If you were hoping for a soothing macro-economic reset this autumn to settle our nerves, the Bank of Canada just told you not to bother.

Governor Tiff Macklem’s speech in Saskatoon this week was a sober tour through a world where tariffs are back and capital is jittery. His point was blunt: monetary policy can smooth the bumps, but cannot repave the road.

That road has changed grade, too. U.S. protectionism has ratcheted tariffs to levels not seen since the 1930s. Trade barriers are proliferating and, with them, come the costs and delays that lower trend growth. It now is obvious that Canada hasn’t much leverage with the Trump administration. What “success” we see in trade talks may be only in limiting damage.

We are hampered by fractured capital flows and by our own slow-moving approvals and comfortable complacency. We are closer to a slow-growth trap than anyone in power wants to say out loud.

We are also running policy at cross-purposes, with Ottawa seeking supply capacity and the Bank leaning against demand. Driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake doesn’t do well in taking you up the hill.

And Macklem sees our problems as structural, not cyclical. The fix rests with productivity, internal trade, faster approvals and diversification that finally lives up to our free-trade rhetoric. In his own framing, the central bank can influence the descent but not the slope of our future growth path.

Ottawa says it hears him. The government is preparing a budget pitched as a “generational investment,” a mix of restraint on day-to-day spending and outsized capital to retool the economy, with fast-track “projects of national interest” under a two-year approvals cap and a “one project, one review” approach. If the........

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