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One of the more baffling CPC missteps from the last election was to try and label Mark Carney “just like Justin.” The electorate clearly didn’t buy it. And why would they? It’s clear the two men differ in terms of tone, tenor, and style. Additionally, as the first few months of the Carney government have shown, it is clearly tacking to the right of the Trudeau government on several policy major policy fronts. The differences aren’t merely superficial but substantive as well.

If there’s one area of similarity, it’s that Trump is seemingly sucking up all the oxygen in government. But Carney and his team would be wise to take a step back and consider what happened to Prime Minister Trudeau the last couple of times Trump and trade occupied a larger than normal chunk of government capacity.

Don’t get me wrong, there is good reason for Trump to be sucking up all the oxygen. Aside from all the obvious trade-related reasons, Trump represents a unique challenge on several geopolitical fronts, including but not limited to inviting Vladimir Putin, a dictatorial war criminal who represents a very real threat to Canadian arctic sovereignty, to a red-carpet welcome in Alaska.

But while focusing on Trump makes sense, if there is one singular takeaway the Carney folks should learn from Trudeau, it’s that Trump can’t trump everything and everyone else.

There were two times in Trudeau’s ten-year government wherein Trump and trade occupied the bulk of resources and time of senior staff in then PMO and Privy Council: first during the NAFTA renegotiations, and then again in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s second win in late 2024.

One doesn’t need to relitigate all of the aspects of the SNC-Lavalin affair to note that the timing of the NAFTA renegotiations coincided with some of the more contentious and antagonistic parts of the between then Justice Minister and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould and senior staff in the Privy Council and PMO, including the clerk and prime minister.

More recently, in November and December of 2024, Prime Minister Trudeau and core members of his senior staff were occupied with ensuring Canada and Canadians would stand strong in the face of yet another Trump trade storm.

In case anyone needs reminding about what went down in December 2024, the abridged version is that after the then-deputy prime minister and finance minister was offered a new position in which she would lead Canada-US relations, while keeping her deputy prime minister role, she decided to resign abruptly the morning of the Fall Economic Statement, letting the prime minister know less than an hour before her statement was publicly posted.

I realize it is impossible to establish the counterfactual in which having a less acutely Trump-focused Prime Minister’s Office and Privy Council Office led to drastically different outcomes. But it is quite easy to envision a world where the PM and his senior team weren’t caught completely off guard by disgruntled ministers, and various relationships, both professional and personal, remained intact.

The point is that few government resources are as important as attention, and allowing Trump to swallow all of it means other, potentially significant things may well fall to the wayside.

Nobody is suggesting that Carney and his team should deprioritize Trump and trade. To the contrary, Carney and his team should absolutely continue to pursue the best possible deal they can extract from Trump, But they have to also be able to keep their finger on the pulse of caucus and cabinet, as well as looking for signs that the Canadian electorate’s focus on Trump has shifted to other glaring issues like the cost of living and housing.

After all, despite the importance of trade and its effect on the economy, there will come a point when whatever is happening on the domestic front will matter more — and there are already signs that a shift may be underway.

Recent suggests that Donald Trump is starting to fade as a top concern, with 38 per cent of respondents picking that as the most important issue, while 60 per cent said the rising cost of living is top of mind. While Abacus did not pick up on any major fault lines amongst the generational divides, it’s worth noting that millennials and gen. Z are likely the ones feeling the affordability pinch the hardest — and they make up the largest voting bloc in the country.

But at least with issues like housing and affordability, you can see the opinion landscape start to shift in real time, so you can ostensibly see the threat coming and course correct. Issues pertaining to caucus and cabinet, however, will bubble up in unpredictable ways. Based on early reporting and snippets from Liberal group chats across the country, it’s unclear whether Carney has the temperament or the emotional intelligence to deal with the multiple ways his own caucus may end up coming for him the moment there is an aggrievement larger than the current Liberal polling advantage.

The Liberal party are, for now at least, incredibly lucky the leader of the Conservative party seems more concerned with fighting online culture wars than actually proposing ways to tackle affordability. But even a feckless opposition can benefit from anger toward an incumbent government. This will be especially true if negotiations with the Trump administration continue to drag on and Canadians begin to accept a fundamental truth: there is no rhyme or reason with Trump.

Trump is in effect a stochastic negotiator insofar as his “strategy” is random and cannot be predicted with any certainty. Trump’s own stated reasoning for implementing so many tariffs on various allies, Canada included, is wildly contradictory, as he sometimes says it’s to protect American manufacturing and at other times he has stated it is about collecting tariff revenue (which, to be clear, he is collecting from the American people).

It’s honestly amazing that Trump’s inability to be managed or handled wasn’t pointed out by the Conservatives on the campaign trail. Not only would it have been an effective attack on the Liberals for making the case that Carney would certainly succeed in getting a good deal for Canadians with Trump; it would have also allowed the Conservatives to pivot back to affordability issues, a subject the Conservatives have traditionally done better on.

While the Liberals are quite right to point out that it’s highly unlikely any other person occupying the prime minister’s office would be faring any differently, or would have more “success” with Trump, they are the ones who crafted this image of Carney being the only person who could secure a deal, and in short order to boot.

It isn’t exactly a secret that some of Prime Minister Carney’s most trusted and senior advisers have gone out of their way to signal to junior and mid-level staff that the new boss is very different than the old boss. That’s all well and good, I suppose, and a choice senior staff in Carney’s PMO are free to make. But if they really wanted to show how different they were from the Trudeau years, they’d instead also be focused on something else: figuring out a way to ensure Trump doesn’t end up trumping all other issues.