CALGARY – Mark Carney is doing a pretty good job so far. Sorry, folks, but he is. Three reasons.

One has to do with that meeting with Donald Trump. If you’ve worked for a Prime Minister (and I have), your job is to just avoid disaster, pretty much. Achievements are few and far between. So, the job is mainly to keep the boss from stepping on landmines.

There were a lot of landmines in Donald Trump’s office, this week. They weren’t easy to see, because that room has now been done up in so much gold and gilt it resembles the receiving room at Wild West brothel. But the landmines were there.

Trump was going to say something crazy about Canada – that was a given. He was going to say something that was wildly, provably false. He was going to make stuff up, just to see how Mark Carney would react.

Those were the landmines, and guess what? Mark Carney didn’t step on any of them. Closely resembling the central the banker that he is – a job which typically involves listening to idiot politicians say idiotic things, and keeping one’s cool – Mark Carney kept his cool.

He let Trump talk, and then delivered the one line he’d flown to Washington to deliver: namely, that Canada wasn’t for sale, ever. Huzzah! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, as George W. Bush might say.

Reason number two has to do with Pierre Poilievre, who Mark Carney wants you to think is his adversary. But he isn’t. After blowing a 30-point lead, losing an election that was in the bag, and then getting the pink slip in the riding he’d held for two decades, Pierre Poilievre is someone Mark Carney really, really wants to keep around.

So, when a reporter asked Carney about accommodating Poilievre’s desire to run in an Alberta seat where a fence post painted blue could win in a landslide, Carney was all magnanimous and whatnot, and said he’d do what he could to grease the wheels of democracy, blah blah blah.

I was impressed by his acting skills, on that occasion. If there’s anybody who really, really – REALLY – wants to keep Pierre Poilievre around, it’s Mark Carney. But he didn’t show that. He was sort-of lowkey about it, and the commentariat predictably ran around saying how refreshingly Prime Ministerial he was. But that’s nonsense: Mark Carney gave himself a big gift, and he tricked everyone into thinking he was being a charitable nice guy. Clever.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (39)

Comments (24)

RE’IM, ISRAEL – When you come to this quiet place – where the death cult called Hamas raped, mutilated, beheaded, burnt, slaughtered, and shot 364 young people on the morning of October 7, 2023 – some Canadian visitors inevitably ask themselves: where is my country?

Because, make no mistake, Canada’s leadership hasn’t been much in evidence around the site of the former Nova Music Festival. Or at any of the other sad places in Israel, really, where 1,200 men, women, children and babies were murdered by Hamas and Gazans on that terrible day. 

Did you know that every major world leader has been here to pay their respects, but not Canada’s? It’s true. The president of the United States, Joe Biden, ten days after the pogrom. The top leaders of France, Greece, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, the European Union. All have come to Israel to pay their respects and bear witness. Not Canada. 

Within Canada, meanwhile, something just as bad has happened: we have become one of the worst places in the world for antisemitism. 

It’s been noted, and reported on, in Israel, too: the schools for little Canadian Jewish kids sprayed with bullets. The Canadian synagogues firebombed. The Canadian businesses owned by Jews firebombed and shot up. Just because they are owned or run by Canadian citizens who happen to be Jewish. 

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (1)