The Decibel - Decoding Mark Carney’s strategic narrative about Canada

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

One of the key jobs of a prime minister is to help build out the story of what is Canada. And while Mark Carney was considered a political neophyte when he became Prime Minister, he’s proven to be adept in using political symbolism to build out his version of what it means to be Canadian at this moment in time. Shannon Proudfoot, a feature writer for The Globe, pieces together the actions, speeches and policies that Prime Minister Carney has used over the last year and a bit to build out his strategic narrative and explains where the weak points are in it. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You know the slogans. Elbows up. Elbows up. United. We will build Canada strong. We can give ourselves far more than anyone can take away. And you've heard the soundbites. President Trump wants to break us so America can own us.

We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be. We are no longer relying just on the strength of our values. We are also building the value of our strength. These are the foundations of a story that Prime Minister Mark Carney is telling us about Canada and about ourselves. Every Prime Minister weaves a political narrative that they use to define the country they govern.

And on top of slogans and soundbites, they often include historical references. Our country was brought. built on the bedrock of three peoples, indigenous, French, and British. And specific policies. And that's why Build Canada Homes will prioritize the use of cost-efficient and modern methods of construction, including factory build, modular, and mass timber. Shannon Proudfoot is a feature writer and columnist for the globe, and she's been piecing

together these clues from the Prime Minister to reveal the bigger story Carney is telling. She's on the show to decipher his policies and speeches and to explain where the prime minister's narrative rings true and with who and where it doesn't. I'm Cheryl Sutherland and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Shannon. Welcome back to The Decibel. Hi there. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. So let's start by talking about political narratives in general. Why is it important for a political leader to be able to create a narrative about the country they're leading? Yeah, when you think about it, in a way, politics is all stories. I don't mean to suggest that it's nothing but shallow. Obviously, there are policies that greatly affect people's lives. But in terms of how politicians justify what they're doing or tell us that they're the best one to run the country in a particular moment, it's all kind of narrative-based, right? It's all about this is our set of problems. These are the solutions I see. Here is why I am the best person to shape those solutions. On a national level, particularly for federal politics, unity. and people feeling buy-in and feeling like part of a collective is really important.

And the way you weave that is to give people a narrative that they can all feel like they belong to. But what I really wanted to unpack in this piece is what a story gets you as a politician. What does it sort of give you permission to do? What does it allow you to justify and also what's not in the story? And just to spend a minute on this unity part, because I think that's really interesting, as you mentioned, that in a federation, you know, there are so many different parts of Canada, right? and so many different identities, that it's important for a prime minister to make us feel like we are our one under one message. Absolutely.

And I think that's a particular challenge in Canada always, and particularly in this moment, where we see sort of minority, but little bits of separatist sentiment bubbling up in different parts of the country in Quebec and Alberta. Also, the sort of pre-existing conditions of this country is that we are geographically vast, you know, not that many marbles rolling around in that tin can, very different regional interests and regional characters. Part of the essence of Canada, we all know, is this mosaic effect rather than melting pot. And so where Americans have a very strong sense of Americanness that tends to sort of scrub out some of the places they come from and their different origin stories.

In Canada, the mosaic means we have a lot of different stories that kind of exist as a quilt across the country. And so I think the unifying quality of a national story becomes particularly important in a country that has a lot of different things going on within its border. Okay, so what are the elements of an effective narrative? Yeah, so aside from it being this unifying story, we can all be part of, a national narrative is actually very much like advertising. I talked to an advertising expert in my story, and he talks about when you create a brand for a product, you obviously want to shape how people will see your brand and how they will see themselves if they buy your product. But it can't be something you pull in from out of left field. It has to be something that feels true, that feels like it's already there. And that is a key part of a national narrative.

And we see that over time in history, as Canadian prime ministers in different moments in time have sort of emphasized or deemphasized different parts of the Canadian story, there's still sort of a finite menu they choose from. There's this kind of range of Canadianness, a salad bar of Canadianness, and they pick the parts that they emphasize. So it has to resonate with people. You can't tell people that being Canadian means this thing that makes absolutely no sense to them because people are smart and you're not going to sell them on a night. idea that doesn't matter. It has to be, if we're, if we're being a little bit more grizzly and political about it, it has to be vague enough that everyone can see themselves in it, can project themselves into it, but it sort of has to tug at the heartstrings or have some emotional content. It can't be really astringent or people sort of have nothing to grab

onto. So it is very much, I think, like advertising a product, but it's doing much heavier lifting because it's about a sense of a nation and a national identity. So I know you're making me think about when you think about like it has to be vag enough, but people can grab onto it, is like a horoscope. That's exactly what I was thinking of. A horoscope speaks to everyone, but nobody. Totally. I was going to say it. And I thought proud for one too many analogies. You can't do it. But that's exactly it. You will go through changes today. You will be faced with choices. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now that we have a bit of a sense of how political narrative works and their

importance, let's dive into Mark Carney's story about Canada. How would you describe it? Yeah, it's funny. I started the story with this image of wallpaper because I thought to say to people, like Mark Carney's telling a story about Canada kind of registers as like, duh, that's the entire thing he's been doing. Like we've been living inside a Canadian snow globe for like a year and a half, two years, right? But I think that's made the actual story he's telling us, like what he's saying about Canada, invisible. Because it's been wrapped in this kind of like patriotic, raw, raw, Mike Myers' elbows up thing. So his version of Canada, he talks about us being confident, being sovereign, which is a, direct response to threats from the U.S., but it's also doing something else. He talks about

Canada being muscular, us sort of not just riding sidecar in the world. He talks about us as builders of things. We make stuff, we sell stuff, we draw things out of the earth. We are sort of global citizens being middle powers, as in that famous Davos speech, but that that doesn't mean, middle doesn't mean mediocre. It means that we can draw together with other middle powers and show some muscle. There's also a very retro quality, I think, to the way he presents sort of us as hewers of wood and drawers of water, that we draw things out of the earth and we sell them and that we sell them to lots more partners. That is who he wants to project us being and sort of having these multiple connection points in the world as opposed to just America to the south of us, which I think is sort of the orientation we're more used to. When you say retro quality, is that kind of something that harkens to the past of this, like the builders and makers of things, that that was Canada from the past? There's sort of multiple chapters of it. That's one version of it, which I sort of see as even more of a throwback. There's also a really, I think, a really hefty post-war flavor to it. He talks about things like building modular homes, nuclear power. One of his catchphrases is, you know, we will do things at speeds not seen in generations, which I think is a very direct kind of callback to the post-war moment when we were, you know, building a country.

and infrastructure very quickly for returning war vets. And I think that kind of hearkening to a post-war moment might be sort of an emotional appeal. The idea is, you know, we once rebuilt from the ashes of a great conflict. And here we are in another moment of massive upheaval and uncertainty and anxiety where we are kind of just passengers to events. But it's a sort of empowering message, right? It's like a sunnier day will come where we will also have our post-war rebuild moment. So I feel like it's sort of offering a bit of an emotional.

ray of hope, I think, that he's kind of plucking at there. The other thing that's interesting about this narrative that Carney is portraying of Canada is that it's a very defined version of Canadianness, right? Like, this stands in contrast to how a lot of people usually think about our national identity, which is undefined or which is like, we are not America. That's kind of the sense that we usually get. And this is something different he's doing. Yeah, so I interviewed a lot of historians for this story.

And I put that exact idea to quite a few of them, because to me it sounded sort of novel or discordant, this idea of Canada as confident and muscular and we know who we are, to me is the opposite of kind of the idea of docile, polite Canadians, America's hat, you know, as we define ourselves in opposition to being non-American, as you say. And I got different responses from them. One of them said, that's my age, so I'm sort of mid-40s, that it was sort of my historical reference point, and also that I was thinking of the most recent government of Justin Trudeau, which had a very different way of projecting Canada in the world. And in fact, said in a lot of cases he was the historical aberration and Carney's very kind of chest out version

of Canada is a really good match for a lot of prime ministers before him going all the way back to like Laurier and McDonald. Okay, can you, can you explain that? What do they mean by the fact that that Trudeau is actually the one that's the different one? So more than one person I talked to said this, so this was a common perception. They said if you go back and I had examples of speeches from Laurier and McDonald, when they were talking about Canada in its much earlier days, they didn't talk about us as like a sidecar to the U.S. They talked about Canada as its own entity with a proud history, great resources. L'Oriet at one point predicted that Canada was capable of supporting a hundred million people that we had such great kind of natural gifts that that was the sort of

population we could support. They saw Britain as a sort of decaying empire and that we were going to sort of be the leaders of the Commonwealth because Britain was kind of like had had its day. And when I said this to one of the historians I talked to, like, are you seeing a parallel moment to now where like we have an empire next to us that's been like a really big deal and kind of feels like it's fading and falling apart? He said, yes, I also see that. So there's sort of an interesting historical echo. But the way in which Justin Trudeau could be seen as an aberration, and this is, this is loaded with, I think, to some degree, like partisan viewpoints, but I think it's also valid in a broad historical sense was that Trudeau's version of emphasizing Canadian diversity

a lot of people saw as being about divisions. It was about talking about the differences between people and the kind of chasms and the tension points. And some people saw that as constantly apologizing for Canada. Carney's way of talking about Canada as a leader and as something to be proud of, not something to apologize for, to a lot of the historians I talked to, falls much more in line with the historical precedent of earlier prime ministers. Yeah, I mean, we should also note that, you know, the Trudeau era was also the time when we ushered in some reconciliation with indigenous peoples. A hundred percent. And something that I think about, too, is that Trudeau was of the moment, right? You know, Barack Obama was of the moment. And it makes me kind of think about how much control a politician has over narrative versus kind of global events or kind of the vibe of the time, right? So, for example, right now we have Trump being the U.S.S. president. So how much is it the control of the politician versus? global events that actually determines the story. Yeah, it's a great question. And the kind of fencing answer is it's both. I think of it as events give the prime minister a lump of clay to work with, and they can sculpt it to some degree. But it's kind of like that thing we were talking about earlier,

where the idea of what Canada is and what it does has to ring true to people. So you sort of have to work with the context, the historical moment, the vibe you've been given, and then you can sculpt it and project it in a particular direction depending on what suits your political purposes. We'll be right back. Okay, let's go through how Carney translates these ideas of Canada into policies. What policies stood out to you as being particularly symbolic of his vision? One of the first things I remember noticing is not actually policy,

but the doing of politics, if you'll indulge me for a second. This was about 30 seconds in. So back in March, when he was first sworn in as prime minister, The cabinet lasted about 10 minutes before they disbanded to call an election. He gave a press conference in the driveway outside Rito Hall, where they always give the press conferences after a swearing in. One of the very first things he said was that he said Canada's history was founded on three peoples, the British, the French, and indigenous people. And I'd never sort of heard someone recently encapsulated that way. And immediately after that, he went on his first international trip to London,

to Paris, and to a Caloit. That was one of the first. moments, I remember thinking, huh, this guy who was supposed to be a technocrat who can't do politics actually can do politics and symbolism quite well and seems to like it. A lot of people, when I wrote a profile of him, will talk about how strategic he is. And so to that end, it feels to me like no setting for a speech, no line, no gesture, no policy decision is empty or random. Everything feels like it's nodding towards something else. So the absolute centerpiece of his economic agenda, which is the centerpiece of what this government is doing. They're very ruthless about priorities and there's a very clear sense of this is where we're directing our energy. This is what we're doing is about developing the economy. And it's pretty clearly a sort of rising tide lifts all boats notion where if we can produce more stuff, sell more stuff to more partners, this will get better for everyone. Like across the board, wages will rise. When we talk about affordability problems, somehow that will work itself out. I would argue he's not doing a great job. about explaining that to people, at explaining how it connects to their lives. But they've made a

great show out of the major projects office and these projects that they put on that list to accelerate. They're all very concrete things. They are things like you could touch or you could swing a hammer against and it would make a loud sound. It's things like mines, ports, roads, highways, pipelines. That again is where there's kind of a retro quality, right? He does talk a bit about an AI strategy and quantum computing, but that's not where most of the kind of policy energy is directed. It's to making stuff, moving stuff, selling stuff. So that's where I think that matches up with that narrative. And also in terms of policies, I also think about all the agreements he has made with European countries. How does that fit into his narrative building?

So that's a huge part of the very particular Carney story of Canada. His version of Canada, we turn our face to Europe, not south to the US. Like he, I think on that first trip again that I mentioned where he went to London, Paris, and Akalawi, he described Canada as the most European of non-European countries. And he has put enormous political capital travel miles into striking all these deals. And that is part of him wanting to diversify our trade. It also makes sense. It's a match to Carney's own history and resume and Rolodex. He has heavy contacts in Europe from being the Bank of England governor. And you could argue there's some natural connection points there with, you know, Canadian immigration history, our history as, you know, part of the British Commonwealth,

it makes sense to reach out for those friendships. But there are also people who argue that there's a tension point there in that, sure, you can ship your stuff across to Europe or to Asia or to these other parts of the world where he's putting a lot of energy into cultivating trade agreements. But that's a lot harder than driving it in a truck across a bridge to the United States. And so that's where the tension comes in in the narrative. And can we really solve? for everything that's changed in this moment. Is there also an irony here that, you know, part of Carney's assertion of Canada's sovereignty involves turning to Europe more because we're replacing America with Europe?

It's an interesting point. I would love to see you ask him that in a press conference because I think he'd have a spicy answer for you. So come on up to Ottawa and we can arrange that show. I think his argument would be at the risk of like, I don't know, projecting a Carney headspace for you would be that sovereignty is about. making our own choices and about deciding and also that having more dance partners, it's a counterpoint to a kind of monopoly relationship, right? Both not just trade, we should say, but also security, like the idea of belonging to bodies like NATO and respecting territorial

boundaries and patrolling our waters and keeping an eye on the Arctic. Like, these are all strands of that sovereignty thing where Carney is cultivating a very particular story of what Canada is capable of and who its friends are right now. One thing we haven't talked about yet, which I think is surprising is that we haven't talked about universal health care. And to me, that's kind of one of the pillars of Canadian identity. Why isn't Carney leaning more on that? It's a really good point. He sometimes nods a bit in a very general direction, but I think this is like the exception that actually proves the rule you're pointing to. One of his things that he puts in the window about Canada is, like, we take care of each other. But that's sort of his, one of his few

nods to that notion of Canada. So I think this might be an example of, you know, that salad bar we talked about, the menu options of how we define Canada. Universal Health Care is a version of a thing we have always held close, right, or we have held close for a very long time. And I don't see him emphasizing that a lot these days. But I do think that's one of the kind of risk points, or at least one of the things, one of the questions we should ask about this story is what's not in it. If we are talking about Canada as a country that ambitiously builds things and moves things and sells things, we're not talking about it. Like there was an alternate version of strengthening the Canadian economy or there's

some alternate timelines. We could have decided that our future was as, you know, a care economy or it was in like cultural exports. There are other choose your own adventures that we could have chosen here. And sort of the underlying point of this story was for me to point to the fact that we are telling a choose your own adventure story, which means we're making choices. But exactly what you're saying, that's one of the choices we're not making. A reckoning has to be coming about what we're spending on or what we're not spending on.

And the story sort of attaches to that. The story he's telling will attempt to explain how we're spending and where we're tightening. But right now, what the government is actually doing is just shoveling money out the door. And they're not having the conversation yet about what we can't do as a result of what we are deciding to do. And that will be one of those ones that is just not palatable to Canadians. So I think you will continue to see them say, we're not going to touch health care, but something's got to give in program spending or in things that we're doing or we're just like the deficit is just going to get worse and worse. And part of his project is supposed to be kind of taming that. Okay.

So it sounds like the tough decisions are the tough conversations are yet to come. 100%. Yeah. What about nature? Because that's something that is another commonly Canadian stereotype is that we're a country that loves nature. Does that factor into Carney's story of the country? It absolutely does. And that, I think, is sort of Carney's substitute for the Justin Trudeau diversity story.

It's a little bit more subtle, but he really does emphasize nature in a couple of ways. The past two summers, this summer and last, they've had this Canada Strong Pass where it was free for people to go to national parks. And they sort of, they positioned this as sort of, you know, in a moment of rally around the flag, we're going to make this available to everyone. I think it also does some political heavy lift. another thing he emphasizes is when people question, hey, buddy, you used to care about climate change and climate policy and that doesn't really seem to be a priority for you anymore. I'm seeing a lot of pipeline announcements right now. 100%. Yes. There's been an enormous shift there, both from the previous government and from,

I think, who people thought Carney was. And so he gets pushed on that a lot. What he always points to is his government's $3.8 billion nature strategy, which is heavily focused on like land and water and species conservation. And that's always sort of his, his fig leaf or the thing he points to to kind of reinforce his nature cred. So it's doing a lot of things because also when he made that announcement, he talks about nature as something that inherently sort of all Canadians can get behind. That is part of all of our common identity. So I think it's sort of, it's unifying without directly nodding at diversity. It's kind of just like inviting you all in. You can go stay in a tent and Gatno Park or enjoy nature no matter who you are.

that that is supposed to be part of all of us. Hmm. Okay. So would you describe Carney's vision as optimistic or more pessimistic? Oh, it's enormously optimistic in a way that I would argue is becoming problematic. All incumbent politicians, I suppose, need to tell a story about how things are good and getting better because otherwise, like, what are they doing and why would we hire them again? So I have some sympathy for the tension in that. But I do find Carney's story of, Canada sort of insistently upbeat. And in a lot of ways, that makes a lot of sense. And I think really met the emotional moment. And so Carney's very upbeat story of Canada and his story of the fact that

we can stand up to that and we can rebuild, like one of his famous lines, we can give ourselves more than any foreign country can take away, was enormously appealing. So just so I understand it, it's like it's optimistic because it's hopeful. Because Carney's optimism is quite different. I mean, people would say Trudeau was also optimistic, but there is a different type of optimism here. It is. And there's almost a strange contradiction in it, in that he starts almost every speech talking about the rupture or how we're in a more dangerous and divided world, which certainly doesn't sound very optimistic. That's kind of sad trombone. But his story about Canada within that rupture, dangerous, divided world is a very upbeat one. It's less, it's maybe it's, Trudeau was

famously sunny ways. Carneys is more like, build stuff, moves, stuff sells stuff. It is so inherently optimistic, and I'm not sure it's really all that true. Like, if you want to be really fact-checky and pedantic about it, we sell three quarters of our stuff to the United States, or we have historically. So can we reorient some of that and diversify our trading partners and beyond better footing? Absolutely. We probably should have done that before now, and we should be working on it now. But the idea that we could fill in that blast radius crater entirely, just sort of by trying harder is just not true. And that's where I think there's a bit of a problem underlying Carney's Canada narrative, which is that he's not talking to us about how this is probably

still going to get harder before it gets better. He has nodded though from time to time at sacrifices will be coming. You know, we're going to have to make tough choices. There's a harder story that is also part of the reality. And it also feels to me like Carney is uniquely equipped as a former central banker who has steered two countries through really, really rough economic and political waters, he could stick handle that. He could, he could weave that in. He could help us understand, like, the choppy water that's coming, and here's what we're going to do about it, because he benefits from so much public confidence right now. He still sort of has a halo and that halo will tarnish over time. So to me, like, I would think that now, while the halo is still bright and

shiny is the time to start having some of those difficult conversations. So would you say, Shannon, that Carney at the moment is kind of sugarcoating our challenges? He sure is. And the funny part about that is when he did, he has these forward guidance videos. He's put out two of them now. And the idea is this would be his chance to sort of tell us the way he sees things, like what the problems are and what he's going to do about them. But in the very first one he did, one of the sort of kind of money quotes out of it was, I will never sugarcoat our problems. And I, I would argue there's actually been a lot of sugar coating. Yeah, I feel like Carney could just tell us like it is.

Like, we're all adults here. Yeah, it's like we can take it because we have to know, right? Just to end here, Shannon, can we talk about what is being left out of his narrative? So earlier we talked about how healthcare is part of the narrative that he's not really talking about. But what else? Like what kind of Canadian identity or values are not included in Carney's vision? Yeah, well, some of it is what I said earlier about Trudeau's incentive. some people's eyes over emphasis on diversity.

Carney doesn't do that a whole lot at all. And some people view that as in itself unifying, because like we're not focusing on the fault lines so much we're talking about the collective. But I think there's probably a fine balance between sort of not overly focusing on divisions between people and kind of just papering them over. And I think that may become a thing over time that we can't pretend that the experience of Canada or experiences in the world are one-size-fits-all. There's also a more kind of nuts and bolts economic part of it that's not there. And I'm not saying that it should be. My point is that a very

powerful story doesn't invite you to ask questions about the story it's telling you. That does not make you pause and think, huh, well, is building mines and ports and pipelines like the way we solve this? Like, is that the best and only way? We are also making choices about trade-offs between climate policy and things like resource development. And those might be entirely reasonable or necessary tradeoffs to make, but we're not really talking about them as tradeoffs. We're just talking about them as sort of a manifest necessity. Like we're just doing this because we're just doing it. So it's all those, like again, to go back to the choose your own adventure analogy, you know, the thing where it's like, if you choose this, turn to page 47 and if you choose this,

turn to page 63. The story only tells us about page 47. It's, erases page 63. And there's a lot of other things there that we could entertain as other sort of doors we could walk through. Shannon, really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. That was Shannon Proudfoot, a feature writer and columnist for the globe based in Ottawa. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Tiff Lamb mixed this episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mikhail Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.