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He is either a lying hypocritical traitor or a noble change agent. The problem is less knowing which than knowing when we finally know.

During his leadership run and election, he said Trump wants to break us so they can own us and that won’t happen. Ne … ver.

But lately he’s said we need to live with their arbitrary tariffs and pay them imperial tributes by buying whatever they say. That doesn’t sound very proud and independent. In Brazil there were street celebrations for refusing to bend the knee to the U.S.

This makes Carney sound rather neo-liberal: let the free markets rule as in 19th century economics, which really means whoever has the money, sets the rules but don’t worry, it will work out for everyone.

The only neo thing about neo-liberalism is it came after a long interregnum of Keynesian government interventionism, to which Carney had seemed sympathetic. On the other hand, he’s a youthful 60 and as an adult has only served neo-liberal regimes like Stephen Harper’s and the U.K. Tories. He knows their inadequacies well yet must feel a bit disoriented trying to head off in a very different direction.

So, we truly don’t know. His buy-in to a huge bump in military spending under U.S. pressure was ominous.

Yet, consider the two main thrusts of his cave.

One is building up the navy. After the Second World, Canada had the world’s third largest merchant fleet. Yet, its owners and our government destroyed it by selling it off and smashing the heroic Canadian Merchant Seamen’s Union through importing a crime-ridden U.S. union. (It’s described in Elaine Briere’s heartbreaking documentary, “Betrayed.”) Carney’s policy could amount to “dual use,” restoring our civilian shipbuilding capacity.

The other thrust is aerospace. This recalls the destruction of the Avro Arrow program in the 1950s and obliteration of Canadian success in aerospace projects. Does Carney intend to reverse these drifts?

I don’t mean to suggest he knows which side he’s on. That’s possible but pretty rare; politics doesn’t work like that normally. Politicians find out who they are and what they’re going to do when they do it. (U.S. President Barack Obama’s disgraceful choice in 2008 to rescue banks but let homeowners fail is a good — well, awful — example.)

What you believe doesn’t define you, it’s what you do that does.

This brings us to the key deficiency in Carney’s arsenal: the absence of a constituency he can resort to for advice, useful defiance, or support. The Conservatives have their base, who generally push in a neo-liberal direction. So they tend to reflexively dismantle whatever good a previous government did.

The NDP, to the extent they still exist, have a union base plus various progressive streams.

The Liberals, as usual, are an unimpressive muddle. It’s a wonder they survive, though it may also be their secret ingredient. But in a crisis like this, they can neither hold a leader accountable nor have his back.

This puts us — and I say this with all the confidence of someone about to kick a hornets’ nest — eerily in the situation of Cuba when the U.S. imposed its blockade decades ago. Their natural trading partner was gone with the wind and desperate to survive without bowing to the U.S. will and restoring its hideous suzerainty, they turned to the Soviet Union. Castro had been a progressive nationalist and revolutionary but hardly a Marxist-Leninist.

That’s obviously not where Carney is headed. But he does recall the amiable figure Robert Redford played in “The Candidate,” who unexpectedly wins and turns to his brilliant campaign manager asking what we do now. Neither of them has a clue.