Saturday, May 24, 2025

Today's News: My response to the Carney push-backs (Plus, Sunshiny's excellent Mandate Letter tweet thread)

So the usual suspects are whining about PM Mark Carney tonight -- there seem to be three "push-backs" underway. 
The first pushback is about Carney's mandate letter. 
If you haven't seen it already, at the end of this post I have reposted Sunshiny's excellent tweet thread analyzing what the letter means.
But getting back to the critics, the complaints I am seeing are that Carney's priorities are either too specific or not specific enough -- the Carney mandate letter doesn't provide detailed lists of expectations for each government department; neither does it explain in detail exactly how each department should interpret the overall Canadian mandates within its own sphere.
But maybe Carney expects Cabinet ministers and their newly-appointed Chiefs of Staff to figure these things out for themselves? Like heads of departments always do in every office in every business and corporation across the country?
The CBC At Issue panel said the mandate letter sounded suspiciously "corporate".  Well, of course it does. Carney is a corporate kind of guy and that's why Canada voted for him.
Which leads me to the second pushback -- that Carney says he has a mandate to carry out his agenda but critics say really he doesn't. 
Because, I guess, he didn't quite get a majority government? So somehow that means Canada doesn't actually support what Carney wants to do?
But for the first time since 2015, the Liberals were supported by a plurality of Canadian voters, with MPs elected from every region. This seems like a pretty broad and deep mandate to me. 
Regardless of whether every single Canadian who voted Liberal actually supported every single plank on the entire Liberal platform, the Carney mandate letter provides us with a good place to start.

View on Threads

The third pushback is some bitching about Carney's management style -- supposedly, Carney is too much of a hands-on manager but also his office is chaotic.
Hmmm....I wonder where these stories are coming from?  I have a sneaking suspicion there might be a opposition leader office trying to distract from its own internal chaos by whispering about how awful the other guy is.
Christopher Nardi / National Post
Inside Mark Carney's PMO where ministers get called out, punctuality matters and patience is on short supply
National Post spoke with a half dozen current and former PMO officials, senior bureaucrats and caucus members
...They described Carney as extremely focused on delivering an ambitious agenda of reshaping the Canadian economy in the era of U.S. Donald Trump. He is fiercely punctual, runs a tight ship during meetings and is decisive — all marked differences from his predecessor.
Gone is the indecision that marred Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office, with important decision documents often sitting weeks or months on the desk of chief of staff Katie Telford. Some bottlenecks still exist, but they are more the product of an understaffed Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) serving a political neophyte.
“Decision-making is not a problem,” said one senior government official, describing Carney as “task focused” and for whom results matter.
“He does not suffer fools,” the official added, a common refrain among all sources....
“Carney will call out ministers if needed,” said one senior former Liberal who worked in both the Trudeau and Carney governments. “And he will probably call them personally to do it. Trudeau never called his ministers.”
And though the National Post article continues with concern-trolling about Carney's inexperience in Commons debates, I doubt that Carney will have the problems they predict - he doesn't have any trouble thinking on his feet and coming up with a quick quip.
Basically, Carney doesn't hesitate to do whatever he feels is the right thing for Canada, and he frames it in a way that Canadians can support.

Finally, as promised, here is Sunshiny's tweet thread about Carney's mandate letter and what it means:
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A lot of focus on AI.
Was it part of (prominent in) Carney's campaign?

If yes, I missed it.
NPoV

12:35 pm
Cathie from Canada said...

AI is under the general heading of economic development.
I recall an interesting Cory Doctorow column from March that said a country like Canada could dominate world technology if we developed technology that broke the monopolistic American tech companies -- see my excerpts here:
https://cathiefromcanada.blogspot.com/2025/03/elbows-up-responding-to-trump-tariffs.html

12:02 am

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