“Sneaky Carney” — a nickname in dormancy?

Expect Conservatives to keep the label in cold storage, ready to thaw whenever circumstances permit.

When Mark Carney first floated his leadership ambitions on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart jokingly called him “sneaky.” The Conservatives seized that sound bite, stamped it onto attack ads, and tried to make “Sneaky Carney” shorthand for everything worrisome about a globe-trotting central banker who suddenly wanted to run Canada.

We know how that turned out. Voters looked past the label and elected a fourth Liberal government.

Case closed? Not quite.

Spark Insights’ first post-election survey offers textbook brand data. Carney scores off the charts on “intelligent” (80 per cent) and posts low-70s on “hard-working,” “has a clear vision,” “likeable,” and “decent & well-intentioned.” Only one attribute lags: “honest,” at 65 per cent—still respectable, but dead last among the 14 measured.

That gap matters.

In packaged-goods marketing, you can brag about taste or cleaning power all day, but if the public doubts the brand is truthful, your equity starts to erode. Politics is no different—perceptions of honesty might even matter more.

Behavioural science calls it negativity bias: we weigh a single negative cue more heavily than a cluster of positives. A well-timed smear doesn’t need to dominate someone’s mental picture; it merely has to linger, ready to tilt judgment when new information arrives. Carney’s honesty number suggests the Conservative frame landed softly but stayed lodged. Voters didn’t buy the caricature wholesale, yet enough of them tucked it away to register a faint wobble in the trust column.

So far, Carney’s brand promise is theoretical. He has never held elective office; he has no messy voting record; there is no catalogue of broken pledges. That clean slate helped neutralize the “sneaky” trope in the heat of a campaign. But governing, unlike campaigning, produces daily micro-judgments: missed targets, shifting timelines, inevitable U-turns.

When those arrive—and they always do—the dormant label can resurface as the explanatory narrative. Ah, we were warned: sneaky. Once a mental shortcut gains that foothold, every subsequent stumble confirms it.

Expect Conservatives to keep the label in cold storage, ready to thaw whenever circumstances permit.

Mark Carney won the election because Canadians rated his competence higher than their qualms about his candour. Yet the polling also tells us Canadians are reserving final judgment. In branding terms, they are early adopters sampling the product; the promised benefit (“steady, competent leadership”) must now prove itself in daily use.

If Carney’s government can demonstrate conspicuous honesty—not merely an absence of scandal, but active transparency—the “sneaky” tag will fade. If, however, routine political missteps meet even the faintest whiff of evasiveness, that 65 per cent could slide south, and the Conservatives’ once-dismissed framing might sound like prophecy.