Mark Carney’s plan for Canada
Whatever his flaws as a politician turn out to be, Mark Carney does at least possess self-awareness. “You’re supposed to campaign in poetry and govern in prose,” he said in his final campaign speech on April 27th, on the eve of the election. “As the assembled media will tell you, I campaigned in prose. So I’m going to govern in econometrics.”
Govern he shall. By early on April 29th it was clear that Mr Carney had led the Liberal Party to a rare fourth consecutive stint at ruling Canada. It was a historic turnaround, wiping out a 25-point opinion-poll lead for the Conservatives in just four months to win 169 seats in Parliament, three shy of a majority but enough to form a government. Mr Carney and his new cabinet must govern a country in which a fissure has opened up along lines of education and immigration. Despite the vote being fairly evenly split between the main parties, Canadians of all stripes agree that the country’s biggest problems are a sluggish economy and a painful shortage of housing.
Hence the striking overlap in the platforms of the Liberals and Conservatives. Both parties agreed on the need to cut taxes immediately, to spur home building, to spend more on defence, to expand trade beyond the United States and to replace ageing ports and crumbling bridges. New pipelines are needed to carry Canada’s abundant energy resources to oil-thirsty markets. Merely beginning the process of fostering new investment should help Mr Carney jump-start Canada’s flatlining economy, which in recent years has been suffering one of the lowest rates of productivity and growth in the rich world. “We are going to build, build baby, build,” declared Mr Carney, now an elected member of Parliament, in his victory speech.
He should be able to run a stable minority government without constant appeasement. The Liberals can work with Conservatives to boost energy exports, then turn to the New Democrats or the Bloc Québécois to pass legislation to make energy cleaner. All parties have promised to back Mr Carney’s efforts to repel Donald Trump’s clumsy advances.
No time to lose
Those working on Mr Carney’s transition plan suggest he will move swiftly. A new cabinet will be sworn in within two weeks. (He has promised to continue his predecessor’s practice of appointing a cabinet with a roughly equal number of women and men.) He will then convene Parliament, which has not sat since December, and present his plans to lower taxes, slash red tape, rev up house-building and revamp the infrastructure to send Canada’s commodities to market. This will be the first time in Mr Carney’s career he has made laws. Reeling opposition leaders have pledged not to move against the new government during an initial grace period.
Mr Carney will also meet Canada’s restive provincial leaders. They have a lot of power in Canada’s federal system, most notably over natural resources. Alberta, the country’s energy-producing powerhouse, has been sending Conservative MPs to Ottawa for decades, only to see its desire to streamline oil and gas production repeatedly thwarted by eastern Liberals. Frustration has been boiling over. The province’s premier, Danielle Smith, promises to make it easier for her citizens to launch referendums. Before the election, three in ten Albertans said they would back independence for their province if the Liberals returned to power. Mr Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital, will have to give priority to mending fences with his home province. He must also free up interprovincial trade.
Speed is vital. Mr Trump is already hurting Canada. Statistics Canada, a government agency, reports that GDP contracted slightly in February. Mr Carney has said Mr Trump has already irrevocably altered relations between the two countries. The two men will meet at the latest in six weeks, when Canada hosts the G7 summit in the resort town of Kananaskis in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. ■