Most Governments Peak in Year One. Here’s Why.
The Carney government has set some ambitious targets. Defence. Productivity. Housing. Trade diversification. Infrastructure. Projects of National Interest. All of it. Every problem, fixed. Every policy lever, pulled. Every chart, up and to the right.
And look, good for them. I sincerely mean it. I love these ambitious goals. The truth is, you do not get into government to manage decline. Or at least you really shouldn’t. You get into government to do big things. The early signs are promising. There is energy in the building. The new ministers still know what they’re there to do. The King paid us a visit. Nobody has resigned in disgrace. Yet.
Long live this honeymoon. I mean it.
The real question is not whether this government wants to deliver on its promises. It is whether it can outrun the thing that eventually catches every government in Ottawa. Entropy.
Because here's the thing. Most Prime Ministers achieve their biggest and boldest legacy moves in the first year. After that, it gets harder. The oxygen gets thinner. The inbox gets heavier. The media questions definitely get tougher. Especially in a minority parliament.
The tough stuff starts this winter.
Trudeau came in swinging. In his first year alone, he launched the Canada Child Benefit, resettled 25,000 Syrian refugees, signed the Paris Agreement, restored the long-form census, legalized medical assistance in dying, announced cannabis legalization, initiated Senate reform, and launched the MMIWG inquiry. By year two, it was slower going. Court challenges. Regulatory blowback. Stakeholder fury. Open letters. Committee hearings. Ministerial turf wars. Towards the end, it seemed like their entire week was spent answering for something someone else said on a podcast.
It happens to every government. You can write the headlines now. Minister contradicts PM on key file. Documents released under ATIP raise new questions. New polling shows growing uncertainty. And of course, the classic. Top aide departs as pressure mounts.
So how do you fight it?
One way is to let your ministers actually do their jobs. I know. Revolutionary stuff.
There is a story Simon Sinek tells in his book Leaders Eat Last, about a U.S. Navy submarine captain that should be required reading in every PMO transition binder. Captain David Marquet took over the USS Santa Fe, which at the time had the worst performance record in the fleet. One day, early in his command, he gave an order that could not be carried out with that sub’s propulsion system. His officers tried to follow it anyway. Because he told them to. They literally tried to do something that was not physically possible, because they had been trained not to question orders.
That's when it hit him. The crew had been trained to obey, not to think.
You don't need to have served in the Navy to picture this model.
"Sir, request permission to submerge the ship."
"Permission granted."
"Aye aye, submerging the ship."
This wasn't working.
So he flipped the model. He told everyone to start their decisions with “I intend to.”
"Sir, I intend to submerge the ship."
That one shift, from passive compliance to active responsibility, changed everything. The Santa Fe went from worst to best. Its officers became some of the most highly promoted in the Navy.
The moral is simple. If you concentrate too much power in the captain’s chair, eventually nobody else remembers how to steer.
Ottawa is full of clever people who want to be involved in every announcement, every press line, every comma in a briefing binder. The instinct is understandable. You want cabinet and caucus alignment. You want discipline. You want to keep the government on message. But here is what also happens. Files slow down. Decisions stack up. Ministers become spokespeople instead of leaders. The PMO becomes the bottleneck. And then the whole thing grinds to a crawl.
That is how you waste a mandate. Not by making the wrong decisions. By not making decisions at all.
If this government really wants to hit its targets, it has to know when to let go. That means trusting ministers to manage their files. It means not rewriting speeches from the first floor of PMO. It means accepting that if you want a government that moves, like Carney aims to do, you cannot hold the reins on every file forever.
The first session is over. The real work starts this fall. If they want a shot at real legacy, they had better keep running at full speed.
Because year two comes fast. And it does not care how many targets you set.