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Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa April 15, 2026. (Credit: Blair Gable\/Postmedia) <\/p>\n Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa April 15, 2026. (Credit: Blair Gable\/Postmedia) <\/p>\n
Mark Carney has been a rockstar politician for only a little over a year now so it\u2019s way too soon for a greatest hits album. But that\u2019s what his slickly shot \u201cForward Guidance\u201d YouTube video<\/a> mainly is.<\/p>\n As he explains, \u201cforward guidance\u201d was a technique Carney used as Bank of Canada governor to help stabilize financial markets during and after the 2008 crash. Central banks that had usually kept their strategies close to their chests decided they could better reassure markets by laying their cards on the table and saying how long they planned to keep interest rates low. (Way too long, it turned.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Carried over to the political realm, forward guidance would mean telling us what the government intends to do in the way of policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Carney has been doing little else for almost 18 months now. He told us during his leadership campaign. He told us during the federal election campaign that followed quickly on that. He told us in a speech from the throne that King Charles read for him and then in a fall budget. And he told us again in Davos and, less successfully, in a state of the Confederation speech from the Plains of Abraham. And of course his government has bombarded us with swarms of ads about what a great job it\u2019s doing. For central-Canadian viewers of the Stanley Cup playoffs the jostling between federal propaganda and the Ontario government\u2019s \u201cProtect Ontario<\/a>\u201d ads is almost as fierce as what\u2019s taking place on the ice.<\/p>\n By now only hermits won\u2019t know that Carney\u2019s plan is to \u201cBuild Canada Strong,\u201d that he stands for standing up to the Americans in support of the true North standing strong and free, that he favours trade diversification and that he is good buddies with comedian Mike Myers, proud Canadian resident of (the internet tells me) Colchester, Vt. \u2014 which, yes, is closer to Canada and Canadian tax rates than Los Angeles, where so many other strong Canadian patriots reside.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n With its quick cuts and rapidly shifting camera angles, Forward Guidance does zap up Carney\u2019s still flat speaking style. So do fancily interspersed clips illustrating what he\u2019s saying as he\u2019s saying it. Astronaut Jeremy Hansen gets the longest camera time. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely second, shots of him being used to back up a passage on trade diversification. Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s appearance is so fleeting you almost wonder whether it wasn\u2019t dropped in by Chinese computer hackers aiming at the kind of subliminal visual control people worried about back in the 1970s. But of course the Liberals themselves have good reason to downplay China\u2019s role in their plans.<\/p>\n Story Continues <\/p>\n An interesting AI exercise would be to compare Carney\u2019s first year in office with Justin Trudeau\u2019s. Which of the two had more photo ops, often featuring hard hats and bespoke banners, announcing things? To his political detriment, Trudeau became famous for being much better at aspirational than delivery. It\u2019s a fate Carney needs to beware of.<\/p>\n Now having achieved his majority, he would do better with another strategy from his central-banker days: quantitative easing, i.e., easing off on the quantity of photo ops he\u2019s been providing. What Canadians most want to see now are ribbon-cuttings for pipelines and other hard asks that have actually been completed.<\/p>\n Forward Guidance doesn\u2019t use the term \u201cElbows Up!\u201d but it does repeat golden oldies from and adopt the aggressive\u00a0tone of Carney\u2019s successful election campaign. In a strange choice of prop, he holds up a toy soldier Mike Myers gave him, a model of Sir Isaac Brock, defender of Upper Canada in the War of 1812. Credit Carney with the courage to praise a white, dead, European cis-male (so far as we know Brock was cis: people in his era didn\u2019t think to record that) whose home was in the English Channel island of Guernsey and whose life and ultimately death on the battlefield at Queenston Heights were in service of British imperialism and colonialism. Even so, when you\u2019ve got one of NATO\u2019s most poorly equipped militaries, a toy soldier is not your best prop. Duck, prime minister! Meme attacks are on their way.<\/p>\n At a time when Carney should be pivoting his strategies to managing a majority caucus, why, apart from nostalgia for the election campaign, is he invoking the War of 1812 in a new communications drive? Could he be preparing a blame story for failure of the upcoming CUSMA negotiations? Trump is almost into lame-duck territory, the November midterms are approaching, the Supreme Court has struck down most tariffs and no Republican has taken up Trump\u2019s 51st-state mantra, yet Carney persists in insisting our close relationship with the U.S. is now over. Lord help us if it is. Relevant export fact<\/a>: 2024 Canadian exports in $billions: to the U.S. 541.2, to China 28.9, to India 5.0.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no doubt CUSMA itself will be over if we don\u2019t move on dairy, liquor and other irritants. A majority prime minister who truly wanted to let Canadians in on what\u2019s coming would be strongly signalling that for the good of the 98 per cent of the economy that isn\u2019t dairy and poultry, things in those two sectors may have to change. But instead of such Forward Guidance we get Backward Spinning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[693,7121,7122,7119,125,127,111,7120,6750,3203,7123],"class_list":["post-13022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-bank-of-canada","tag-canadian-tax-rates","tag-election-campaign","tag-forward-guidance","tag-house-of-commons","tag-justin-trudeau","tag-mark-carney","tag-mike-myers","tag-ontario-government","tag-parliament-hill","tag-prime-minister-narendra-modi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13022","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=13022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}