The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Carney's bumpy start and Canada's weaknesses exposed

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Rudyard is joined once again by The Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne to reflect on Mark Carney's bumpy first few weeks in office: delaying the spring budget, a chief of staff search coming up empty, and cabinet ministers going off message all point to a challenging start for Canada's newest Prime Minister. Rudyard and Andrew then turn to Canada's relationship with the US. Are we still in the crisis of our lifetime, as claimed by our political leaders during the election? Andrew argues that even if the immediate threat has subsided for now, the crisis helped us see that we are too exposed to a partner we can't depend upon. Leaders must seize on this moment of clarity by beefing up Canada's defense contributions and addressing interprovincial trade barriers. Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I am wary enough of his volatility, his unhinged qualities, his lack of restraint, his tendency to convert what previously were dismissed as jokes or wild fantasies into deadly serious policy. So I don't think by any means we are out of the woods when it comes to Donald Trump, not even starting. Welcome to the Monk Debates YouTube channel and podcast feed. A real pleasure to once again host Andrew Coyne, columnist with the Globe and Mail for our our weekly chats on all things Canadian and around the world. Andrew, you're coming to us from Ottawa. You've had another successful stop on your book tour. Just remind our audience about the book.

I'm hearing a lot of buzz around it. So congratulations. Oh, well, that's good to hear. Yeah, it's called the Crisis of Canadian Democracy. And it's an attempt to pull together all the different strands of dysfunction and failure in our democratic system. and maybe see what can be done to fix it. Yeah, could not be more timely and just remind our viewers and listeners that Andrew and I spoke about his book recently on our YouTube channel. You can check that out now or go back through our podcast feed and find that conversation.

Well, Andrew, talking about democracy, let's talk about Mark Carney's week that was. I think we're all sympathetic to a new prime minister coming in, having to kind of wrap his hands around what is a very big and complex. job. But it did seem like, Andrew, a couple of fumbles, maybe some stumbles this week. Is it speaking to some bigger challenges that this proverbial outsider is having in getting his PMO up and running and the business of government underway? Yeah, I mean, it's very early days. As you say, he is unique in Canadian history in becoming prime minister without ever having held or even run for elected office before this. It would be challenging for any new government. It always is. It's particularly challenging for somebody who's a newcomer at this. The sequence of events, let's remember, was, you know,

Trudeau steps down, then there's a leadership race, then there's an election. So he's been going pretty nonstop. But yeah, coming out of the gates, saying you're not going to have a budget in the spring. I don't think it was necessarily well advised. Initially, they were going to say they wouldn't even have one until next spring. They would have a fall economic statement, but that be about it. But they got enough of a beating in the media, I think, that they decided they better have a full-on budget in the fall. Not the worst thing, but just an indication of a certain degree of disorganization. I read and I hear that they're having trouble finding a chief of staff to replace the very temporary Marco Mediciino. We'll see whether that comes to fruition the next little

while and you had some cabinet ministers going off message as it were now a lot of times when i bristle when people talk about this when they're talking about ordinary members of caucus yeah members of caucus don't have a script or shouldn't have a script they're they're supposed to be independent they're supposed to be exercised the independent judgment they're generally speaking going to be broadly supportive of the party of which they're a member uh but there's nothing wrong whatsoever with a ordinary member of parliament having a different point of view. Cabinet ministers, on the other hand, have collective responsibility for the government

are supposed to stay on script. And so when you have even veterans like Stephen Giebeau, I didn't have any particular problem with the statement that he made as a matter of fact. That is to say, there is a real issue as to whether, even if you took all the constraints off of pipeline building, whether there was actually that much demand

to build them at this point. But for the minister of Canadian identity and culture to be offering an opinion. A, an opinion that was not necessarily that of the government, and B, was nothing to do with his portfolio, wasn't the most disciplined start of festivities. And you had statements from Anita Anand. Who else? Gregor, Gregor Robertson, the former... Gregor Robertson and housing, that's right. So people, I guess, weren't fully brief. This is probably a function of not having a full-time, a chief of staff to kind of crack the whip on these things. So that looked a little disorganized. So, Andrew, do you think you've been around as long as

I have? There's always these promises when prime ministers come in that, you know, cabinet will be a place of debate and discussion and I will value my colleagues' contributions. Again, maybe these ministers' interjections were a bit clumsy, but that Prague Spring seemed to last about 72 hours. before, Andrew, are we seeing the reversion to the norm, which is a command and control PMO that carefully scripts and programs as cabinet ministers and basically runs their departments through chiefs of staffs that it's appoints. And it sounds like that is the direction the Kearney government is going, is to continue this relatively new tradition of the prime minister's office setting the chiefs of staff for ministers, in a sense, having that direct line of sight into their own.

offices. Yeah, that's become the norm. And as you say, I saw something to that effect that they were gearing up to do that or had done that already. It's only one thing among many different pieces of the puzzle, but it doesn't bode well. And certainly my expectation, both because, as you say, every prime minister comes in vowing free votes and cabinet government and then everything gets centralized in the PMO even more than before. So one's expectation for that reason has to be that we'll probably see more of that. You look at Mr. Carney as a person, and he's always been the smartest guy in the room,

doesn't care who knows it. By nature, it would be surprising, let's put it that way, if he was a very good delegator, but we will see. One piece of evidence that may or may not be to the contrary, I think you can read it in different ways, was the sort of collective mandate letter that he put out.

Now, this has, again, become a ritual in recent prime ministerships. I'm not sure how far back it goes, but certainly under Justin Trudeau, ministers were given these very detailed public mandate letters, individualized, that were basically a to-do list. Now, you know, you can look at that and go, oh, isn't that marvelous? It's this transparent, it's open, they have it, they have, they made these promises, and now the ministers are expected to execute on them. Except that's not really how cabinet government is supposed to work.

In the great days of cabinet government, ministers were expected to sort of bring forward, ideas and to help shape and and determine their portfolio. It wasn't just executing commands from the prime minister's office. So it shows how fully we've absorbed the idea that the ministers are basically just the prime minister's, you know, employees. Whereas Carney, what has he's done is he's put out, it has seven priorities. So it's, and it's good to have a short list of priorities. Any government will basically be judged by whether it achieved maybe two things. So, whittling it down to seven is a good start. And secondly, the text, if you read the text at face value, what he's saying to

ministers is, here's the things we would like to accomplish as a government. I would like to hear from you, your ideas, about how you can contribute, what you think the government should be doing, particularly within your particular bailout. And if you were, you know, trying to get people the benefit of the doubt, that's certainly different than Justin Trudeau's approach to the mandate letters. maybe it augurs something good. There's language in there about we're bringing back real cabinet government. So having been burned before, be very, very skeptical.

But I'll just, in fairness sake, I'll put that one possible piece of evidence that maybe things will be a little different. Yeah. Andrew, what do you think of the criticism Carnies come under around these kind of executive signing ceremonies? You know, your book is all about, you know, Canada's kind of parliamentary traditions or parliamentary system. You know, is this, in a sense, just a kind of harmless foul, maybe an unconscious or somewhat crass attempt to replicate President Trump's, you know, executive orders that he signs with great kind of flourish in the Oval Office? Or, Andrew, is it something bigger, as you identify in the book, a, a kind of fundamental confusion now that may have metastasized well beyond our government to much of the public about what, in fact, a parliamentary democracy is and how it's constructed and who the prime

minister is. It's a very interesting question. There's certainly nothing unconstitutional, but let's put it that way. Prime ministers do sign documents ordering that certain things should happen. It's the ceremony and the publicness of it. And as you say, the symbolism, that's very presidential, even before Trump. So I think he got very bad advice on that. I don't think that's a symbol he needs to be setting out. I agree with you that it absolutely plays to one's worst fears about how centralized things have become

in the prime minister's office, the presidentialization of our system of government. So it will just depend on, is this a symbol of, that represents still further substance? Is he going to take things even further than previous prime ministers? Or was he just getting bad advice about showing that he's in charge, etc? I think particularly for somebody like him, I mean, yes, he's a newcomer, but he won that leadership of his party by such an overwhelming percentage.

He got over 40% of the vote in the election. I don't, you know, and he's a take charge kind of guy. I don't think he needed that to be shored up, if you will. I could understand if people were worried that, you know, does anybody know who this guy is or do they think he's got the chops to be the leader, et cetera? But I think that's the least of his worry. So I think he got very bad advice on that. You know, Andrew, it may not be the right assessment, but I certainly have the feeling that since the election that there's a perception in various quarters of the country, corporate Canada, especially, but I think also among some segments of the voting public that the pot has come off of boil vis-a-vis. the kind of crisis atmosphere that did affect and was a major feature of our most recent federal

election. I wonder what your assessment of that is. Do you sense that either through reasons of complacency or precipacity, Canadians are starting to dial back some of the more, how do we to characterize this about being uncharitable, but somewhat hysteric at times, arguments that we were indeed, I think, in Mark Carney's words, in the crisis of our lives. lifetimes. I certainly feel that a lot has changed in the last 30 days in terms of the national mood. Do you agree? I agree that the perception has changed that the public, and that was happening during the election campaign, the public was dialing back, as you say. I'm not entirely sure whether the public is right to be dialing it back. In other words, yes, there's been a change in

perception. Is this just the whole thing was a sham? It was, they ginned up a lot of fear over nothing, which I think you're starting to see some people saying, I don't believe that. So just because Trump has been relatively quiet in recent times, doesn't prove anything one or the other. But I am wary enough of his volatility, his unhinged qualities, his lack of restraint, his tendency to convert what previously were dismissed as jokes or wild fantasies into deadly serious policy. So I don't think by any means we are out of the woods when it comes to it on.

Trump, not even starting. Yeah. You know, he's just slapped a 50% tariff on Europe out of nowhere. He could easily do the same thing to us. And I think we're going to have a long-term problem, certainly with this president, possibly with other presidents, but certainly with this president of not respecting boundaries, literal and figurative, of wanting to impose his will on this country in ways that we will find very uncomfortable.

So I think we're in, you know, maybe a lull right now. now in the hostilities. But I'd be very surprised if that just meant, oh, it was all just a nasty dream or it was just liberals using this to get elected. I think there was substance of the fear. I don't doubt that the liberals milked it for all it was worth. But that doesn't mean it wasn't reality. As I always say, you know, the story of the boy who cries wolf ends with the wolf devouring the boy. So, you know, there are such things as wolves. Yeah. So that's my concern is I hope people don't fear from one extreme to the other. You know, no, you know, the troops weren't at our door, but neither is, is there no, nothing to be concerned about?

Yeah, I just, I guess what I'm wondering is, I think that as smart analysis, you know, the Boy Scout motto of always be prepared. But, but there's a political environment now within which this government will have to act. It's one where, you know, the TSX, our major stock exchange is at all-time highs. It's where the blended effective tariff rate on all Canadian goods going into the United States is now in the low single digits. And yes, all of this can change. But we also had revealed to us since we last talked to Andrew that it seems as if the liberals took off a lot of the retaliatory tariffs. And again, that was probably a smart thing to do. Retaliatory tariffs are in a sense just a tax on Canadians and often the Canadians who can least afford it.

I'm just wondering politically, Andrew, how this kind of affects the government's ambit, it's room for maneuver, its ambition, and whether they need to now calibrate to the facts on the ground, which yes, can change, but they are what they are right now. And I think the mood has changed. So what's your advice? Can they just simply push through? Or does there have to be a bit of a recalibrated? Maybe rhetorically. I don't think some of the issues on the ground have changed. So what the, what the crisis mentality helped us see and revealed to us in that moment of clarity was we had left ourselves rather to expose to a partner that we couldn't necessarily depend upon. So whether or not the absolute worst case scenario is right with us here now, what was clearly the case was we had a longer-term agenda. So we had a

short-term issue of how do we fend off these tariffs and whatever Trump wants to do this week. But we had a longer-term agenda of how do we make ourselves less dependent on the United States, less dependent on our NATO allies, but we're more of a contributor. So beefing up our defense contribution is clearly going to be with us for some time to come, and that's an enormous challenge just on its own. Everybody or most people agree, we need to spend a lot more in defense. Very few people have said where they think the money's going to come from. You know, are we going to cut spending on other things. Okay, let's talk about what we should cut or are we going to raise taxes? Well, that'll be an interesting sale when you're talking about, you know, that level

of extra spending or are we just going to chalk it all up on the national credit card? Well, that has issues. So that alone is a big issue that we had suddenly crystallized, I thought, that as a country, left or right, liberal or conservative, that we had to do something about that. Secondly, the interprovincial trade barriers. I hope we don't lose a sense of urgency. about that. I would greatly fear that experience would tend to suggest that the provinces will talk a good game for a few weeks and then everyone will go back to sleep. So I don't think we can afford that. And that's not about this week, but it is about our Canada-U.S. relations in a way. The productivity agenda is on its own, is a huge thing. It was a huge thing before Trump started

talking about 51st state, but it's an even huger thing. If you're looking at basically a madman in the White House who is saying things to wreck the world economy every other day and then retracting them on alternate days, that's a huge headwind that we don't need already. I mean, we're already growing so slowly that we're not able to keep up with population growth. To be able to beat through those headwinds, we're going to need much faster sort of basic economic rate of growth. So a huge policy agenda there. So yeah, I agree with you that if you don't have the wolf right at your door in a snarling and yapping and getting on the nightly news every night. It maybe takes some of the urgency off of it in terms of people's perception. But that's what people are in politics

to manage, is how do I sustain popular will in the direction I want to go? And that was, whether there was a, whether the end was nigh or not, that was very much what we were voting on in that election was, whose judgment did we trust, who did we think would be the best occupant of the Prime Minister's office at this particular moment in history. And it was a near-run thing, as it turned out. The country was pretty evenly divided on it. But that was very much what was at issue. A minority government was, I think, in many ways, the ideal outcome. Carney will, you know, can't just say my way or the highway. He's going to have to work with other people. It's a very strong minority, but it's still a minority.

Hi, Monk listeners. If you were unable to purchase tickets to our sold-out May 29th Monk debate on Trump's America, you can still catch all the action. live from the comfort of your living room. For just $25, it's a donation, no less. You can watch the debate featuring Ezra Klein, Ben Rhodes, Kelly Ann Conway, and Kevin Roberts, all again live on May 29th, starting at 7 p.m. Eastern. As a monk donor, with your $25 contribution, you'll get streaming privileges to all of our yet unannounced 2025 live events, access to full-length editions of our popular weekly

current affairs podcast. Friday Focus with Janice Gross Stein. You get that for one year and a charitable tax receipt for residents of Canada. Find out how to become a donor and watch the May 29th Debates live at triple W monkdebates.com. Just as we move towards wrapping at the show, I guess one thing I'd like your help on trying to wrap my head around and just in the basis of this conversation, which has been very helpful to our audience. is, again, Carney's mixed messaging at times. There's been my part, possibly some confusion, I'll be honest, about our prime minister's seeming endorsement of something called the Golden Dome.

Of course, if it's Mr. Trump, it always has to have gold worked into it somewhere. But the Golden Dome, for those who have not been following the news closely on this topic, is basically a continental missile defense system. is a completely unproven technology. It is potentially half a trillion dollars to intercept one, possibly two intercontinental ballistic missiles at some time in the future. And Mark Carney has seemed to kind of warm a bit to this idea, at least leaving the door open to Canada, considering becoming a participant in the so-called Golden Dome and extending the Golden Dome, north of the Canada, U.S. border to encompass our landmass. And I guess what my confusion is,

Andrew, is if we're trying to be more independent from the United States, if we're trying to pursue our security, which ultimately, I think probably was the ballot question in the last election, why are we playing footsie with the president on an idea that is, I would say, charitably, as dumb as a bag of hammers? I'm not sure I'd be quite as negative on the concept. I agree with you. It's unproven. I agree with you.

There's a lot of speculative technologies involved. I certainly agree with you on the cost is massive. But this has been an ongoing debate going back decades, of course. This is going back to the Strategic Defense Initiative under Reagan. And there was a decision time on ballistic missile defense under the Paul Martin government where Martin decided that Canada, would not be part of it. I don't have hostility to the concept itself. I'm very wary of the progenitors of it. So I would have more time to discuss that with Ronald Reagan or a George

Bush Jr. than I would with Donald Trump. So it is a head scratcher, why we would be so quick off the mark to say that we would have some involvement with it or might potentially have some involvement with it. I'll give you maybe the best case scenario, as I'm in the mood to be charitable today. It may be that the calculation is, look, this is never going to happen under Donald Trump. It may not happen under anybody. Trump likes to talk about grand schemes that never come to fruition. Remember, you know, infrastructure week that never happened or, you know, all these other things. And the calculation may have been, look, we don't have, we're not committing to anything. We can say some nice things about it in a short term, hope that the whole thing stalls and doesn't really go anywhere.

and we buy ourselves some credit at the cost of looking a bit more than a bit inconsistent, but we buy ourselves some credit with the administration leading up to some very tough decisions to come. So one of which is what do we do about the F-35? I think there's real reasons to be concerned about putting all of our eggs in that particular basket when it leaves us exposed to U.S. decision-making when it comes to repairing and replacing parts and all the technology that's associated with it. And so there's a lot of people who looked at this and said, there's a case to be made that, okay,

we have to buy a certain number that we've already committed to, but the rest of the contract we should maybe switch over to one of the European fighters, for example. Okay, that's going to be a tough thing to sell to the Americans. You know, it's easy for us to say, well, that's what we're going to do, but we should expect a lot of blowback on it. Yeah. And so it may be that the decision,

was let's give ourselves some bargaining chips. Let's give ourselves some, let's earn some some brownie points, and maybe we can mitigate some of the fallout from that decision. That's the best case scenario I can make for it, because as you say, it's certainly, it's very consistent with anything he said during the campaign. Yeah. Yeah, and my only contribution with that is I agree wholeheartedly. I think this was political and tactical. I expect maybe this was an issue that was raised by the president with Mr. Carney during their lunch. in the White House. It might well be a proverbial ask of the president.

I think, though, we have to be careful about Canada's reputation. I think my understanding of this technology is that if you want to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles, you have to target those missiles effectively before their final boost stage is complete. So in other words, you are intercepting these missiles from outer space. You are therefore weaponizing outer space. is the signatory going back multiple decades to various treaties that have tried to demilitarize outer space. That is a noble idea. We should leave humanity's hatreds on planet Earth if we possibly

can and not take our lower orbit and high, high atmosphere, stratosphere, and turn this into another zone of militarization and weaponization. So I think we have to be careful, Andrew, about what our tacit support means, vis-a-vis some larger, bigger policy priorities that I think Canada has been historically on the right side of history when it comes to, you know, resisting this guns and boys with toys in outer space. President Trump has created his space force. I wish them well, but I just see all of this, Andrew, as kind of not simply silly and, as you say, ultimately probably something that never comes to fruition, but it sets dangerous principles that validate what the Russians and Chinese are increasingly doing, which is exactly that, the weaponization of space.

And I just hope that Canada would have nothing to do with that. Andrew, thank you for a fantastic conversation today. We wish you well on the continuing book tour. If people want to get their hands on a copy of the crisis of Canadian democracy, where can they do this, Andrew? What's the easiest way to purchase your vote? I would say the easiest and best way is to go to either the Sutherland House publishing website where you can buy them directly from them or from one of your local bookstores.

And I've got nothing against the major chains either, but local bookstores play a particular role of adding a bit of the human touch in terms of editorial selections and things. And so buy them at your local bookstore. Yeah. And again, congratulations. I hear lots of people talking about the book and the ideas in it. and some important messages about our democracy and its future. So thanks again for coming on the program and get out there and do some more book readings. Very good.

Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Ladies and gentlemen, that was our latest conversation with the Andrew Coyne columnist at the Globe of Mail. It's part of the Monk Debate's ongoing commitment to provide you with civil and substantive dialogue on the big questions and ideas shaping this moment. We hope you enjoyed it. Please head over. If you're watching us on video to our YouTube channel, You can catch all kinds of conversations that I'm having with Janice Gross Stein, with great debaters, and a whole panoply of video and audio for you to listen to and engage with.

Thanks again for watching. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.