On April 19, Prime Minister Mark Carney took the unusual step of uploading to YouTube what he promises will be the first in a series of regular “public reports” on the business of the federal government. This was an especially surprising step for a technocrat to take, as such ideologues (yes, technocracy is an ideology) are typically anything but transparent. As we’ve come to learn over his first year in office, Carney exudes an air of “getting-things-done” professionalism while accomplishing comparatively little in the way of tangible results. Most of what he’s done so far is glad-handing around the globe, making vague agreements with only the possibility of being realized in the distant future. The missed deadlines on the MOU with Alberta come immediately to mind, suggesting not to put too much faith into these effectively non-binding agreements. Carney’s latest online effort reinforces a narrative through a YouTube video without delivering anything tangible. It seems yet another example of an unfortunate trend. For Canadians, it’s all hat and no cattle, all over again. If this YouTube video helps anyone, it’s the Liberals.Carney’s video immediately draws attention away from the floor-crossing scandal: the undemocratic method by which he procured a majority government. He wants the shiny new object in the room to be something other than how undemocratic he and his technocratic governance are. It’s bad news for Carney when even CBC’s political commentator, Andrew Coyne, accuses the Liberals of an “autocratic streak a mile wide.”Luckily for Carney, Trump is the gift that just keeps on giving. He’s the most effective distraction on the planet. The POTUS is, in fact, the same shiny object in the room that left-leaning Canadians were obsessed with one year ago, when he catapulted Carney’s election campaign to success by threatening Canadian sovereignty. Trump plays the recurring role of bogeyman yet again in 2026 and could keep Carney afloat if needed. .Carney’s inaugural YouTube episode, titled Forward Guidance with Prime Minister Mark Carney, is a nine-minute speech that recycles talking points aimed at soothing Liberal supporters. That makes some sense. Carney needs to maintain the higher approval ratings reported in recent polls, in case any mishaps occur and the Liberals are forced into an election.With this foray into social media, Carney may also hope to cut into his populist opposition in Canada. He might win converts through the appearance of transparent reporting in a popular medium like YouTube. However, like the mainstream media in Canada, Carney’s content is not designed to “report,” as he frames it. It’s designed to propagandize.The message on YouTube begins with Carney reassuring anxious viewers, reminding them that he is the right person for the job. After all, it’s Carney who knows, “from experience that outside forces can sometimes seem overwhelming.” He goes on to list his central banker credentials, which again is not reporting anything on current events. From there, he quickly digresses into his typical “America bad” spiel.“Security can't be achieved,” Carney cautions, “by ignoring the obvious or downplaying the very real threats that we Canadians face. I promise you, I will never sugarcoat our challenges.” That’s all well and good, but nobody is asking the Prime Minister to minimize the threats Canada faces from Trump — not even Poilievre’s Conservatives. In this instance, however, Carney sets up a strawman argument so he can conflate anyone who believes in co-operation with the US as capitulating to Trump’s threat of making Canada the fifty-first state. He then tears the strawman down by saying he “will never sugarcoat our challenges.” Of course, he won’t. He will play them up so that people believe he is the only solution. After he denigrates US protectionism, where he explicitly claims our reliance on America is part of “weaknesses that we must correct,” Carney positions himself as the champion of working-class Canadians, bemoaning the condition of the automobile, lumber, and steel industries. Making concrete the effects of Trump’s tariffs and cementing why America must invariably be the bad guy. None of this is new. None of it is reporting either..From there, he segways into his planned solution, namely, diversification of trade. Again, it’s not new to anyone, and it’s not reporting. He promises Canadians we can “take back control” by investing in “new markets.” However, this promise to invest in new markets conflicts with his previous promise that he will “never sugarcoat any of our challenges.” When has Carney ever discussed, for instance, the fact that access to the EU’s internal market comes at a significant risk to Canadian sovereignty? Even more concerning is that we have but one instance where Carney dared to openly admit China was a threat to our national security, and that didn’t stop him from a desperate bid to continue trade with Xi Jinping. Omitting threats is at least as bad as sugar-coating them.Another conflict in Carney’s speech surfaces when he accuses some Canadians of waiting for the US to “return to normal” and of hoping “the good old days will come back.” He derides this as an unacceptable strategy because it’s based on hope. The problem with his assertion is that there’s significant evidence he’s attempting the very same strategy — based on hope — by trying to wait out the Trump administration before he is forced to renegotiate the USMCA with them. Carney’s hoping that a lame duck president will be unable to enforce trade negotiations that otherwise might see Canada end up with very little. According to US Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, Carney is conducting the very same wait-and-see, hope-based strategy he’s warning Canadians can’t possibly be successful with.Why is it that hope works for him and not for us?Even Carney’s overall “Canada Strong” strategy contains identifiable inconsistencies. .While many solutions to Canada’s problems apparently fall within the scope of Carney’s “Canada Strong” approach, recent data have been uncovered, revealing where his impetus may, in reality, lead us. “The Canada Strong plan we're putting into action,” Carney boasts, “its goals are ambitious: to catalyze $1 trillion in investment.”Let’s stop him right there. What Carney is referring to is reversing a trend the federal Liberals were responsible for when, according to an April 2026 report from the Royal Bank of Canada, “Between 2015 and 2024, more than $1 trillion of investment exited Canada — the largest capital exodus in Canadian history.” We should have already had this $1 trillion investment in our country during the Trudeau years, when Carney was Justin’s economic advisor. We should now be talking about the next trillion in investment. Instead, we’re hoping to retrieve the one we missed.The most important takeaway from this video is that it’s propaganda. The multiple conflicts within the “Canada Strong” approach suggest Carney’s use of an ideology to inform governance (technocracy in this case) and not legitimate economic science and/or data analysis. Don’t be fooled.
