W hatever his flaws as a politician turn out to be, Mark Carney does at least possess self-awareness. “You’re supposed to campaign in poetry and govern in prose,” he said in his final campaign speech on April 27th, on the eve of the election. “As the assembled media will tell you, I campaigned in prose. So I’m going to govern in econometrics.”

It’s common for U.S. politicians to tie their opponents to an unpopular incumbent president, but this year in Canada, Mark Carney took it international. Unlike in the U.S., Canadian politics is multiparty and often defined by issues without salience to its neighbors to the south.