Mark Carney Is Governing like It’s Wartime

The Liberals are centralizing power and moving fast. Why isn’t anyone objecting? The post Mark Carney Is Governing like It’s Wartime first appeared on The Walrus .

Travelling home recently from a business trip— I run a Canadian polling firm specializing in political and public opinion research—I tried to describe to myself, as objectively as I could, what the Mark Carney Liberal government actually is. Not what it says, but what it has done and put into motion: the legislation, the budgets, the orders in council, the deals with premiers and foreign capitals. Let’s do a little inventory: The consumer carbon tax killed by order in council within days of taking office.

Bill C-5 giving cabinet the power to fast-track projects it deems in the national interest, with twenty-three projects worth over $130 billion now referred to the Major Projects Office. A pipeline deal with Alberta premier Danielle Smith followed last week by a $20 billion prosperity agreement that bought David Eby’s acceptance of it. Immigration cut well below Justin Trudeau–era targets.

Trudeau’s senate appointment reforms mostly reversed. A plan to shrink the public service by 40,000 positions while a new sovereign wealth fund expands the state’s balance sheet. A national artificial intelligence strategy.

A food security strategy. Then look abroad: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2 percent target hit for the first time since the Cold War, backed by a Defence Industrial Strategy and a fleet of German-built submarines. The Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement renewal under negotiation with a hostile White House.

New support for Ukraine and fresh sanctions on Russia. Support for strikes on Iran while keeping Canada out of the operation. A strategic partnership with China that has restarted our relationship with the world’s second-largest economy.

This is a lot of motion in sixteen months. Two questions were going through my mind while reading this list were, first, is this the most ambitious government in a long time, and, second, why has public opinion largely applauded what would have been deeply divisive and in some ways controversial decisions? Our latest survey, completed on July 2 with 2,366 Canadian adults, finds 54 percent approve of the job the Carney government is doing while 31 percent disapprove.

It has sat near that level for months. Carney’s undertakings are maybe the most ambitious for a new government since at least Brian Mulroney. More specific, it feels like a wartime-footing government without a war.

It’s a government organized around an external threat that’s willing to suspend its own party’s orthodoxies, centralize power to move fast, and measure itself in outcomes rather than values. You might expect a government behaving this way, breaking this sharply from its own predecessor, to be dividing the country. And yet it isn’t really at all.

Approval has climbed from 41 percent when Carney took office to the mid-fifties today. Carney’s personal impressions sit at plus nineteen in our July wave while opposition leader Pierre Poilievre remains underwater at minus five. And the approval isn’t coming only from Liberals: roughly one in five Conservative supporters tell us this government is doing an acceptable job, a level of cross-partisan credit we almost never measure in normal times.

Now, that doesn’t mean Canadians have signed off on every piece of the agenda. The cost of living and the economy still top our issue ranking, and 65 percent of Canadians put affordability among their most important priorities. What’s remarkable is what those voters do next.

Among people who rank the economy and cost of living first, the Liberals remain competitive and, in some segments, hold a narrow advantage. Economic anxiety, especially the micro form of it, does not usually behave that way. It usually eats incumbents for breakfast.

The explanation, I think, is that voters have become less interested in who shares their worldview than in who seems most competent to navigate an uncertain future. This is valence voting in its purest form. Canadians look at that world and see instability.

They look at Canada and feel, comparatively, reassured. We are living through what I’ve termed the Age of Reassurance, and a government building ships, pipelines, and homes is selling exactly the product this anxious market wants, especially when the primary threat to most people comes from outside our borders. There’s another way to picture it.

A strong wind has been blowing from the south for eighteen months, and it hasn’t let up. A government facing that wind can drop anchor and wait for calmer weather, or it can set the sails. This one set the sails.

And our research suggests the public expects nothing less. The moment feels rare to people. A government that treated it timidly would be seen as squandering it.

The wind created the licence and the demand at the same time. But the analogy that explains the licence also contains a warning. Wartime footings have a life cycle.

In the mobilization phase, the public grants extraordinary latitude. Orthodoxies get suspended, power gets centralized, and few people ask hard questions about process because the threat is the only ballot question that matters. Wartime footings also defer things, though.

They defer the domestic accounting. They defer the question of what the mobilization was for. When the threat recedes, or simply becomes normal, the deferred questions can come due all at once.

In July 1945, Winston Churchill had just helped Britain survive World War II. His personal standing was towering. But British voters handed Clement Attlee’s Labour Party a landslide anyway, sending Churchill packing.

And here’s the detail that should interest anyone reading Canadian politics today: Attlee wasn’t the opposition. He spent the war inside Churchill’s coalition as deputy prime minister, running the home front while Churchill ran the war. When the votes came, Churchill was still selling victory.

Voters were buying homes, health care, and jobs. Gratitude turned out to be a currency that couldn’t be banked. That’s the structural risk sitting underneath these approval numbers.

Our tracking consistently shows Canadians attributing their economic pain to forces outside the country—to US president Donald Trump, to tariffs, to global volatility—rather than to their own government. This is the most speculative part of the argument, but I’d put it this way: Carney’s licence may be rented from the threat, and nobody knows the term of the lease. If the wind shifts, or dies, or simply becomes wallpaper, the ballot question reverts to the one that never went away.

If I’m Pierre Poilievre, I stop running against the mobilization. Attacking a wartime footing the public demanded is a losing argument. I start positioning as the owner of the peace: the person with a plan for what comes after, for the pay stub and the mortgage renewal.

Attlee, not the anti-Churchill. And if I’m advising this government, I’d say the frameworks and memorandums of understanding now have to become outcomes people can see. Homes they can afford.

Paycheques that stretch further. Churchill’s lesson is that you can win the war and still lose the election, because voters don’t reward the mobilization. They reward what comes after.

Originally published as “Is the Carney Government on a Wartime-Footing Government Without a War?” by David Coletto (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.