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Susan Delacourt: I’ve been talking to folks this week, all on the outside of the new Prime Minister’s Office, I should stress, but the general take is that things in this government are “in flux.� Carney is keen to get things moving quickly, and impressing people, but his ambitions in that direction may be getting stalled by uncertainty over who’s working where and for how long. His chief of staff, Marco Mendicino, is only staying through summer in “transition� mode.

MG: Lucky us. The sooner that transition wraps up, the better. But overall, I’d say that Carney does seem to be trying to move faster than his predecessor. That’s good. The biggest criticism I had of Justin Trudeau, and it was sort of a meta-criticism that tied together a lot of specific failures, was that he was overwhelmed by events and couldn’t move at all. So aggressive speed and energy is a welcome change. The problem is, I don’t get the sense that Carney will be able to sustain this in the face of ... well, Ottawa.

SD: Hey that’s my town you’re talking about. What do you mean by that?

MG: I don’t think Trudeau ran into problems because he was lazy, dumb or meant badly. I think he ran into problems because the machinery of government is, ahem, broken. Or at least not suited to the much faster pace the current state of the world requires. And I don’t think Carney can overcome that by force of will.

SD: Back during the pandemic, I talked to a Conservative who worked in Stephen Harper’s government, who said: Conservatives didn’t trust the public servants enough, and Liberals rely too much on them. That sounded right. No offence to the public service, and especially not any of the people in it, but the actual purpose of their jobs can be to slow things down. So this is going to be a challenge for Carney if he wants to speed things up, I agree. That carries other risks though. Namely, mistakes.

MG: I guess the other issue is how comfortable the Liberal party will be with a boss that’s pushing harder than the old one. The members can cause as many problems as the bureaucrats.

SD: To that point, I’ll be fascinated to see how the debate goes at this weekend’s caucus retreat, when there will be talk of giving MPs more power over who is the leader, the caucus chair and who is in and out of caucus. This Reform Act conversation didn’t go far under Trudeau, but my colleagues were finding MPs willing to talk (off the record mainly) about how it would be a good idea to have a more muscular set of MPs.

MG: It wasn’t a lack of muscle. It was a lack of, uh, another part of the anatomy. The caucus had all the power they needed to force Trudeau out. They just didn’t have the guramba. But I was asking more in the sense of whether these guys are eager to move faster than Trudeau did, or now just totally habituated to the speed of JT that anything faster will be resisted.

SD: Let me ask you a question. What will you need to see in the throne speech as evidence of Carney moving more quickly than Trudeau?

MG: Nothing in the throne speech will answer that question for me. I’ve been speechified enough. They’ve lost their allure.

SD: Well maybe King Charles can put some gloss back on it. I think I’d like to see some deadlines, such as the July 1 one for an internal trade deal we already know about. I will be looking for ways in which Carney is seeking co-operation with opposition parties — yes, even Conservatives — to get things done. I will be curious to see how much the Donald Trump drama figures into this government’s plans, because that president has a way of messing with best-laid plans, as the Trudeau government learned.

MG: I’d welcome some firm deadlines and goals. Absolutely. That’s a basic accountability mechanism we’ve largely nerfed out of our governance. So absolutely. But that’s still going to take some time, especially with summer looming. On that front, I’ll ask you this: any thoughts on the reports that Carney is having a hard time staffing the PMO? I don’t have any, to be honest. You know that stuff better than I do.

SD: I think this is worrisome. It reminds me of how long it took for Trudeau to staff up in the first term, mainly because they were looking for folks who would be different from past Liberal governments. The same motivation may be at work here; in a rush to be new, some old problems repeat themselves.

MG: Do you get the sense that it’s a lack of interested candidates or that Carney is being picky?

SD: Here’s where I reveal a secret. I’ve not all that acquainted with Mark Carney. I’ve actually had more conversations with Pierre Poilievre (though not recently.) So I’m only guessing at whether he is being picky. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear he’s a perfectionist, though, and I find that encouraging.

I am surprised, as I was discussing with a colleague this week, about how he didn’t land in office with some high-powered business and corporate types to help him run PMO. He certainly travels in those circles. Maybe this is a persuasion act we will see over the summer. Or maybe government has looked so hard over the past years that any big names will not think it’s worth the sacrifice. It took Carney more than a decade to plunge into this world, after all. The timeline for demonstrating “real change� is a lot tighter — like next week.