I have become pessimistic about Canada, and the reason is depressingly simple: we have built a political culture in which the impression of governing well has become more valuable, more transferable, and vastly easier to manufacture than governing well itself. We tell ourselves that voters reward productivity, investment, and rising living standards.
I no longer believe it.
I believe they reward the performance of seriousness, and Mark Carney performs seriousness the way certain actors perform grief — competently, at will, and without much reference to what is actually happening offstage.
He does not shout. He does not need to. His entire brand rests on the implication that the spreadsheet has already been checked, that the adults have finally returned, that you may simply relax and trust the man who speaks fluent Davos.
The demagogue says: trust me, I am angry on your behalf. The technocrat says something more insidious: trust me, I understand what you cannot. Both are asking for the same thing — your surrender of judgment —, but only one of them gets invited to Strasbourg.
The trouble with this style of politics is a timing problem, and it is not a small one. Branding is instantaneous; results are not. Carney can announce five hundred billion dollars in investment this afternoon. Whether any of it becomes an actual factory, mine, or pipeline is a question that will not be answered for years — conveniently, past the next election.
He can announce a grand European partnership by lunchtime. What it costs, what it yields, and whether it produces a single additional container of trade will take just as long to discover. The headline always arrives well ahead of the audit. Often it arrives instead of the audit.
Consider the European romance currently sweeping Ottawa. Canada already has CETA. Since its implementation, ninety-eight percent of EU tariff lines have been duty-free, with the remainder scheduled for extinction. We are not exactly locked out of Brussels.
While Europe is burning, Carney is still playing the European-superiority schtick. France and Italy have yet to ratify CETA, the trade agreement we actually have, but somehow “associate membership”—an EU membership category that does not currently exist—is the glittering prize on the horizon.
Since Carney enjoys literary and historical allusions, here is one for him. Schliemann went to Troy and found actual gold. In Euripides’ Helen, the Greeks discovered they had fought over a phantom. Before treating Canadians to another learned reference, perhaps Carney could establish which sort of prize he is bringing home.
As to the “associate membership,” a nonsense phrase possessing as much legitimacy as “double secret probation” for fans of the legendary Animal House movie - nobody knows what it grants, what it costs, or what it obliges us to accept when European regulation collides with the American-integrated economy we actually live inside. Nobody knows anything, in fact, except that it photographs beautifully.
