You know, Chrystia Freeland ran for the Liberal Party leadership too. It’s recent history, so we tend to forget it. But you must think Freeland really, really wanted it, after her long history with Justin Trudeau and then splitting with him so publicly. So, wouldn’t she be kind of pissed off at Carney now, being where he is?

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I am vaguely curious how those machinations took place, for Carney to kind of land here just as he has. I guess I am just musing about it because I don’t know how else to start writing about how I don’t get Mark Carney at all. I don’t understand him.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to vote for him or his party. But I feel like my befuddlement is something I want on the table. Because you know, we don’t know very much about Mark Carney except his resume, and we’re electing him, probably with a substantial majority, at a very critical time to do some pretty big things.

Maybe my worry is that, if I don’t get Mark Carney, then maybe he doesn’t get us, either. I don’t deny he’s one of us. He feels very Canadian to me, despite the globalism, despite the substantial time abroad. I believe his heart has never left here, and that means something.

I also don’t deny that he’s qualified, from a certain perspective, to do the job of Prime Minister. But that job is malleable. What that job actually is depends on who’s in it and what they want to do with it.

Prime Ministers don’t apply for the job based on a set of milestones or a statement of work. They get the job first. Then they decide what those milestones and statements of work will be. They can structure them however they want, to be whatever they happen to be good at.

But when we survey our options for Prime Minister, we typically have some vague boxes to put them in. If they’ve run for office before, which Carney has not, we have a party affiliation, a voting record, a few town halls or all-candidates meetings. We have Question Period. We have none of that with Carney, save the affiliation.

Perhaps more striking for me personally is that I don’t have an ideological read on Carney. He’s called himself centre-left, but is he really? And what does centre-left mean, exactly, right now, in this context?

Like (apparently) hundreds of thousands of others in the past two days, I watched that long form interview between Carney and Scott Galloway. It gave me some peace of mind because you had on display that Mark Carney, the one who has a clear image of the world, which seems to be a resonable image, a rational image, and he seems to have a practical strategic sense of how Canada fits into that world.

In the latter stages of the interview, when Carney gave some of his prescriptions for Canada, I was less enthused, but I was willing to give it a pass. I wasn’t sure about the whole homegrown pipeline of new housing and everything that it is supposed to accomplish: setting up a new industry, advancing careers in the trades, and getting people affordable homes.

But it’s ok, I think, because, well, it’s early days. Politicians have big ideas and 90 percent of them never come to pass. This is why we don’t worry too much about platforms because they are just that: big ideas.

Side note: Before I make any judgments on the housing plan, what I really want to know is what Carney thinks is the root of the housing problem in the first place. Since he wants to build he apparently thinks the issue is supply. But is that really the problem? I live in Vancouver and there is a lot of development going on. I want it explained to me, by this Ph.D. in economics we’re about to elect, how his prescription is a direct solution to whatever specific issues he sees that are our barriers to affordable housing.

As I watched Carney announce the costed Liberal platform on Saturday, I couldn’t get over how little I understood about who he is. Are you a socialist? A capitalist? Don’t say pragmatist. Because pragmatism depends on your objectives, which depend on your ideological bent. I don’t understand you, Mark Carney. I don’t know what box to put you in.

I could say that I don’t mind not knowing because I do believe he’s moral, sincere, and really does view the role of Prime Minister as an act of service. But all of those things can be true of a person while they are still mostly engaged in an intellectual exercise of moving around pieces of the economy to see how the bar graphs change. (And you can get very caught up in your own intellectual exercise if you’re not careful.)

Carney must be doing that, at least in part, because that’s what he knows how to do. He’s never worked in a business where he’s had to sell goods or services, so he doesn’t have a hands-on, intuitive understanding of that day-to-day work and its friction points. He understands it academically. Fortunately, the job of Prime Minister is largely an academic one; even bank governors take broad strokes to predict and soften macroeconomic trends. They are not builders.

I think I am so caught up with not getting Mark Carney partly because I view him as a generational cohort. He recently turned 60; I turned 50 a few months back. That’s less of an age difference than you might think, so when he makes certain statements they tend to pique my interest because I feel like I could take something from them that are revealing, something that would show who the hell he actually is.

On the Galloway podcast, he’s asked near the end what he would say to his 25-year-old self. He answers casually:

“Relax and stay focused on what you like. I probably spent more time doing things I didn’t really love than I should have.”

I’d like a follow up on that. So, what kinds of things that you didn’t really love? Of course, we can assume he’s just talking about working long hours on “versions of” Wall Street (as he refers to his private sector work in that interview). But it could be something more substantive.

Like maybe he had no interest in economics. He just happened to be good at it. That happens to a lot of people. They end up in their less-than-preferred career because it was available to them and they pursued it. But if you chat with them over drinks they might say, “you know, I always wanted to be a soybean farmer. But it turns out I was really great at carpentry, so that’s what I ended up doing. Forever.”

I think those kinds of details can be very revealing, especially in a man we’re about to elect to remake our economy. I’m on board for the ride, because I think he’s decent, he’s smart, he cares, and I’m up for the experiment. But this will be an experiment. I just wish we knew whether we were in bed with a capitalist or a socialist or some kind of political atheist who makes it up as he goes along.