Mark Carney and the Illusion of Control

It’s 183 days since Mark Carney told Jon Stewart he was an “outsider” who’d “just started thinking” about running for a leadership role in Canadian politics. He thought fast—and announced his candidacy three days later. Now he’s been prime minister for longer than Charles Tupper and John Turner were. How’s he doing? Tonda MacCharles interviewed a bunch of smart people in a solid attempt to discern an emerging Carney doctrine. The picture that emerges is of the Hey Kool-Aid guy. He smashes through a picket fence, he’s got thirst on the run, and pollsters get a big, wide, happy ear-to-ear Carney smile. Despite his political success to date, Carney keeps ratcheting up expectations. When he tabled Bill C-5, he called it “a day that has been literally decades in the making.” He’s attempting “the biggest transformation of our economy since the end of the Second World War.” He wants to “fundamentally reimagine our economy.” He’ll fire people! He knows a guy who’ll kick Ottawa’s ass! Leave those brown shoes at home, because, as the Single Mandate Letter puts it, “Canada must build an enormous amount of new infrastructure at speeds not seen in generations.” Sometimes, in a discussion that most people would have thought was about something else, Carney will remind everyone that Canada’s in a crisis. “Let’s be straight,” he told the CBC’s David Cochrane in the middle of an interview. “It’s a sunny day, it’s beautiful out—we are in a crisis. We have to get moving.” A few weeks later, at a news conference near the end of the parliamentary session: “Well, look, we’re in a crisis. We’re in an economic crisis. We sometimes, you know, glide over that. This government doesn’t.” I think this evocation of urgency shows an understanding of the national mood. Every new prime minister rides to office on a wave of frustration with the previous crew. One of my pet theories is that Carney pulled ahead of the Liberal leadership field when he showed up for the first debate on February 24 holding a cheap ballpoint pen, as though he’d just been balancing his chequebook and needed to get back to that. I think every day Carney appears to be heeding voices that counsel greater deliberation—or, for that matter, anyone calling for a refreshing return to partisan scheming—will be a day he loses political momentum. So there’s a cost when files cloaked in the trademark Carney urgency don’t seem to materially advance. We’re almost a month past the Saskatoon first ministers’ meeting at which some people expected the feds to unveil their fabled major-projects list. Carney has said that Bill C-5 permits the creation of such a list but there’s a limit to how long it can take. This will, of course, always be a matter of ear. Sometimes deliberation helps. Many of the biggest headaches in politics are the fruit of attempts to look decisive. But this isn’t a business-as-usual moment, and the bigger risk for Carney would be to look like a new chapter in business-as-usual government.

• Why Mark Carney Is Talking like It’s 1939
• Mark Carney’s Secret Weapon? Being Reasonable
• Mark Carney, Cutthroat Capitalist

To understand how Carney fits into Canadian politics, I’ve found it useful to return to an old analytical tool I sometimes use to think about the various ways people can rise to power. In his 1998 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, and in some magazine writing he did around the time of its release, journalist Nicholas Lemann wrote about the various paths to power in America. Class and ideology can be misleading, Lemann wrote. It’s sometimes more useful to look at how somebody got ahead over the course of their life. He identified three paths to leadership in America: Lifer, Talent, Mandarin. A Lifer spends their career in a big organization with a complex rule system. The Lifer rises slowly and masters the rules and expectations of the system. This path is a little less common today than in the twentieth century. Career soldiers are Lifers. Machine politicians, who start out door knocking and rise within the party or because of its munificence. The kind of person who used to be called a “company man” is a Lifer. Start in the mailroom, retire as VP. Jean Chrétien is the classic Canadian political Lifer. For a Lifer, the big day is the promotion. A Lifer mistrusts change in the organization, because change robs him of his powers. He’s increasingly powerful within the system, but he needs to preserve it. A Talent comes from outside a system, disrupts it, and benefits from chaos. Entrepreneurs are Talents. Lemann called them “the classic American leadership type.” Steve Jobs was a Talent. And Elon Musk (it helps if you remember that these types don’t imply value judgments, for good or ill; they describe a style). In Canada, people who built successful new political parties were Talents: Preston Manning or Lucien Bouchard or, to some extent, Stephen Harper in 2002–04. “The key moments for them are election days, championship games, initial stock offerings,” Lemann wrote: the day when you find out whether anyone’s buying what you’re selling. Talents mistrust stability, because stability robs them of their chance. A Talent’s moment of power is everyone else’s moment of chaos. Lemann’s book was about the attempt to build an American Mandarin class through systematic educational testing. (Short version: it did create a Mandarin class, but that class didn’t get to lead much.) Mandarins are almost the only leadership class in a place like France, where every president since Georges Pompidou went to Sciences Po. (Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t graduate.) But Mandarins are less common and usually don’t rise as far in North America, where they tend to be mistrusted as elitists, globalists, or what Harper, cribbing David Goodhart, called “Anywheres.” “People become Mandarins by performing well in school,” Lemann wrote. “Educational credentials, the more elite the better, are the coin of their realm. . . . The default activity for them is to go into limited-access fields where their degrees confer the maximum benefit, mainly the professions of law, medicine, academia and the Wall Street side of business.” You see where I’m going: Mark Carney, who went from Harvard to Oxford to Goldman Sachs to the Banks of Canada and England, is a Mandarin. The big day for the Mandarin is the entrance exam. Mandarins’ skills are portable—analysis, synthesis, the social grace that allows you to avoid making a target of yourself in a workplace where you don’t necessarily arrive with allies. Mandarins sit in the desk they’re assigned, and for all their learning, they tend to leave organizations unchanged. You don’t rethink Oxford, or Goldman Sachs, or the Bank of England. An early reviewer of Lemann’s book suggested adding a fourth leadership type to Lemann’s three: “Heirs,” who would have been called Legacies in the Ivy League or “Nepo Babies” today. An Heir has a better chance of access, by virtue of family ties, to a normally closed system. Al Gore, Jr. was an Heir, and George W. Bush, and Justin Trudeau. An Heir’s big day is the day they’re born, which is absolutely not the same as saying they don’t work hard later. An Heir is often conflicted about the craft, because they watched it crush Dad. Yet Heirs can be reluctant to question some of the craft’s big assumptions. Political science isn’t science, and a bunch of categories from a book nobody read three decades ago is nearly doggerel, but I think we can get a useful lay of the land from all this. Everyone always thinks they’re a Talent. They’re usually wrong. Justin Trudeau was an Heir. Pierre Poilievre is a Lifer. Just about our entire political class has spent a decade running away from characteristics that are at the heart of the Carney style. Davos, globalist, investment banker, Laurentian elite (he keeps reminding us he was raised in Alberta; of course he does). Basically, all that’s missing is the monocle. Everything that made Carney such a charmed candidate for other posts would, in most circumstances, have weighed against him for political office. I’m not sure he could normally have hoped to gain power as easily, and relatively decisively, as he has. But then Donald Trump attacked Canada, and a big chunk of the electorate wanted to get as far away from Trump as possible. So Carney was elected, but on probation. I find myself having to explain to non-Canadians that we, as a nation, haven’t been weirdly pining all along for Mark Carney to lead us. In an Abacus poll a year ago, 93 percent of Canadians couldn’t identify Carney based on a photo of him. The circumstances defined him as much as he did, and certainly more than Poilievre managed to do. This leaves open the possibility that different circumstances could un-define him, or define him differently. I think Carney’s path explains some of his reported chippiness about lateness or brown shoes or tabling a memo you haven’t even read. The Talents in our politics—Manning, Bouchard—they basically lit themselves on fire and jumped into the nearest Chamber of Commerce lunch. They had to trust, delegate, cajole all the time, as a basic requirement of political survival. They gave huge jobs to random eccentrics they often didn’t even like, because those were the only allies on offer. Meanwhile, everyone at Goldman Sachs or Brookfield had to run a gauntlet to get in, but once in, and for the duration of their tenure, they shared a common set of assumptions that I suspect Carney will always want to be reconstructing. He is surprisingly insouciant about big parts of the job. Why was his first cabinet tiny but the second is big? My guess is that it’s because he doesn’t care about cabinet structure. The first one was wee but it got mixed reviews and put noses out of joint. Fine. Whatever. Give them a big cabinet. I don’t want to relitigate my criticism of Michael Sabia as clerk of the Privy Council, but whether it’s a good or a bad decision, it’s a certain kind of decision. You don’t pick Sabia if you’re planning a serene and frankly overdue twenty-month root-and-branch reform of the public service. You pick Sabia to do what he did at finance: commandeer a corporal’s guard of top lieutenants to drill holes through existing structure and, for good or ill, get shit done. Devil take the hindmost. I haven’t polled Carney’s team deeply on this, and I suspect it’s pointless to poll a tiny sample on a hypothetical, but I’m not sure Carney plans to last long in the job. Roll his minority into a majority in a couple of years, then exit near the end of that second, longer term? It feels plausible. Of course, there’s a sea of confounding variables between here and there. This corner is laying no bets. For now, Carney is an odd kind of leader at an odd moment, with gratifying support from a workable plurality of the sort of people who answer pollsters in summer, and some early political success. But, you know, it’s a sunny day, it’s beautiful out—we’re in a crisis. Adapted from “Midsommar” by Paul Wells (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.The post Mark Carney and the Illusion of Control first appeared on The Walrus.