Standing outside Rideau Hall on Tuesday, Mark Carney said his new cabinet — the first real cabinet of his time as prime minister — was “purpose-built for this hinge moment.”
Carney has long been fond of thinking of this current moment as a hinge — even before its real depths were clear. The Hinge was the title of the book he was planning to publish this month, before the opportunity to become prime minister of a G7 nation came along.
It is perhaps a more hopeful way of saying “crisis” — or an overlapping series of crises, like what the prime minister and his new cabinet now face.
Carney did not shy away from the word “crisis” during this spring’s campaign. In particular, the multi-layered threat posed by Donald Trump was, in Carney’s view, a “once-in-a-lifetime crisis.” But the economic and security crisis that Trump suddenly represents for Canada sits beside a housing crisis that has been building for decades. And the premier of …