Good morning. We’re digging into the highs, lows and faux pas of Mark Carney’s first year in politics – more on that below, along with a tentative Canada Post deal and a spiked 60 Minutes report. But first:

• Carney formally names investment executive Mark Wiseman as the next U.S. ambassador
• The Bondi shooters prepared their attack for months, including firearms training, police say
• The driver in the alleged Ryan Wedding cocaine scheme took part under “threat and fear,” a judge found

To remind myself of Mark Carney’s meteoric rise through Canadian politics in 2025, I looked back at the different ways I described him in this newsletter. He went from “former central banker Mark Carney” to “Daily Show guest Mark Carney” to “Liberal leadership candidate” to “newly minted Liberal leader” to “newly minted Prime Minister” – all in the first four months of the year.

By May, Carney had his first cabinet and a fresh to-do list: The federal government would deliver a new trade deal with the United States, double the rate of home construction, build serious infrastructure projects, boost military spending, push through a middle-class tax cut and dismantle internal trade barriers to grow a sluggish economy – some of it as soon as Canada Day.

Well, he got the tax cut and the turbo-charged defence budget, though the rest is still a work in progress, and even Carney now concedes that a U.S.-Canada trade deal probably won’t materialize any time soon. So how should we tally up his time in Ottawa? I asked my colleague Shannon Proudfoot to break it all down.

Carney’s whole pitch to voters was that he was “most useful in a crisis.” We’re a year into Donald Trump’s trade war and eight months into Carney’s term. How useful has he been?

Any notion that existed that Trump would back down, or that Canada could negotiate a reprieve from the trade war, has evaporated. Then again, so have lots of ideas about a baseline level of sanity, decency or rationality with Trump.

That doesn’t mean voters won’t eventually blame Carney for overpromising, but he’s still enjoying the political benefit of the doubt for a situation that is both deeply damaging to Canada and difficult to solve.

The tricky bit for the Prime Minister is that his big economic policies – diversifying trade, building major national projects and beefing up the Canadian economy – will take a long time to pay off. Canadians who already feel pinched by affordability may not have a lot of patience to wait for an explanation of how a technocratic solution will help them.

You profiled Carney during his run to be prime minister. What stood out about him while you were reporting the piece?

A lot of the Carney essentials that people outlined to me have been on display over the last year, including the intelligence, the ego, the impatience when he feels like someone isn’t holding up their end of the bargain, and the wit that can be charming or lacerating, depending on the context.

What do you think surprised Carney – not just a rookie PM, but also a rookie politician – about Ottawa?

Running to be prime minister isn’t an entry-level political job, and we’ve all watched Carney learn to do it in real time. His speechmaking has improved, as has his French, and while a lot of people would argue his press conference answers go on too long, I will never complain about a politician offering nuance about what they’re thinking.

But it’s the more subtle things that have required some stretching and growing. His infamous “Look inside yourself, Rosemary” tantrum to the CBC’s Rosemary Barton was, I think, about him mistaking standard accountability questions for suggestions of personal malfeasance, not yet grasping that the rules of engagement for public office are different than in his previous life.

Since he began running for the Liberal leadership, Carney has preached this geopolitical serenity prayer about how there are certain things Canada can’t control, so we have to focus on the things we can. This year has been a long, still-unfolding lesson that many more things fall into the uncontrollable category.

Carney has a long list of major projects meant to give us “more than the Americans can take away,” but everyone I know remains anxious about grocery prices and the rising cost of living. Has he done anything about those pressures?

This is where dragons lurk in the woods for Carney. There isn’t a whole lot a government can do about inflation and private-sector prices. And it’s going to take a long time for wages to catch up to prices and to move the needle on housing affordability, even if – big if – building accelerates and immigration slows to ease pressure on supply.

Early this year, Trump’s economic and sovereignty threats eclipsed everything else. But those other issues didn’t get resolved, they were just temporarily buried, and now they’ve risen back to the top of Canadians’ worry lists.

Affordability has been the central focus of Conservative messaging as long as Pierre Poilievre has been leader, and for the Liberals, it’s a liability. That’s both because it’s an issue incumbent governments wear and because their party has struggled to show effective empathy.

Carney did manage to snap up two Conservative MPs in the past few weeks. Is that a testament to his leadership – or does it say more about Poilievre?

To really answer this, we’d have to peer into the hearts of the floor-crossers and would-be defectors, and sadly, that technology doesn’t exist yet. There could be high-minded policy reasons or leadership questions involved. There could be crass political self-interest at play. But in political terms, I don’t think it matters much. At the moment, it looks positive for the Liberals and negative for the Conservatives, and in politics, narratives tend to feed on themselves.

This time last year, Trudeau was prime minister, Carney couldn’t be tempted to join his government and the Liberals trailed the Conservatives by 20 points. So I recognize a lot can change quickly in politics. But what will you be watching for from Carney in 2026?