The Decibel - The challenges ahead for Carney as Parliament resumes

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Between ramping up major infrastructure projects, trying to make a deal with the U.S., and working on strengthening ties with Europe, Prime Minister Mark Carney has had a busy summer. With Parliament resuming for the fall session today – this government’s first full session, save for a brief sitting in the spring – Carney will have to address Canadians’ changing priorities.Today, Shannon Proudfoot, a feature writer for The Globe’s Ottawa bureau, and Robyn Urback, a Globe opinion columnist, discuss the challenges Carney faces, and what room there is for opposition parties to advance their priorities.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.

Between ramping up major infrastructure projects, trying to make a deal with the U.S., and working on strengthening ties with Europe, Prime Minister Mark Carney has had a very busy summer. And today, Parliament resumes, and it's this government's first full session. At a recent cabinet planning forum, two pollsters from Leje presented some interesting findings. Those Trump tariffs, they are no longer top priority for Canadians. They fall behind issues like inflation, costs of living, and housing. So we've convened a panel to talk about the challenges that lie ahead. I've got two guests with me.

Hi, I'm Shannon Proudfoot. I'm a feature writer in the Ottawa Bureau. Hi, I'm Robin Urbach. I'm a current affairs columnist based in Toronto. They're here to talk about how Carney is meeting the moment and what kind of space he's leaving open for opposition parties to make political gains. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this, is the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Shannon, Robin, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us. And I should point out that we're talking here around 11 a.m. on Friday, just in case something changes after that. Things have been happening fast the last week or so. It's a fair bet. Exactly, exactly. So let's just start with a big question here. So as Parliament resumes, how would you describe the political moment that we're in?

Shannon, we'll start with you. So I think we're sort of heading out of purgatory. I think Mark Carney and Pierre Pollyev have each sort of been in their own purgatory over the summer. I can unpack that a bit. And now it's kind of show your work time. For Mr. Carney, this is fairly obvious. He was elected in really strange, urgent circumstances back in the spring. There was basically no reason on earth his party should have gotten a fourth term considering where the polls were, but then Donald Trump stomped into the frame and changed everything. And to my mind, what Carney promised during the campaign was to do very big things very fast. But the thing about doing very big things,

things is they're really hard to do. And so he was talking about simultaneously dealing with the potential economic damage of the tariffs on the Canadian economy, which are not, we're not expected that and are not expected now to be small. He was talking about shoring up all the weaknesses we've always had in our economy, basically making ourselves stronger to withstand the onslaught. But those are really, really big things to pull off. And now I think this fall is time where he has to deliver on that. He has to show that he can do more than just sort of spin the rhetoric on it, that he can deliver. And also to connect that to people's real lives, because where Pollyev comes into this picture is that we've seen the issue set

switching, where Donald Trump is not top of mind for Canadians anymore. It's back to the affordability stuff that everyone was worried about a year ago, which is Pollyev's sweet spot. That is what he has been very good at prosecuting in public. And so I think for Carney, he's sort of fighting a two-front war where he has to content people and show that he still got his elbows at least somewhat up with Donald Trump, that he can deal with that, but also addressing domestic affordability concerns that we've already seen Pollyev just hammering on with laser precision. And then we can see things like, you know, housing costs, crime creeping in.

So we're moving much more back to, I think, a domestic framing. And that's where they're going to be duking it out and trying to sort of explain to Canadians, what they can do to help. Yeah, and Shannon, you're kind of referring to these, this, the Leje pollsters that were saying that terrorists have fallen to the number four spot, that cost of living, affordability, that's really top of mind for Canadians. Robin, what do you think about that? How is that going to be challenging for Carney?

Well, I think Shannon's totally right. I think that those issues have kind of eclipsed what was seen as the acute emergency of Donald Trump, and I think part of it is just that Donald Trump has a whole bunch of other things on his plate other than annexing Canada. and tariffing us into oblivion. And I think because of that, what's happening domestically is that people are remembering some of the things that they were angry about before, frankly.

So they're still looking at their grocery bills and they're thinking, like, my God, why are my grapes, like $12 or whatever it is? And I still can't find a house and the price of everything is still going up. And like, oh, yeah, Donald Trump is there, but these immediate concerns are still affecting my life. And that's going to be a real challenge for Kearney,

especially because I think the measures that he can take to address affordability in the short term and in a way that is sort of immediately perceptible to the average person, he's already done that. So he has passed legislation to deliver that middle class tax cut and he has canceled the carbon tax as well. And like these little things that people are going to notice in their day to day, it's not going to change their life. I mean, I think it was the government anticipated that something like, like $840 will be the savings for a dual income household based on this middle class tax cut. And the carbon tax is that actually going to save people money? Well, it'll save people money when they pay for gas, for example, but they're not getting

those rebates back. But in terms of the measures that Carney can take, those are the ones that people are going to see immediately. The planning that he's doing now is for the medium and the long term when you're talking about things like diversifying trade, building infrastructure. building a new government body to see to the building of houses across a nation, like those things take time. I do think it may be to his political advantage, at least, that he is saying all the right things. Like he is acknowledging that these are issues that are affecting the

everyday Canadian. And there is the perception that the government is taking real action on that, especially when you compare it to kind of the rhetoric or the attitude towards these issues under Justin Trudeau. I mean, very infamously, his finance minister, Christopher Freeland, referred to a vibe session when we were talking about some affordability concerns. And that understanding Yeah, I know. It rubbed people the wrong way, right? There was this perception that the government wasn't listening and wasn't taking affordability concerns seriously, wasn't taking the economy seriously. So even though these these major projects that the Kearney government's going to be pursuing in the next parliament will take years to see returns, frankly. I think it will help

them politically that they are putting out the perception that we understand that the economy is a serious issue for Canada and we're taking important steps to make sure that we improve the status quo. Shannon, what do you think about that? Like, is Courtney being the vibes here? Because it sounds like there's plans, but I don't know, is that going to be enough to appease people who are feeling the pinch right now? So I think he has a couple of challenges. It's apparent that he's aware of this. One of the neat things I find, I don't know, Robin, if you find the same about watching Carney is he is such an incredibly precise and strategic communicator that I feel like listening to him speak is like looking at one of those maps of a shopping mall that is like, you're here

and you need to go down this hallway and up here to get to where I want you to be. So we've seen a very, I think, very obvious kind of shift or widening of his message in the last week or two. We saw it at the cabinet meetings a couple of weeks ago. We saw a caucus this past week where he's talking about things. like crime. He's talking about affordability. And those are new explicit messages from him. So they're obviously alive to the risks here. Robin's right, the Trudeau government looked criminally out of touch with how people were feeling about the economy. Carney obviously understands that. You think

Carney's doing a better job then? I think he is. There's just, they're more focused. By the time we got to the last year or two with the Justin Trudeau government, it was the sense that they were running on fumes. They were incredibly insular. They were kind of bunkering themselves. So they just were not capable of responding to the moment. Except for promising free money. They promised to send everyone free money. Still waiting for that one. Free money and the tax-free Christmas.

Yeah. Which still, oh, that touches my heart. That was so ridiculous. Anyway, but I do think Carney is doing a better job, but I think he has a really not easy communications challenge here. If you think about the stuff he has made the centerpiece of his economic plan, which was largely about responding to Trump, but they're now making it about creating jobs.

It was these big projects of national incentives. interest. This past week, we saw the first five of them announced. And you also saw from the Leje pollsters who talked to the cabinet. I just found that little speech they gave to the media, which presumably echoed what they told the cabinet. It's so enlightening. Because what the pollster said is Canadians think these things are a good idea, but in a sort of vague way that they don't understand what it gets them. And I think Carney has a real communications problem there because, or at least a challenge, because he is putting a lot of political capital into this, a lot of. A lot of of, you know, government energy. This is the centerpiece of what he's going to do to shore up

the economy. And I think it's going to be challenging to explain to people what that gets them, especially if they are feeling squeezed by very ground-level things like Robbins talking about, like their groceries, their rent, all of those things get a whole lot more choking if you're losing your job or having your hours cut or feeling like you are. And I think the dotted line between Kearney doing things like expanding a port or the second phase of LNG, how are people supposed to understand what that gets them and what that helps them? So I think that there's something they have to figure out there in the storytelling. And I always try to be careful not to focus just on style and not substance in government. But in this case, like politics is how people feel

how you're meeting the moment. And I think I think there's some dragons in those woods they got to they got to kind of deal with. That's an interesting point to bring up the communications issue because you know, we knew Carney as the economist, you know, the banker, and we always knew there might be some growing pains as Carney as the politician. So are we starting to see some of these growing pains, like the messaging issue? Robin, what do you think? I think we're seeing it, you know, a lot of the growing pains that I think we're seeing from Carney are happening behind closed doors in a funny way. Like we're seeing little fractures, for example, coming out of caucus. So liberals formed their environmental caucus a week or so ago.

And you do that because you feel like you need a coalition because the cabinet and the guy in charge isn't taking the environment seriously. And that's become a source spot within caucus and understandably so. I mean, this is a guy who canceled the carbon tax and has now paused the EV mandate and will probably get rid of it.

And, you know, there's other musings about potentially seeing a pipeline, an oil pipeline rather, are in the upcoming list of projects. So I know it's a concern for members of caucus that the Kearney government will be leaving some of these issues behind. And certainly there's going to be fractures within caucus and there already are on issues of Israel, Palestine,

and other social issues. I think one of the biggest issues he might also have is just dealing with stakeholders and interest groups and lobbyists. I was thinking back to the summer when he had that meeting with indigenous leaders about Bill C5, the major infrastructure projects. And the talk that came out of that, the report card that they gave him, was not great.

And there were explicit comparisons, which I thought was very interesting to Justin Trudeau. And some of them mentioned that Trudeau, really his enduring strength was that he could go into a room of stakeholders, of interest groups, of activists, whatever, and he would work the room. And he would be smiling and congenial and grating everyone and personable and laughing and all of those things.

And their perception was, Karnie is not that guy, for better or for worse, right? Like, he's a business guy. He comes in there and he's not interested in talking about, like, how your kids are doing and what's growing in your garden today. He's down to business. And they notice that shift. Although he does have some magical quality in these meetings because we just saw him meet with Danielle Smith.

Right after announcing a major project's crop that does not include a pipeline. and she came out of that meeting positively purring and telling her province to be patient. So there's something he does in these meetings. Like I take your point, Rob, and I don't think he's a retail level politician like Justin Trudeau. But there's something he's doing that's working for him with at least some people. Well, there is reporting that he's talking about dropping the oil emissions cap. So like maybe that's enough to win over Danielle Smith. You just need to drop a nugget like that and you have her eating out of your palm.

I don't know. You know what I'm thinking about in terms of how Carney portrays himself. Something that came up last week was this trail run he did, right? Like he was photographed trail running. I mean, that really captured people's attention. Maybe he just needs to be photographed doing trail runs more often. Be relatable, except not relatable. I don't know if he can pull off the shirtless ones that Justin Frodo used to do.

We are in a different world now. Maybe. I make no judgment, but. Do you think that made him more human? Like, what do you think about the fascination around this trail run? So I think that the reason it was so fascinating to people was because he has displayed up to this point a very pronounced reluctance to put his personal life in the window. You know, he did the bare minimum thanking his wife and children when he won the leadership.

But I have noticed a distinct disinclination in him to tell his personal story. His attitude seems to be like, I'm here to do a job. Like, we don't need to talk about the bio stuff, which is not always the mode of politicians. He seems to have put a fence around that stuff. And to me, that was a window into him as a person. I don't think personally it qualifies as relatable because running 20, six-cours up and down a bunch of hills to me is not a thing where I go. Don't you do that on the weekend? Come on. Same, buddy. Same. But that is who he is. Someone, when I was working on a

profile of him, someone directly linked the fitness thing. He is an obsessive runner. He eats very carefully to him doing his job. And even this sort of illustrates how strategic he is, that he figures if he wants to have these high-powered jobs and work long hours and travel a lot, he can't be a schlub. He has to be in good shape to do it, which I think is such an interesting kind of like little glimpse into the character of the man in the way he thinks. It's fascinating. I think that reluctance to wade into his personal life also feeds that perception that he sort of put out there and fueled a little bit that he's coming in to do a job and to get out. And we'll see whether that's actually what he does. But if you're interested in building

a political legacy where you want to be there for as long as possible, you introduce the country to your kids and your wife and you tell them about the stories you read at bedtime and all these other things and how you make cheesecake if you're Doug Ford. And that's part of building a political narrative. But if Kearney actually is just interested in coming in, fixing the problems and leaving, as the people around him suggest, but we never know. You don't need to sort of busy yourself with all those other things. You've got a job to do. You come in, you do it, you leave.

We'll be right back. All right. Carney. Let's turn now to Pierre Polyev. He's got his seat back. His favorite issues are back in the spotlight. Shannon, let me start with you. What kind of position is Polyev in coming into the session? So this might be annoying. I don't know if I have a nice and crisp answer for you because my answer is I find the position he's in fascinating. There's a couple of data points. I don't think anyone seriously thinks his leadership is in doubt when the party does a leadership review in January. But that exists simultaneously alongside the truth that a lot of people within the big blue tent were

really ticked about the way he ran the election campaign. And the fact that he and his inner circle, which seems to be a very tiny inner circle, have not been very friendly, have not been very open to outside feedback. There were lots of reports during the election campaign that Jenny Byrne, the campaign manager created a lot of bad feelings by plugging in preferred candidates in certain ridings. So those are the kind of things that don't buy you a lot of benefit of the doubt if things kind of hit the skids a bit. Now, as you said, Cheryl, the issue set is coming back to his bread and butter. It's all going back to affordability. It's all going back to the stuff he spent the previous two or three years prosecuting to great

effect. So we know that he's good in that mode. I almost think the biggest challenge for him. He's an excellent opposition leader. It's to get to the next step. They have explicitly positioned the April election result as like a down payment. It's part one of two. We'll get. them next time. We didn't get all the way there. We hit a new high water mark and support. The circumstances were weird. We can keep running the same campaign and emphasizing the same issues and things will be different next time. But part of that is the kind of like you have to dress for the job you want thing. He is such an excellent, almost custom-built political animal for the oppositional role. I think we've seen in the public perceptions of him. People are having

difficulty seeing him in a sort of statesmanlike role, seeing him as a solutions guy as opposed to a guy who points out the problems and tells you who to blame. And so I think that next gear is the big hill for him to climb. But after he talked a little bit in the immediate wake of the election about sort of, you know, growing and learning and there was some sense of maybe some epiphany, some kind of redirection, we haven't seen that. Instead, what their approach seems to be is absolute retrenchment. We will just keep doing what we're doing.

And the world and the public will come back around to where we are, which is interesting. I mean, only time will tell whether he's right or wrong. and whether that amounts to stubbornness or being very prescient. Like, that's the only difference between those two things, right, is whether the world does indeed come back around to where you are. It sounds as if he's being typecast in the opposition leader role. Or he's typecasting himself. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robin, what do you think? Well, I think Shannon's right. Like, if you were to design an opposition leader in a lab, you'd get, Pierre probably out, like, there wouldn't be anything that you'd change. Even, like, losing the glasses, it's perfect. I think his challenge, yes, I agree, will be to project that level of seriousness that I think, even if Canadians' minds have sort of moved off Trump a little bit, I think that desire for a serious leader is still out there.

And you can see based on polling of preferred prime minister, Pierre Pahliav, still lags quite significantly behind Mark Kearney. But I think the other challenge for him is he suddenly finds himself in an environment and in a parliament where the policies are much more difficult for him to oppose. And part of that is just because the government keeps adopting his ideas, frankly. I mean, he was so good at prosecuting the downsides of the carbon tax that he got rid of it. And he was successful in getting rid of Justin Trudeau. And the government has gotten rid of the digital services tax.

And he's been calling for months, years really, for bail reform, for example. And we just heard Attorney General Sean Frazier saying that legislation is coming in the fall. So both the conservatives and the liberals say that they're going to propose bail reform legislation in the fall. I think the danger for him coming into this parliament is that he's so good at making his case to Canadians about why certain legislation should be scrapped or amended that he might get what he wants. Like he's been railing forever about Bill C-69, the Environmental Impact Assessment Act. And I don't know what he would do, frankly, if the government decides to scrap it. It's like a dog chasing a squirrel. And suddenly the dog catches the squirrel and everyone's stunned because the dog doesn't know what to do with it.

Right. So I think that's the big challenge for him going forward that he wants to oppose, but not so effectively, that he gets what he wants in a very strange way. Because what ends up happening, and we've already seen it a little bit, is he doesn't know how to react. So after the Kearney government got rid of the carbon tax, he found this really sort of silly line saying that, well, it was actually a lie, the government's going to bring back the carbon tax. You can't believe them. It was just sort of floundering. So he is very good at opposing. And that's great for him. But it's also a risk that he takes in the next parliament as well, because he doesn't want to really get what he's pushing for. Okay. Let's turn to the other parties. Robin, you've written a lot about the NDP. Let me start with you here. Do you think there's a moment for the NDP to kind of get its act together?

I think there potentially is. I mean, notwithstanding the size of its caucus and its lack of money and its lack of permanent leader, which are pretty big notwithstanding. I'll grant. They are, yes. But I think there is a real political and policy opportunity in Kearney's move back to the center right, yielding space on the left that hasn't been available to the NDP in really a decade or so. He's talking about reducing the size of the public service.

He's talking about potentially pushing forward an oil pipeline. He legislated the Air Canada flight attendants back to work. These are all great things for an NDP that has money and caucus and a permanent leader to really seize on. I think part of the struggle for the NDP when Justin Trudeau was prime minister was sort of the Pierre Paulyev problem of now. It was that Justin Trudeau was kind of taking all of the NDP policies. and putting his own name on it. And there was also, of course, the issue that the NDP was in an explicit agreement to prop up the liberals and that obviously didn't help to distinguish them as a party.

But those issues are gone now, right? There's space for the NDP to be the NDP again. And I think whether they can occupy that space effectively really comes down to who they select as leader. I mean, it's sort of simplistic to say, but I think really so much of it does come down to the persona, whether that person is captivating and communicates well and captures the attention of the wider public because that means there is momentum for the party and momentum means money and money means organizing and all the tools that you need to get your message out there. So I think that's going to be the crucial factor for the NDP. It's going to be not about whether they have the policy ideas,

the space, the opportunity to really distinguish themselves as a serious party. I think it will be whether they have the right messenger at the helm who can actually make those things happen. So the House is back on Monday today. Shannon, what will you be watching for? It's pretty hard not to be sort of fascinated by the idea of Pollyev and Carney going toe to toe in the House of Commons for the first time. One of the common sort of knocks on Carney or the ideas of the weaknesses he was going to have, say, way back in January. I mean, it was a couple of things. His French sucks. Well, we learned his French was, I think, better than, anyone assumed it has been getting better. And also that he was a technocrat who couldn't do retail politics, that he would like stand up there and deliver an economics lecture. He does

sometimes do that. The man certainly loves a six point plan in a press conference, which, hey, as a reporter, I enjoy having questions answered. I'm okay with that. But Pahliav has an almost completely opposite set of political strength. So it is going to be very interesting to see how they face each other, how their caucuses feed off the energy they provide in question period. Everything is about to speed up. Carney has told us an announcement is coming in the first week of the House, I think, about build Canada homes. The budget is coming, a budget that will somehow achieve austerity and investment at the

same time, which sounds like a magic trick, and I can't wait to see how that works. We are expecting Canada's climate competitiveness strategy. Committees are coming back. Everything is revving back up in a way that it really didn't in the spring because they that very truncated focus just kind of ram through C5 session for three weeks after the election. So what I'm really watching for is just how all of this will function once the world speeds up. Once Carney is executing on the stuff he put in the window, once Pollyev is responding to it. And as we've learned over the last year, circumstances change much, much more than I think we could ever imagine.

I'm not sure personally if I will ever again feel like I know where something's going. when you think about where things were last year this time. The conservatives were 20 points ahead. We were talking about could the liberals even survive as a party? Donald Trump looked like he was maybe going down in a heap to Kamala Harris' politics of joy.

So much has changed. And so I say that just with an awareness that what we're talking about now is the way things look now. Who knows? In two months, in three months, in four months, where the public goes, because we have to remember this is about 40 million Canadians responding to events and responding to these people who say they have solutions where the events go.

The United States is looking like a Tinderbox right now. And maybe that means Donald Trump is distracted from us. Maybe that means he has some really bad feelings and things get worse for the rest of us. I don't know. But I'm looking forward to just seeing this actually play out when the House is back for this to stop being hypothetical and to start being real. Robin, last word for you. I'm really curious to see if that sort of condes. geniality that we saw in collaboration between the liberals and conservatives in particular,

how long it really lasts in the next parliamentary session? I am not optimistic that it will be something that we see carry out months and months on, but you never know, as Shannon said, it's a fool's errand to sort of make predictions, but things as they're changing. But we saw over the summer the conservative supported Bill C5, and there was this sort of attitude, and I think it was responding to the mood of Canadians that we all need to sort of work together, the perception that there is this external threat, and despite our differences in Parliament, we need to work together to make sure that Canada is stronger on infrastructure, on trade, on all of these other things. So I think it was a policy decision and a political decision, frankly, for the Conservatives

to decide, okay, we're going to get on board with this, and we're going to make sure that it happens. I don't think that's going to last, but it will be interesting to see if it does, because I think, as I say, it's going to feed off of what Pollyev, what the conservatives, what the liberals, frankly, too, are feeding off of Canadians, too, what the mood is in the country. I don't think it's going to stick around. Well, believe it there. On that optimistic note. On that optimistic note.

No more cooperation. Robin, Shannon, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. Thanks for having us. That was Shannon Proudfoot, a feature writer in the Globe's Ottawa Bureau, and Robin Urbach, an opinion colonist for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland.

Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.