By Lisa Van Dusen

April 14, 2026

As Mark Carney celebrates a belated majority victory nearly a year after his election as prime minister, he can once again thank Donald J. Trump, along with the voters of University-Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest, and Terrebonne.

Of all the improbable outcomes Trump’s presidency has rationalized, Canada’s pro-technocrat groundswell of floor-crossers and byelection voters is among the most interesting, and least dystopian.

Carney’s economic credentials as a serial G7 central banker, his unflappable temperament, his vision for refashioning Canada’s economy as a path to prosperity, resiliency and sovereignty, and, above all, his enthralling normalcy, have evidently possessed Canadians with a desire to revise last April’s election result by giving him the unfettered mandate they narrowly withheld on Election Day.

In a world tormented daily by the rampaging ignorance of Donald Trump, Mark Carney may be the first technocrat rock star.

Only in 2026 could “Hope is not a plan” be an applause line, partly because it implies that the man who uttered it knows what is a plan, and partly because it just sounds so much saner than “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”

On Carney’s mustering of a parliamentary majority via floor-crossing, defection or poaching, depending on your sources and perspective, we’ve had many excellent Policy columns in the past year but there are two pieces, filed roughly a year apart, that especially help frame the bigger-picture debate.

The first was posted on March 4th, 2025. Jointly bylined by economic-policy statesman Tom d’Aquino and prime ministerial historian J.D.M Stewart, it posited the following:

“The existential threat to Canada posed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s targeting of our economic security and sovereignty are clear. What is worse, there is no evidence that the American president will recant or revert to a position that respects the deep historical ties long enjoyed by Canada and the United States. This leaves Canada in a truly unprecedented and precarious situation. The bold and idealistic response needed? A grand coalition government.”

The piece, titled To Meet This Moment, Canada Needs a New Grand Coalition, was filed weeks before the April 28th federal election, so its central thesis was bound to be ignored in the short term by the candidates in that race. But it laid down a public-service marker as a creative, debatable but legitimate approach to an unprecedented context.

In a world tormented daily by the rampaging ignorance of Donald Trump, Mark Carney may be the first technocrat rock star.

It’s well worth a re-read in light of the apparent post-partisan shift in the composition of Carney’s caucus.

The recent companion/sequel to that article is Policy columnist Don Newman’s piece of April 10th. Filed in the wake of social conservative Marilyn Gladu’s defection to Carney’s Liberals, it attributes what Liberal strategist Scott Reid later described to The Guardian as “the quietest assembly of a union government we’ve ever witnessed” — to a combination of Carney’s post-partisan vision for Canada and the stability that vision offers.

“If this keeps up,” writes Newman, “he can present an ever-growing caucus as a form of national unity government.”

The flipside of this sense of harmonic convergence among political, geopolitical, economic, and moment-meeting-man elements is a backlash that ranges from performative partisan indignation to accusations of opportunism and situational ethics.

The problem with the social-conservative Gladu’s defection to Carney’s Liberals is that she has long represented the very views that people had assumed kept Carney — whose global experience made him a prime recruitment target for both the Conservatives and the Liberals — from choosing the former.

The technocratic answer to that is that, in a moment of existential urgency, implementation is paramount, and implementation is much easier with a majority government.

With that majority secured Monday night, Carney will be able to govern less precariously, implement his agenda, which, based on polling, has the backing of Canadians, and avoid an election until as late as 2029.

The potential perils in that scenario — of not calling an election sooner to obtain a majority from the entire electorate that you’ve already obtained by other means — is that time can be either an asset or a liability.

By next year, the Conservative Party might have chosen a new leader, the CUSMA negotiations with the Trump administration may be a pragmatic casualty of an altered trade status quo, the influx of Tory MPs to Carney’s caucus could look less like a unity government than an array of exploding-headline IEDs, and the polls, as Pierre Poilievre can tell you, may look very different.

But amid a global clash of values in which one side is brazenly, overwhelmingly defined by strategic corruption, intelligence-insulting cynicism, tactical bullying, and industrialized deception, Mark Carney represents the opposite of all of those things.

“If that makes him a technocrat,” Canadians seem to be saying, “we’re all technocrats now.”

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.