Mark Carney’s plea for Canada to "come together" isn't just a tired political trope. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a G7 economy actually functions. When a Liberal majority is framed as a mandate for national harmony, we aren't seeing a path to progress. We are seeing the installation of a velvet-gloved stagnation.
Unity is the sedative of the unproductive.
The "lazy consensus" suggests that if we all stop bickering and align behind a single federal vision, the wheels of industry will magically begin to turn. This is a fantasy. Conflict, not cohesion, drives innovation. If everyone in a boardroom agrees on the three-year plan, the company is already dead. The same applies to a nation. Carney’s call for alignment is effectively a call for silence in the face of structural decay.
The Productivity Gap is a Crisis of Comfort
While the establishment celebrates a stable majority as a win for "certainty," they ignore the reality of Canada’s abysmal productivity rankings. We are currently trailing our peers because we have prioritized social cohesion over competitive friction.
Since 2015, Canadian GDP per capita has moved with the speed of a glacier in a deep freeze. We have protected our "national champions"—telecom giants and banking oligopolies—under the guise of maintaining Canadian identity and stability. What did that stability get us? Some of the highest cellular rates in the developed world and a housing market that functions as a giant Ponzi scheme for the middle class.
Real growth requires breaking things. It requires allowing inefficient legacy industries to fail so capital can flow to high-growth sectors. You cannot "come together" to do that. You have to fight for it. Carney, a man who has spent his career in the rarified air of central banks and global boardrooms, views the economy from 30,000 feet. From that height, the messiness of creative destruction looks like "divisiveness." From the ground, it looks like survival.
The Centralization Trap
A Liberal majority often signals an era of massive, centralized industrial policy. The government picks winners. They throw billions at battery plants or green tech initiatives, hoping to buy a future. They call this "strategic alignment."
I have watched firms burn through mountain-sized piles of cash trying to chase government subsidies instead of chasing customers. When the state becomes the primary venture capitalist, the market loses its ability to price risk. We end up with a "consensus economy" where every major player is tethered to the federal teat.
This centralization stifles the very outliers we need. The next $100 billion company won't be born out of a government task force on "national unity." It will come from a disgruntled founder who hates the way things are currently done and wants to incinerate the status quo. By demanding that we "come together," Carney is asking those disruptors to wait their turn and follow the playbook.
The Interest Rate Illusion
Let’s talk about the math that the "unity" crowd avoids. The era of cheap money is over. We are transitioning into a period where the cost of capital actually matters. For years, low rates masked the inefficiency of our federal spending. We could afford to be unified because we were borrowing from the future at $0$ interest.
Now, the bill is due.
National unity in this context means "don't complain while we tax your productivity to pay for our previous lack of foresight." The establishment wants a quiet population because a loud population starts asking where the money went.
- Fact: Canada's business investment per worker is significantly lower than in the United States.
- Fact: Our regulatory environment makes it easier to build a condo than a mine or a pipeline.
- Fact: A "unified" approach to regulation usually just means adding more layers of red tape to satisfy every possible interest group.
If we want to fix the economy, we don't need a group hug. We need a chainsaw.
Why Political Stability is a Double-Edged Sword
Investors often say they love stability. They lie. Investors love predictability, which is different. You can have a stable, unified country that is predictably sliding into irrelevance. Look at various European economies over the last two decades. They have high social cohesion, great "unity," and almost zero technological relevance on the global stage.
The United States is currently a masterclass in political division and social friction. It is also, by almost every metric, outperforming the rest of the world in terms of innovation, AI development, and capital attraction. The friction is the point. The lack of a "unified national vision" allows for a thousand different visions to compete.
In Canada, we are terrified of that competition. We treat it as a threat to our "social fabric." Carney’s rhetoric reinforces this fear. He positions the Liberal majority as a shield against the "chaos" of disagreement. But in the modern economy, chaos is the only thing that creates value.
The Fallacy of the "Middle Class" Pivot
Every politician, Carney included, talks about "strengthening the middle class." It’s the safest, most boring sentence in the English language. But you cannot strengthen a class of people by protecting them from the realities of the global market.
We have subsidized a lifestyle based on real estate appreciation rather than genuine value creation. By encouraging "unity" around this model, we are essentially agreeing to a collective decline. We are choosing to be a "branch plant" economy—safe, stable, and subservient.
I’ve seen this play out in the private sector repeatedly. A CEO comes in, sees a divided department, and demands "synergy" and "alignment." Six months later, the smartest people have quit because they were tired of being told to play nice with the idiots holding them back. The department is now unified, but it’s also useless.
Stop Asking for Leadership and Start Asking for Liberty
The premise of the "time to come together" argument is that we need a great leader to point the way. It’s a top-down, 20th-century mindset. The most successful systems in the world are bottom-up. They are emergent. They are messy.
We don't need a federal government to tell us what Canada's "time" is. We need a government that gets out of the way so that individuals can decide what their own time is.
- Decentralize the power: Give the provinces more room to experiment with different economic models.
- Slash the subsidies: Stop propping up companies that can't survive a week without a government grant.
- Welcome the heat: Stop treating political or economic disagreement as a "national crisis."
The High Cost of Playing Nice
There is a massive downside to my contrarian view: it’s uncomfortable. It involves winners and losers. It involves people losing jobs in dying industries. It involves a period of volatility that makes the "unity" crowd break out in hives.
But the alternative—the Carney path—is a slow, polite descent into a second-tier nation status. We will have our unity. We will have our "coming together." And we will have a standard of living that continues to drop while we pat ourselves on the back for being so civil.
The Liberal majority isn't a signal to stop fighting. It’s a signal that the fight just got harder. The establishment has circled the wagons. They’ve recruited the brightest minds of the old guard to tell us that everything is fine as long as we all agree.
Don't believe them.
The most patriotic thing you can do for the Canadian economy right now is to be difficult. Be demanding. Refuse the consensus. Demand that we stop managing our decline and start embracing the friction that actually builds a future.
Canada doesn't need to come together. It needs to wake up and start competing.
