Good morning. Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre sparred for the first time in Parliament yesterday – more on that below, along with JD Vance’s guest-host appearance on Charlie Kirk’s podcast and Camryn Rogers’s golden hammer throw. But first:

• Carney told Anglo American to move its headquarters to Canada for a Teck deal approval, sources say
• Israel launches its long-awaited major ground assault on Gaza
• B.C.’s deficit will rise to $11.6-billion after dropping its carbon tax

And we’re back. The House of Commons resumed yesterday after a brief four-week sitting early this summer, which happened to be – thanks to Justin Trudeau’s resignation and the federal election that followed – the only time Parliament convened all year. Yesterday also marked the first faceoff between Prime Minister Mark Carney and re-elected Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. The contest started cordially enough, with handshakes and lip service to their shared goal of a prosperous Canada, before moving into the expected heckles and desk-thumping. Poilievre and his front bench began hammering Carney’s government over the cost of living, crime, housing and immigration; Liberals had to resort to yelling to be heard.

It’s clear Carney is already feeling the opposition’s pressure to deliver on his lofty campaign pledges. So I reached out to Adam Radwanski, a policy columnist at The Globe, to see how Prime Minister Carney might stack up against Candidate Carney and the promises he made.

Carney built his whole campaign around the idea that our country was in a serious crisis and he’d get us out of it fast. What stood out to you about his plans to do that?

I was struck during the campaign by the exhaustiveness of Carney’s economic agenda. Some of it was big-ticket stuff, like tens of billions of dollars for a housing strategy, or a planned increase to defence spending. But there was plenty promised for just about every sector – even more so than in the Conservative platform.

For tech, for instance, you had new tax credits and investment incentives. For agriculture, there was money for getting more food processed here. For postsecondary education, there was a new fund to attract talent displaced from the U.S. All this was framed as a way of pivoting away from our historic reliance on the United States.

How wedded will Prime Minister Carney be to Candidate Carney’s commitments?

It’s been a mixed bag so far. He quickly started moving aggressively on increasing defence spending, trying to speed up Ottawa’s regulatory processes for major projects, and removing interprovincial trade barriers. But other campaign promises seem like they were made a bit flippantly.

A $2-billion “strategic response fund” for the auto sector was supposed to get more Canadian-made parts into Canadian-made vehicles. There’s been no sign of it since the campaign, and from what I can gather, it was more of a box-checking commitment than an actual priority. I think a bunch of the more granular, sector-specific commitments might fall into that category.

But there’s a broader gap between Candidate Carney and PM Carney. Compared with how he campaigned, he’s just come off more conservative – whether it’s the increased emphasis on austerity, enthusiasm for fossil fuels, or tightening immigration. Insert the requisite “elbows down” reference here regarding his tone toward Donald Trump, too.

We’ll come back to Trump, but let’s linger on fossil fuels, since that message also seems to contrast with the climate-crusader position Carney adopted before taking public office. While he rolls out what he now calls a “climate competitiveness” policy, dozens of Liberal MPs have formed an environmental caucus to push for stronger green initiatives.

I talk to a lot of people in the climate space – largely advocates for the low-carbon energy transition as an economic competitiveness imperative – and most of them seem pretty confused about whether Carney is still a fellow traveller. I don’t think there’s shock about hints that he might drop the controversial planned cap on oil-and-gas industry emissions. But it’s jarring that he barely talks about which decarbonization policies he wants to keep or advance – while acting as though the desire to transition away from fossil fuels was a Trudeau-era fad.

That said, there could be some clarity in the new “climate competitiveness” strategy that he promised last week. It seems as though he’s going to de-emphasize national emissions reductions targets, which will obviously upset some people, including in his own caucus. But others seem ready to get on board if he can demonstrate a results-oriented focus on empowering both industry and consumers to decarbonize.

Last week, Carney unveiled his long-awaited list of major national projects to get fast-track approval, which you found decidedly underwhelming. How come?

Coming out of the election, the narrative was that there was a backlog of major energy and infrastructure projects that had been stuck in permitting limbo under Justin Trudeau. The newish government spent nearly half a year seeking them out, only to land on a list of five projects that are mostly already approved and, in some cases, already being built. There’s a second, more aspirational list of six more projects that are too early in development to need approval yet.

That’s not to say that permitting is as quick as it should be. It’s also not to say that the Major Projects Office – to which these easy wins and long-term plays have been referred – won’t ultimately help get more stuff built. But it looks as though there was some overestimation on Carney’s part about how many nation-building investments were held up under Trudeau just by lack of political will. In reality, it’s a lot more complicated, including through financial obstacles that the MPO is now being asked to take on, as well.

Do you think these initial projects – expanding a liquefied natural gas export facility in B.C.; adding a nuclear reactor in Ontario – resonate with Canadians?

Based on recent polling, it seems the majority of Canadians are on board with just about any project if it’s framed as making us stronger and less dependent on the U.S. – new oil pipelines and new wind farms alike.

That somewhat glosses over regional or localized opposition – not to mention the need to respect Indigenous rights – that could matter more to a project’s viability than whether Canadians less directly affected are notionally supportive. But politically, the bigger danger for Carney may be that he’s raised expectations about a lot of new stuff getting built quickly, so he’s set himself up for blame if it proves a slog.

Speaking of polls: The latest Nanos survey