Howard Anglin: Don’t act surprised. Our new PM is—and always has been—a political player

I don’t know why people keep being surprised when Mark Carney acts like a typical Liberal politician. It isn’t a shock when a creature of our political system plays the part he’s been preparing for his whole life.

Yet, there was Chris Selley, one of our most astute political commentators, posting on X that “this Carney cabinet strikes me more as something he was advised to create, not something he thought was a great idea.” And Andrew Coyne declaring that, after “talk of ‘new realities’” it turns out “we have been had.” (We?)

Only Canadian journalists seem to be surprised that a man who played the insider game so adroitly that he wound up prime minister without a single ballot being cast is, in fact, a cynical operator. They must have forgotten that the job was only available because Carney convinced his predecessor to fire Chrystia Freeland and then left him holding a pinless grenade.

The idea of Carney as an artless outsider was always an act, one so unconvincing even a foreigner like Jon Stewart saw through it immediately: “You sneaky! You’re running as an outsider!” Carney couldn’t even protest—“I am an outsider”—with a straight face. He flashed his wolfish grin, and like children in a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, the Canadian media were dazzled.

At some point they are going to have to accept that this is who Carney is. He may be smarter than Trudeau, and his demeanor and work ethic couldn’t be more different, but the two are products of the same world. They know the same people, they share similar political beliefs and pre-political cultural assumptions, and they both believe the country is only safe with Liberals from the Canadian establishment in charge.

No one should be surprised that Carney’s cabinet is packed with Trudeau retreads, or that the new additions include the mayor who oversaw the Vancouver housing crisis and the Vancouver drug crisis—a twofer of disasters—a former colleague at Goldman Sachs and the Bank of Canada, and his former art dealer.^{1Tim Hodgson, at least, is a serious man with serious credentials.} This is Carney’s crew. They are the people he’s rubbed shoulders with for decades.

And no one should be surprised that Carney’s economic plans include more Ottawa spending, Ottawa-directed “investment funds,” and Ottawa-led home-building, or if he pushes the CPPIB to invest more in Ottawa-favoured industries as Canada’s CEOs cheer him. This is how Liberals always understand the Canadian economy. Why would Carney be different? After all, he built his career at the intersection of Bay Street and Wellington Street.

You don’t have to be elected to be political. The multinational organizations, global institutions, and corporate hierarchies where Carney has spent his career are full of unelected politicians. That Carney rose so quickly in these environments and moved so seamlessly between them shows what an accomplished politician he already is.

I live almost half the year in Oxford, where I am surrounded by ambitious young Carneys. Once you know the type, they are easy to spot: polished, post-national, and pathologically impatient. It is simply inconceivable to them that they aren’t the best people for the job—whatever the job happens to be.

For Carney, that job was prime minister. When he told his wife on their first date in Oxford that he planned to return home to enter public service, she would have understood that he didn’t mean to stop at associate deputy minister of finance. Now that he’s made it to Rideau Cottage, he finally has a chance to test his political skills in elected politics.

Carney has a gift for making people feel reassured that he is in charge. It’s a potent trait that won him the election, and it will serve him well in his new role. But so will the subtler political skills he’s acquired along the way, including the virtues of mythopoetic brand building, taking credit for other people’s work, and dissembling freely with a wink to those in the know.

He is a shrewd operator. A patriot with three passports, two acquired for convenience and quickly ditched for the same reason. A man who put his name to a 600-page book designed to convince the public by sheer volume, if not by evidence, that he is a man of value(s). A religious man, whose commitment to his faith contains moral exceptions just large enough to accommodate his ambition.

Carney likes to boast that he’s not a career politician, but that just means he’s never been elected. He’s been political his whole career, and no one should be surprised when he acts like a politician, and specifically a Liberal politician. No doubt he will do things very differently from Trudeau, but don’t expect the things he does to be very different. His worldview, his advisers, and his cabinet are too similar for that.

He has said he intends to do “big things” and signalled an impatience with the normal timelines of government work. This hardly sets him apart. Politicians from Justin Trudeau to Donald Trump said the same. Every prime minister arrives with bold plans and big ideas, only to be frustrated by a sluggish bureaucracy, ideological shibboleths, caucus politics, a conformist press gallery, and regional interests.

If Carney truly wants to be different, he will have to do things no Liberal can do: use the notwithstanding clause; ditch emissions targets; end the box-checking GBA+ analysis to which he subjected his own platform; overhaul the senior public service and military leadership; and challenge Liberal-aligned regions and industry. Don’t count on it. Carney didn’t come back to fix the Ottawa machine. He’s a man of the machine.