The Times They Aren't-a-Changing
Mr. Carney’s got brains, polish, and gravitas—just not the mandate or the power to change the rules of the game.
I think Mark Carney is great — for all the obvious reasons.
He’s smart, serious, deeply experienced, and gives off the rare impression that he knows what he’s doing. Compared to the flailing spectacle that politics has become, he looks like the adult in the room. If he becomes Prime Minister, there’s a good chance he’ll steady the ship, speak clearly, take the economy seriously, and be our best bet for steering the ship of state through The Odyssey of the Trump Era.
But still — I understand the people who aren’t sold.
I don’t mean the folks shouting on social media. I mean the quiet, skeptical crowd watching from the sidelines. The ones saying: “Okay, but what actually changes?”
It’s a fair question. Maybe the most fair question. And it deserves more than hopeful vibes or tea-leaf reading of Carney’s carefully worded interviews and debate comments. Because for many voters, the real problem isn’t who’s in charge — it’s the fact that the party, the government, and the entire bureaucratic machine underneath it doesn’t change at all.
How much can actually change if the party, the government, the bureaucratic superstructure, and the ideological class all stay the same?
It’s Not Carney, It’s the System
This isn’t about disliking the man, questioning his cred, or suspecting his motives. Carney is bright, serious, and clearly not interested in the theatre that has consumed so much of Trudeau’s leadership. If all Canada needs is a Chief Operating Officer, he’d be the obvious hire.
Some explicit differences:
Tone & Temperament:
Trudeau: Emotional, performative, rhetorically progressive (“sunny ways,” “gender lens,” “anti-racism”)
Carney: Cerebral, reserved, banker’s charm (“resilience,” “policy coherence,” “global competitiveness”)
Net effect: Less sparkle, more spreadsheet. Trades tears for footnotes. The vibes would shift from performative empathy to professional competence — or at least the performance of competence.
Priorities & Style:
Trudeau leaned hard into culture war signaling, identity politics, and social spending as nation-building.
Carney might pivot toward fiscal credibility, climate policy with hard metrics, and restoring Canada’s rep in the international finance club.
He’d still believe in activist government — he’s not a slasher — but with more economist in the room and fewer Instagram stories.
He’s clearly conservative. By any objective measure, by any definition, he is a conservative.
But politics isn’t a job — it’s a machine. A system. And swapping out the driver doesn’t change the direction of the train if the tracks are already laid.
The Party: Still the Party
The Liberal Party hasn’t changed. Carney might set a different tone, but the MPs will be the same ones who’ve cheered every budget, dodged every ethics question, and recited every line from the approved binder. The party machine is slick, centralized, and allergic to dissent.
It doesn’t want change. It wants continuity. It wants the best jobs they’ve ever had. It wants entitlements. It wants that federal pension.
There is no real evidence there’s any radical shake-up coming in the elected government. These are the same operators, staffers, advisors, and strategists — many of whom helped build the exact problems Canadians are fed up with: spiraling debt, housing absurdity, productivity collapse, and a sense that nothing really works anymore.
The Government: Still the Government
Behind those MPs, behind every policy and press release, stands the Canadian federal bureaucracy — a permanent, unelected, largely unaccountable administrative mass. It is risk-averse, process-obsessed, and ideologically saturated after years of HR-driven monoculture. It does not pivot easily.
And it’s not just big. It’s enormously bloated. Barely ambulatory. It’s busy being unproductive.
By some measures, Canada has one of the least efficient public sectors in the OECD. Not malicious — just indifferent. It eats time, not outcomes. It produces reports, not results. And when someone like Carney talks about improving productivity, it's unclear whether that means getting more out of the bureaucracy — or just getting along with it more smoothly.
The government in Canada isn’t really run by elected officials. It’s run by a sprawling, permanent, ideologically self-reinforcing civil service that has ballooned in size, reach, and influence. Over 365,000 strong and largely untouchable, it’s become the fourth branch of government.
And it doesn’t take direction. It gives it.
This is not a conspiracy. It’s a design flaw. You can elect whoever you want, but if they can't move the levers — or worse, won’t — then nothing meaningful will change.
Will Carney change any of this?
Best I can say? Carney and the Liberals need the bureaucrat’s vote to win. They’d be fools to make enemies of them ahead of the election. But could we hope he’s holding change cards close to his chest? Carney says, “We need to deliver results.” This is classic Carney speak. In The Star and other op-eds, he's pushed for “results-based governance” and better “execution.” That’s code for: our system is slow, overbuilt, and more about talking than doing. “We need to improve productivity in the public and private sectors.” Carney's economic commentary often circles productivity, which in Canada has flatlined while public sector employment has skyrocketed. Again, he doesn’t name departments, but he’s pointing at them with a velvet glove. He’s called for tighter controls on program spending post-COVID, and a return to measuring outcomes — a contrast to the open-spigot style of Trudeau's inner circle.
That could mean reducing bureaucracy, or at least slowing its growth. He mentions “rebuilding trust in institutions.” This suggests he knows something is off. Whether he’d trim the fat or just repackage it in cleaner KPI brochure is still unknown.
But again, bottom line — no clear change is being offered in the election platform. You have to believe it to see it.
The Real Power: The Ideological Class
What complicates Carney’s path further is not just structure and size of the bureaucracy, but ideology. The bureaucracy is no longer neutral. After years of progressive drift, entire departments now operate less like administrative bodies and more like values enforcement units. This is true at all levels of government.
What happens when a rational, mildly centre-left economist meets a civil service whose implicit worldview is post-liberal, activist, and aggressively consensus-policed? Where every memo is reviewed for inclusivity, every policy filtered through “lived experience,” and dissent is framed as “harm”?
It’s unclear who adjusts to whom.
I’m going to explore this much further in the coming posts.
Change
Change is really the central theme and purpose of democratic politics. At the end of the day it serves no other purpose. If the citizens didn’t want change there would be no need for democracy. But the main job of the citizen is to imagine more and better for future citizens and be increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo — no matter how good it is.
The distinguishing feature of democracy is that it can facilitate that change on a schedule with minimal bloodshed and destruction. No other system of government in history has been able to meet that low bar when it comes to change.
The only real difference between any of the political parties in a democracy, if looked at over time, is the pace of change.
Ultra-conservative: Glacially slow… possibly going backward
Conservative: Slower than average
Liberal: Average pace - keeping pace with people’s evolving ideas
NDP: Faster pussycat
Far-Left parties: Violently faster
The issue in this election is that the Liberals have allowed the electorate, and the opposing parties, to frame the problem as Mr. Trudeau. Therefore the only change promised is swapping Mr. Trudeau, for Mr. Carney.
So, the reasonable assumption could be we are voting for four more years of the same Liberal government except with Mr. Carney as PM.
For the folks who believe Canada is being DESTROYED… that’s bad.
The Voters Who Walk Away
So, no — the people who aren’t boarding the Carney bus aren’t necessarily radicals, rubes, or reactionaries. They’re just honest observers of the political physics at work.
They know that a new leader matters less than a new culture. And until someone — anyone — is brave enough to challenge not just the optics but the hardware and operating system of Ottawa, change is not coming.
I get what you are saying (and love the music!). The test of the pudding is in the tasting, so we will see.
I am very optimistic about Carney. He will come into the role knowing how government works but with a private sector mindset. He has talked about improved productivity around program spending administration and limiting THAT growth to 2% per year.
But government spending on the whole will definitely rise due to investments—defence, housing, energy infrastructure being the big ticket items. All three are going to put Canadians to work on projects of national importance and in that way I liken Carney’s approach to Canada post WWII. The biggest obstacle there will frankly be the provinces but at the moment at least there is a strong push to coordinate (Alberta excepted).
Now about the left/right frame… I profoundly disagree based on data from polling. We no longer have left/right in Canada (or much of the rest of the world). We have “ordered populism” and “open/liberal” (small l) dichotomies. I have borrowed the terms from Frank Graves’ work.
The MAGA group in the US, and at least half of the CPC base that supports it, are ordered populists who reject traditional liberal values of openness, inclusivity, and social justice which have defined the Canadian experience up until now. These values were shared by the old PCs but today’s CPC party has nothing in common with them.
In Canada 60% of the electorate strongly favours small-l liberal views. What we are seeing in the polls is a rejection of Poilievre’s ordered populism and I have to say, it makes me proud as a Canadian to see it.
Well said 👏