A hot mic caught Mark Carney joking to the Croatian prime minister that Canada's own MPs are mostly useful for votes. It's a throwaway line. It's also the most honest thing anyone in Ottawa has said in years about how this government runs.
Carney doesn't run cabinet meetings by committee. He runs them like a CEO who's tired of watching good ideas die in subcommittee. In May, he called Canada's ambassadors home, sat them down, and told them straight: this government has a higher tolerance for risk than the ones before it. Move fast. Be bold. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand backed it up in her own words, calling it a 180-degree turn from decades of careful, cautious foreign service tradition. Commercial results are now the job. Not diplomacy for its own sake. Results. Global Affairs Canada put that in writing this year, committing on paper to a commercial-driven approach and a goal of doubling non-U.S. exports inside a decade.
That same instinct runs straight through the top of government. Former Privy Council Clerk Kevin Lynch and veteran PCO executive Jim Mitchell didn't mince words: the Prime Minister's Office hasn't loosened its grip under Carney, and it might never plan to. Fewer people touch a decision before it moves. That's not a bug. It's the whole design.
And the people running the machine know it. Carney's deputy minister shuffles in December and March weren't the usual game of musical chairs that happens when someone retires. Eight deputy ministers were out in a single round, gone from Finance, Natural Resources, National Defence, and Justice. Governance expert David McLaughlin didn't soften the read: they weren't deemed fit for purpose to deliver the new government's agenda, so they were retired. Twelve words, and every ambitious public servant in Ottawa understood exactly what they meant.
Add it up and you get a government built to move, not to deliberate. A diplomat whose entire job has been rewritten around getting Canadian business a win abroad. A senior bureaucracy that knows exactly what happens if it can't keep pace. For a company trying to get something done with Ottawa right now, this is the best the door has looked in a long time. It's not just unlocked. Somebody went through and fired the doorman who used to make you wait.