Jesse Zink on Substack – Oct 12, 2026
[Ken Gray – I think Jesse Zink is spot on. Our Prime Minister’s reversal on climate matters is distressing and foolish. In his strategy to appease Alberta he has largely abandoned any real progress towards sustainable energy. With his appeal to a middle-powers approach to collaborative governing he has allied himself with economies that have no interest in reforming capitalism or 1980s-style neoliberalism where consumption is the goal forcibly enriching intransigent, wealthy owners and oligarchs at the expense of vulnerable persons and creation itself.]
[Jesse Zink] Nearly 18 months ago, I wrote a post about Mark Carney’s Catholic faith, expressing the hope that Carney could be part of a movement of Roman Catholics and other Christians who helped point the world beyond the market-based society which Carney and Roman Catholic teaching have been critical of in the past.
Like many other posts, this one was read by some people and then left to languish. Even I forgot I had written it. Then, late this summer it was approvingly reposted and shared by one of Canada’s leading political journalists. Through the magic of the algorithm, this pushed it into the feed of many new readers and it quickly became, by far, the most read and commented on post I’ve ever had on Substack. (If you’ve subscribed as a result of seeing that post, welcome!)
So perhaps it’s time for an update. In the midst of one of the most consequential periods of the Carney era, what can we say about the hopes I once expressed and how his faith is shaping his time as prime minister?
I was wrong
The first thing to say is I was wrong—or at least my hopes were disappointed. Carney has emerged as a leader of a global movement—next up: Time’s Man of the Year?—but it is not the movement I hoped for. Instead, the critical axes of his tenure have been 1) internal and external threats to Canada’s sovereignty and 2) the realignment of global power blocs that risks leaving middle powers like Canada out in the cold. While I think that the market-based society we have inhabited since at least the 1980s has been immensely damaging and is responsible for much of the political turmoil we experience today—I’ve written a book largely about this—the urgency of this moment has meant that political attention has largely been elsewhere. The place of the market has not turned out to be the central question in these last 18 months.
Perhaps the most revealing line of Carney’s has been what he said on the last night of the 2025 campaign: “You’re supposed to campaign in poetry and govern in prose. I campaigned in prose. So I’m going to govern in econometrics.” Carney is laser focused on his metrics, on his nation-building projects, on re-orienting Canada’s trade on an east-west basis (both internally and externally). It’s easy to see how he thinks this makes sense in the present moment, but it is, I am concerned, an incomplete approach and one that is storing up trouble for the future.
At some point, Carney will have to address thorny domestic problems that have little to do with the United States or Canada’s global position. This includes a housing crisis and an affordability crisis. As near as I can tell, Carney seems fixated on his nation-building projects, his quest for military rearmament, and his trade agenda as ways to spur Canada’s economy and hope everything trickles down to the rest of us.
I wish I shared his confidence in this approach. But by failing to reckon with the deeper issues at play here—the extension of market-based relations into more and more areas of our shared life—he is missing the opportunity for the more fundamental reset that is called for in this moment. It’s not simply a matter of creating a new bloc of middle powers—Carney’s favourite approach of “variable geometry”—but of a deeper reorientation that moves our society towards the new approaches we need to, for instance, address climate change or ensure the market has less influence in areas of our life like housing. Such an approach would have flowed naturally from the Catholic social teaching that is clearly important to Carney and the writings of authors like Michael Sandel that he has cited so approvingly in his pre-prime ministerial past.
A nascent movement?
Carney may not be leading the charge in the way I had hoped he once might have. But one of my interesting summer reads was Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by one of Connecticut’s senators, Chris Murphy. It’s written for an American context, of course, but in the way it indicts the present state of American society for allowing the market to take on too great of a role I found it refreshing and timely. There is a political movement developing among some leaders in western democracies who are coming to understand that the way to combat right-wing populism has, in large measure, to do with reassessing the role of the market and curtailing the power of big money.
Carney clearly enjoys the attention he gets on an international level and his peer leaders are looking to him for leadership. Wouldn’t it be incredible if Carney could use his profile and stature to align himself with this nascent political movement—which he has already spoke and written about approvingly—and chart a new path not just for Canada but for all of life on our burning planet? The language of technocratic governance can only take Carney and this country so far—and risks storing up dangers for the future. (Witness Emmanuel Macron in France and the impending election of a right-wing populist to succeed the most technocratic of all technocrats.) I am concerned that in missing a chance to align himself with this movement, Carney’s decisions now will come back to haunt him.
Canadians, it has been said, have two modes: I’m sorry and you’re going to be sorry. A huge majority of the country is behind him in that second position and Carney is, as I write this, riding high in the polls. Carney’s opportunity this fall is to offer a greater sense of the vision that underlies his frenetic activity. If he could draw on his faith—however implicitly—as he articulates this vision, I’d be happy to join in this chorus of approval.
Jesse Zink is the principal of Montreal Dio, an ecumenical seminary affiliated with McGill University, and canon theologian in the Anglican Diocese of Montreal.
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