William Watson: Carney’s 'forward guidance' is mainly 'backward spinning' |
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William Watson: Carney’s 'forward guidance' is mainly 'backward spinning'
Mark Carney's been a political rockstar for a little over a year. It's too soon for the greatest hits album his new video is
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Mark Carney has been a rockstar politician for only a little over a year now so it’s way too soon for a greatest hits album. But that’s what his slickly shot “Forward Guidance” YouTube video mainly is.
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As he explains, “forward guidance” 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.)
Carried over to the political realm, forward guidance would mean telling us what the government intends to do in the way of policy.
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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’s doing. For central-Canadian viewers of the Stanley Cup playoffs the jostling between federal propaganda and the Ontario government’s “Protect Ontario” ads is almost as fierce as what’s taking place on the ice.
By now only hermits won’t know that Carney’s plan is to “Build Canada Strong,” 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. — which, yes, is closer to Canada and Canadian tax rates than Los Angeles, where so many other strong Canadian patriots reside.
With its quick cuts and rapidly shifting camera angles, Forward Guidance does zap up Carney’s still flat speaking style. So do fancily interspersed clips illustrating what he’s saying as he’s 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’s appearance is so fleeting you almost wonder whether it wasn’t 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’s role in their plans.
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An interesting AI exercise would be to compare Carney’s first year in office with Justin Trudeau’s. 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’s a fate Carney needs to beware of.
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’s been providing. What Canadians most want to see now are ribbon-cuttings for pipelines and other hard asks that have actually been completed.
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Forward Guidance doesn’t use the term “Elbows Up!” but it does repeat golden oldies from and adopt the aggressive tone of Carney’s 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’t 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’ve got one of NATO’s most poorly equipped militaries, a toy soldier is not your best prop. Duck, prime minister! Meme attacks are on their way.
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’s 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: 2024 Canadian exports in $billions: to the U.S. 541.2, to China 28.9, to India 5.0.
There’s no doubt CUSMA itself will be over if we don’t move on dairy, liquor and other irritants. A majority prime minister who truly wanted to let Canadians in on what’s coming would be strongly signalling that for the good of the 98 per cent of the economy that isn’t dairy and poultry, things in those two sectors may have to change. But instead of such Forward Guidance we get Backward Spinning.
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