unbelievably lucky timing of Mr. Carney’s moment to run for the Liberal leadership. It arrived just as Donald Trump was holding a knife to the throat of Canada’s economy, making a calm, crisis-handling economist look pretty appealing to voters.

Then there’s the fact we’re 10 years into a Liberal government and, in defiance of Canadian historical precedent and all the previous public rage toward his party, Mr. Carney is governing on almost miraculously borrowed time.

But time has not always been his friend.

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The Prime Minister has often framed the forceful reset of the country’s relationship with the U.S. as an opportunity hidden inside a man-made disaster, telling Canadians that “we can give ourselves far more than the Americans can take away.” But there’s a painful delay hiding under the surface of that comforting notion.

The Americans – or one of them, anyway, and they’re not sending their best – are doing the taking away much faster than we will ever be able to give anything back.

Housing, economic productivity, trade partners, defence spending, trundling along as a cheerfully lazy economic and geopolitical sidecar to the roaring Harley next door – Mr. Carney cannot be accused of lacking ambition in what he says he’ll fix for Canada.

But structural weaknesses and bad habits that took decades to set in are not going to be undone quickly. Since Mr. Carney won the leadership, there has always been this tension between the time frame in which Canadians want and need things fixed – that is, the usual life expectancy of political patience – and the schedule on which his proffered solutions will likely land.

And then of course there’s the mad king, whose sucking, fetid gravitational pull is such that it generates its very own demented time zone.

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The Ontario government launched a $75-million ad campaign earlier this month, summoning the ghost of Ronald Reagan to tell Americans that Mr. Trump is going to destroy their economy with his precious tariffs. That set off a late-night social-media freak-out on Thursday, in which the toddler-in-chief broke off all tariff negotiations with Canada. So now we rewind to where we were in June, killing all the progress the Prime Minister’s Office had been telegraphing was close to a payoff for key sectors of the Canadian economy.

Ontario has paused the ads, in hopes this will please his tangerine majesty enough to resume trade talks. But there is no clock or calendar on Earth that can plan for the malevolent random-event generator that is the U.S. President.

Mr. Carney is now operating within one zoomed-out timeline – engaging in trade talks, building houses, setting up infrastructure and resource projects, and seeking new markets for Canadian goods – working toward a distant horizon at which each of those needles will hopefully have moved in the right direction.

Meanwhile, the anxiety level of ordinary Canadians, the vicissitudes of politics and the Mar-a-Lago monsoon operate on fundamentally different clocks. Mr. Carney is trying to placate them all, somehow.

This week, he delivered a prime-time speech to Ottawa university students, in an odd little staged event meant to offer him a chance to frame the Nov. 4 budget before he left on an extended trip to Asia. He often sounded like a commencement speaker, waxing nostalgic about how time ticks away, rendering the world unrecognizable.

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“Your future will not be the same as my past,” the Prime Minister told the students, while pledging “generational investments” in the budget that would give the future back to them, even if it looked much different from the wide-open, post-Berlin Wall world into which he had graduated. He’d learned a few things since then, Mr. Carney said, including that life doesn’t travel in straight lines and that history is “punctuated by hinge moments” where what you choose determines how the rest of the story goes.

“I will always be straight about the challenges that we face and the choices that we must make. And to be clear, we won’t transform our economy easily or in a few months,” he said. “It will take some sacrifices, and it will take some time.”

Most observers fixated on the word “sacrifices” as foreshadowing hefty budget cutbacks. But sacrifices can be sudden and acute, or they can arrive as chronic pain that requires a lot of fortitude and patience to live with. It seems, increasingly, that Mr. Carney is trying to brace Canadians for the latter, in hopes their patience will extend to his longer repair schedule.

A couple of weeks ago in London, he gave a fascinating interview to Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain. She asked smart, philosophical questions and, for the most part, Mr. Carney offered reflective answers that illuminated his thinking on big issues.

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Near the end of the conversation, she asked how long he planned to serve as Prime Minister, and he deflected with the standard self-deprecating chuckle and an acknowledgment that he leads a minority government. But Ms. Husain pressed him: You’ve promised to tackle such big issues that it’s hard to imagine you could get all of this done in less than a decade, so what is your plan?

“Well, it’s a democracy, and you have to ask permission from voters for the time served,” Mr. Carney said. “The politics favourably or unfavourably will result from that, but I don’t want to be in a position, however long I serve, where I didn’t do what I didn’t think was necessary at the time. I need to do what I think is necessary.”

When you stand next to a river, the shore beneath your feet mostly travels a straight line; only when you look at it on a map or from far above can you see how the water winds through the landscape. That’s also the only way to understand where you are on the riverbank: on a steady straightaway, or at a wild turn that offers no clear line of sight to what’s ahead?

Time is the same: Knowing where you are and where you’re going requires a much wider view.

Mr. Carney is telling us that we’re all standing together on the edge of a river that’s about to make some abrupt swerves. He’s been telling us that for months, whether we fully heard it or not. What it sounds like he’s doing now is telling us he has a map and asking for enough time to get us from here to there.