Sean Speer: Carney’s steady hand is starting to shake

The immediate cost comes in the form of economic uncertainty that looms over Canada’s economy as its own kind of tax. Businesses and investors don’t know what rules they’ll face in six or 12 months, and some are hedging against risk by moving production south, delaying capital plans, or cutting employment. Recent manufacturing job losses in Ontario are an early warning of what happens when Canada’s trade strategy is left adrift. The Carney government’s ambiguity is a major source of the problem. If the strategy is to sit tight under CUSMA until the review period opens next year, then the prime minister should say so. If instead the plan is to keep trying for a new trade and security agreement with the Trump administration, then he should lay out the framework, the priorities, and the timeline. What’s becoming increasingly untenable is the notion that we’re supposed to just sit back and wait for Carney and his government to figure these things out. The political risks of this drift are obvious. If the economy slows under the weight of uncertainty, Canadians will eventually start to doubt the prime minister’s steady hand. If so, it may transcend the Canada-U.S. issue and strike directly at Carney’s brand as a non-political technocrat. We are already starting to see cracks. The decision to wade into the Air Canada flight attendant strike, for instance, put the government on the wrong side of its own progressive voters. If the prime minister can’t make the planes fly on time or fulfill his promise on the Canada-U.S. relationship, what’s the point? What’s the case for Carney? That question is more than rhetorical. Carney’s political authority rests less on deep partisan loyalty than on the perception of competence and control. If that aura begins to fade, there isn’t much left holding his coalition together. Voters who lent him their support in April on the basis of technocratic reassurance may not hesitate to take it back if he looks like just another politician floundering through events. That’s why this episode matters. Retaliatory tariffs may have been bad economics, but the way they’ve been dropped—without explanation, without a clear alternative, and without a broader framework for Canada’s relationship with the U.S.—risks eroding the basic foundation of Carney’s leadership. The steady hand is starting to look shaky.