{"id":102981,"date":"2026-06-25T10:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T10:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/102981\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T10:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T10:34:08","slug":"mark-carney-might-be-used-to-being-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room-thats-no-guarantee-of-success-in-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/102981\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Carney might be used to being the smartest guy in the room. That\u2019s no guarantee of success in politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France on June 17.Christopher Katsarov\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

I imagine Mark Carney was something of an autocrat even in the cradle, issuing directives and insulting subordinates from the earliest age. \u201cYeah, I\u2019m not feeling this WubbaNub. Got any others?\u201d \u201cThis is not a helpful suggestion. Go back and rework it to a different nap time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly his has been a lifetime spent in preparation for, or the active enjoyment of, executive power: Harvard. Oxford. Goldman Sachs. As governor of the Bank of Canada, he would have been used to making all the final decisions, in consultation with a small group of senior advisers.<\/p>\n

And just as certainly he is well suited to it. Stephen Harper was possessed of a first-class brain, but was cripplingly shy and resentful of the gala-going set. Justin Trudeau was blessed with the breezy confidence of a prime minister\u2019s son, but was no one\u2019s idea of an intellectual.<\/p>\n

Explainer: How close is Carney to achieving his top promises? Here\u2019s a status report<\/a><\/p>\n

Opinion: After a breakneck year, can Carney reset for what\u2019s next?<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Carney has both: the smarts and the schmoozy, \u201chihowareya\u201d sociability. He was not born to power, not as a kid from Fort Smith, NWT. But he does seem somehow to have been born for it. He is the top dog in any setting, not only by virtue of his position but because that is who he is.<\/p>\n

That sort of moxie is all the more dangerous for being earned. Nobody gave Mr. Carney anything, except God. He had the brains and the talent and he worked hard for everything he has. But being a natural top dog can blind you to things. At some point that can matter.<\/p>\n

There is, for starters, what one might call \u201csmartest guy in the room\u201d syndrome. Mr. Harper had this in spades. So, one suspects, does Mr. Carney. If you are always the smartest guy in any discussion, if you can always run rings around the people you\u2019re dealing with, it can impair your judgment \u2013 a very different thing from intelligence. <\/p>\n

Smart people win arguments. Wise people learn from them. Getting your intellectual ass handed to you from time to time induces a needed humility, an understanding that there may be points of view you haven\u2019t encountered, facts you aren\u2019t aware of, angles you haven\u2019t considered. <\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t go so far as to say that intelligence is necessarily an obstacle to judgment, but it can be. Judgment is as much or more a matter of temperament, and experience, as it is processing speed. Jean Chr\u00e9tien was, like Mr. Trudeau but not Mr. Harper, no intellectual, but he had more political judgment than the two of them put together.<\/p>\n

Worse, being top dog can also blind you to what the other dogs are thinking. People who think the boss is contemptuous of them will one day return the favour. <\/p>\n

Mr. Carney is riding high at the moment. The public is rightly frightened by the course of world events, notably the sudden \u201cheel turn\u201d of the United States under Donald Trump. Mr. Carney\u2019s technocratic sheen, the bespoke suits and cool, appraising demeanour, suits their current tastes in leaders.<\/p>\n

But that is in part because he has not had to do a great deal other than look the part, unflappable and steely eyed. At some point James Bond has to actually kill someone. At some point Mr. Carney is going to have to make some fundamental decisions, win a big fight, deliver on his lofty promises. <\/p>\n

At that point the wry wink and the easy grin won\u2019t be enough. He\u2019s going to need allies. And at that point the people he\u2019s been bossing about and dressing down are going to make a calculation: Are my interests still served by sticking with this guy? It won\u2019t be love or loyalty that moves them. It will be percentage points.<\/p>\n

The problem is that Mr. Carney is playing, not against type, but in sync with it. The more of an actual, instinctive, intrinsically Type A type you are, the more you would do well to project a humble persona; the shrewder you are in reality, the better you should play dumb, and so forth. <\/p>\n

Everything about Mr. Carney screams \u201cI am a Goldman Sachs alum.\u201d And yet his every word or deed seems to say, \u201cI know. Isn\u2019t it great?\u201d That is not a quality that is likely to endear you to people over time. Maybe in business it does, or in senior bureaucratic roles, though I doubt it does even there. But in politics it is lethal.<\/p>\n

Or at least, it can be. Again, what people want varies with the circumstances. JFK was a millionaire\u2019s son, and something of an egghead to boot: all the \u201celite\u201d traits that people supposedly despise. Yet he remains wildly popular. For a while, people just wanted to be led by a guy the elites despised, someone who reflected back to them all of their own weaknesses and failings. Mr. Trump has put an end to that.<\/p>\n

Whether Mr. Carney could have come up through the ranks politically, given his persona and background \u2013 whether he would have wanted to \u2013 is an open question. As it was he didn\u2019t need to: Fate conspired to thrust him into the most powerful office in the country, and the one that requires the most political skills, with no experience in politics of any kind.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Prime Minister and his wife Diana Fox Carney board a government plane in Toronto on June 11.Christopher Katsarov\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Well, maybe politics with a small \u201cp\u201d: as a central banker, and particularly as the governor of the Bank of England, he will be familiar with how slight differences of wording can lead to vastly disparate results, how suddenly the press can turn sour on you, and other delights of political life. <\/p>\n

Certainly he has proved himself to be a much more adept political animal than many people might have supposed when he started, in the sense of a willingness to drop long-held principles on the spot if that was what was necessary to win and keep power. <\/p>\n

But the art of being politic \u2013 the wheedling and cajoling, bribes and threats that are the daily stuff of political leadership; the whole delicate, nuanced business of keeping all those other political animals, with egos just as big as yours on far less grounds, in the same pack \u2013 on this there is still room for doubt.<\/p>\n

And he is having to learn all this on the job \u2013 a job with frankly dizzying powers. Prime ministers in any Westminster system are immensely powerful. Prime ministers in Canada have always been especially powerful. But the powers of a Canadian prime minister have of late grown to levels that have neither precedent nor parallel.<\/p>\n

Opinion: A Prime Minister who has changed government rapidly but a country not yet transformed<\/a><\/p>\n

They combine all of the powers of a party leader, as they have evolved, to decide the direction of the party organization, the parliamentary caucus, and every member of caucus, with the powers of a head of government: to dictate the business of Parliament, yes, but also the bureaucracy, the police, the military, and the courts, through his unrivalled powers of appointment. <\/p>\n

A 2007 survey<\/a> of 250 experts in 22 countries, scoring prime ministers around the world over last two decades of the 20th century on a number of variables, found widespread agreement that the Prime Minister of Canada was the most powerful of the bunch, and by a wide margin. <\/p>\n

So in Mr. Carney we have an unusual combination of attributes: extraordinary self-confidence, utter lack of political experience, and enormous power. Is it entirely surprising to find that his conduct in office reveals a certain, shall we say, authoritarian streak?<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just the willingness to ride roughshod over important civil liberties, from the rights of asylum claimants to an independent hearing to the rights of internet users not to have the police snooping into their data to the manifest privacy violations implied by Bill C-22<\/a>, the Lawful Access Act, and Bill C-34<\/a>, the Safe Social Media Act.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the high-handed treatment of Parliament involved in passing these bills, whether by means of omnibus legislation combining bills with comically disparate purposes, which MPs are obliged to pass at one go; or by arbitrary limits on how long each bill might be debated, or what sorts of amendments might be entertained.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Mr. Carney\u2019s refusal to attend more than a handful of Question Periods, even when he is in Ottawa, as if the raucous, rancorous daily hazing of government ministers were beneath him, and not an integral part of his job: the basic requirement of accountability, without which power has no legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Opinion: Is Mark Carney a model for a new centrist politics, or will he be the end of the line?<\/a><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s the lordly way in which he treats his own caucus, not only forcing them to stand and support, over and over again, the very opposite policies to those they stood for little more than a year ago \u2013 Did we say we were for a consumer carbon tax? Well now we\u2019re against it \u2013 but telling them, in so many words, that he is not interested<\/a> in their complaints.<\/p>\n

There is, to be sure, ample precedent for this. Twenty-five years ago Jeffrey Simpson famously described the system of government in Canada under Mr. Chr\u00e9tien as \u201cThe Friendly Dictatorship,\u201d and we all knew what he meant. We thought we\u2019d never seen a government as centralized or as top-down as Mr. Chr\u00e9tien\u2018s, and never would again. <\/p>\n

Now, we look back on it as the last hurrah of parliamentary democracy. Since then we have had Mr. Harper, who entered the office promising to restore accountability and respect for parliamentary prerogatives, and centralized power even further; followed by Mr. Trudeau, who vowed to undo all of Mr. Harper\u2019s worst excesses and ended up taking every one of them a step further.<\/p>\n

But no prime minister has displayed quite such an obvious personal taste for autocracy, so early in his tenure, with so little evident concern for how this might come back to haunt him. What\u2019s that old show biz saying? Take care how you treat people on the way up. You\u2019ll meet them on the way down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Prime Minister Mark Carney at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France on June…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[3679,3118,3680,111,3119],"class_list":["post-102981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-andrew-coyne","tag-column","tag-coyne","tag-mark-carney","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}