Mark Carney is meeting heads of state while Canada debates desk counts, and you might be reading that backwards. The world tour looks like leadership. But when the apparatus at home still operates like the threat level is 2015, flying abroad might genuinely be the easier problem to solve.

The Canadian military doesn’t have enough beds and is renting hotel rooms. The civil service doesn’t know if it has enough desks for four days a week in the office. Trump, days before his State of the Union, expressed hope the Supreme Court would just skip it. Nobody planned for any of this, and Canada’s institutional response capability hasn’t caught up to the reality of any of it either.

You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. Right now Canada’s army, figuratively and literally, is still sorting out its accommodations. That gap doesn’t close just because the prime minister understands it.

Topics: Mark Carney Canada, civil service reform, Trump unpredictability, Canadian politics, geopolitical instability

GUEST: Matt Gurney | http://readtheline.ca

Originally aired on2026-02-24