This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Philip Cross, May 30, 2025
This week’s opening of Parliament allows Canadians to begin to assess whether Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government will measure up to the considerable challenges it faces, the two most daunting being redefining Canada’s economic and strategic relations with the United States and reviving our moribund productivity growth. At the same time, Carney must address inter-regional tensions that are as old as Confederation, and despair among young people that is as new as social media.
It will be months before we can judge how Carney is doing. History shows how hard it is to predict whether a leader will succeed based solely on their qualifications. Some who seem to have all the prerequisites flop once in office. Others apparently lacking in competence or temperament end up exceeding all expectations.
In 1928 Herbert Hoover appeared to have a near-ideal skill set to be a successful president, having excelled in both the private and public sectors. He had parlayed his knowledge as an engineer into a fortune as head of a mining company. He then oversaw efforts to help Europe in 1917 as head of the American Relief Administration, before becoming secretary of commerce in the cabinets of presidents Harding and Coolidge. But despite these impressive credentials, Hoover proved incapable of leading his nation out of the Great Depression or even grasping the human toll of the slowly unfolding economic catastrophe.
Here in Canada, Paul Martin also seemed perfectly positioned to handle power in 2003. During almost a decade as finance minister he successfully managed Canada’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1990s, giving him ample opportunity to study how to govern effectively. Instead, he proved incapable of the decisiveness required of any prime minister, leading The Economist to label him “Mr. Dithers.”
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Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
