OTTAWA—Like others, my immediate thoughts upon watching Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Forward Guidance” video was a comparison to former United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” during the 1930s and ’40s. 

FDR used these chats for several purposes but, like Carney, most importantly they were a way of communicating directly with voters without the filters of media. FDR’s chats started when he was elected at the height of the Great Depression, and as he was doing battle with Congress and the Supreme Court to bring forward the core of the New Deal that would not only save America from the worst possible outcomes of the Depression, but also lay the groundwork for the infrastructure and social programs that underpinned the post-war boom of the 1950s and ’60s. 

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He then used the same device to pivot Americans’ thinking about Hitler, fascism, the threat from Japan, and the prospect of another war in Europe that would require American intervention. The U.S. was deeply isolationist at the time: the ravages of the First World War and the rejection of former president Woodrow Wilson’s own Treaty of Versailles—including the nascent League of Nations—by the U.S. Senate were fresh wounds. And that American nativism certainly had a real, long flirt with fascism, particularly in the form of Charles Lindberg’s “America First” movement.

Roosevelt’s initial success was limited: while he managed to secure support for “Lend Lease”—a program that allowed the U.S. to give supplies to the United Kingdom in........

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