Mark Carney’s Trickle-Down Nation-Building
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney touts a new era of industrial policy and state-led development. But instead of rebuilding public capacity, he is turning the state into a guarantor of private capital while asking workers to trust in trickle-down prosperity.
Mark Carney’s vision of nation-building is that of a banker. His new Sovereign Wealth Fund looks less like Norway’s model of collective public wealth than a state-backed investment deal built around privatization. (Andrej Ivanov / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
There is no doubt Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is popular. In the year since becoming Liberal Party leader, he has assembled a majority government through defections. His support has not budged despite the controversy surrounding those defections and the fact that he has not yet secured a trade deal with the Trump administration.
With his majority, Carney can now turn to furthering his nation-building project.
There is an irony in Carney’s frequent use of the term nation-building. While the term means different things to different people, it rose in prominence alongside Cold War–era liberal ideas about development and modernization associated with the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. It is a very American concept for a country that defines itself as Not America and wants to escape its economic dependence on its southern neighbor.
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