This is the name of a practice that he implemented during his time as the governor of two central banks: a series of public updates launched amid the financial crisis of 2008 that unpicked and explained market tumult as it played out. The intention was to guide stakeholders through the measures being made to counter the financial collapse. “And that’s the spirit I’m talking to you about today,” he said.

Up close and personal: Mark Carney’s intimate communication style is attracting plaudits at home and abroad (Image: Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP) While the PM’s surprise appearance at breakfast time didn’t quite jolt the proverbial marmalade from atop the morning toast, it was, well, a bit of a shock nonetheless. Addresses such as these – grave, detailed, thought-out and delivered well – don’t usually arrive unannounced. This was a “fireside chat” for Canadians in the Trump era – a fatherly hand to hold in a complicated time.

But where Franklin D Roosevelt’s conversational radio addresses to Americans – which elucidated the New Deal in the aftermath of the Great Depression and during the Second World War – were designed to reassure, Carney’s iteration seemed designed to brace Canadians, without stoking overt alarm, for further uncertainty to come. “Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses,” Carney stated, in what swiftly became the speech’s headline in the blanket coverage by newsrooms across the country. “Weaknesses that we must correct.” Many Canadians will tell you that they know this already – the national imagination has accepted the US’s upturned status.

So why make this kind of speech, and why now? “I was surprised by it,” Tim Sayle, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto and director of its international relations programme, told Monocle. Sayle tracks political communication styles and their impacts.

A straightforward answer is that the address’s cherry-picked nods to historical hurdles that Canada has faced in the past and the national mettle that overcame them are sandwiched between two major announcements – one upbeat, the other less so. The first, a landmark global investors’ conference in Toronto in September, which Carney announced last week. It’s a welcome response to the quickening pace of inward foreign investment into Canada, which has sped up since late last year.

But the second is the upcoming review of Cusma, as it’s known up here, the renegotiated free-trade agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico – which is likely, once again, to become a battleground. “I have, personally, bemoaned the fact that Canadian leaders haven’t spoken to Canadians directly about issues of real concern enough,” says Sayle. “Governments tend to calculate that it’s safer, from a political perspective, not to address major subjects, especially geopolitical and international issues, head-on.

Because there’s often little upside, and instead there’s a lot to lose by taking firm and even an explanatory position on things.” This, then, is new for a Canadian prime minister. But shifting the way a leader communicates with voters has been evident in Carney’s tenure from the outset – when he opted to reveal his political ambitions in public for the first time, not with a major Canadian broadcaster, but on The Daily Show in the US. From taking to the ice with Finland’s PM to cracking double-entendres at an event for steamy Canadian-made smash-hit TV drama Heated Rivalry and presenting Joni Mitchell with a lifetime-achievement award, Carney is a versatile political communicator.

“[He is] achieving two things by doing this,” adds Sayle. “There is both a trajectory to his remarks but also what is quite purposeful repetition.” Carney’s star turn in Davos earlier this year, for example, sent a jolt through European capitals. But in its spirit it was a message that he had delivered to Canadian audiences multiple times before.

“One is establishing a consistency and continuity in his ideas. But of course, he’s speaking to different audiences, so he’s also using the opportunity to introduce those ideas for the first time to those who haven’t heard his remarks elsewhere.” That is all in contrast, of course, to the everything-everywhere-all-at-once communications strategy of Carney’s counterpart south of the border. The strategies couldn’t be more different but the goal is arguably the same – to control the narrative before events, or rivals, do it for you.