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Yet Carney has historic challenges and large promises to fulfil.

What he needs now is backbone, courage and world-class negotiating skills. That, at least, was the message from a pc28����Star panel discussion comprised of voters who have been sharing their journey to a decision over the weeks leading up to the election.

Canadians feel threatened on many levels: by the United States, of course, and by crime, fraying health care and an affordability crisis. They want maturity, a steady hand and solutions, not slogans and stunts.

To the panellists, there is opportunity.

This week, it was as if the participants had all been reading Goethe on commitment:

“Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. / Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. / Begin it now.”

They noted that the platforms of Carney’s Liberals and the Conservatives who will form official opposition — parties that in total took almost 90 per cent of Canadian votes — have a good deal in common.

Rob Fulford, a labour relations specialist and father of two in the pc28����riding of Don Valley West, noted that the major parties had “a lot of common front, particularly in terms of the U.S. So there should be some common ground to be found there.”

While there is politics involved in any initiative, “it really speaks to the bigger issue of that unifying” that’s happening across the country that all party leaders praised and called for, said Fulford, who voted Green.

John Penturn, an executive headhunter in the riding of Spadina-Harbourfront, said “now we’re going to find out what he’s actually ready to act on.

“Everyone is holding their breath waiting to see how decisive Carney’s going to be,” he said.

“If he doesn’t act decisively in some way that looks convincing, that’s more than tone, there’s gonna be a problem.

“So our eyes are really peeled to see what he comes up with, how decisively he does it, how energetically, how much he looks like he’s actually doing something rather than saying he’s doing something.”

Penturn expected that Carney will “have a bit of a honeymoon period. He might even have a honeymoon period in Quebec” where the Liberals elected a solid group of MPs.

Such phases of goodwill and harmony are terrible to waste.

This honeymoon, however, if it occurs, will be played out under existential threat from the United States and along the dangerous fault-lines of regional sensitivities at home, most particularly in Quebec and Alberta.

The promise of an east-west energy corridor intended to make Canada, as Carney put it during the campaign, “an energy superpower,” will be an issue laden with sensitive tripwires on which his efforts will be closely scrutinized.

“I’d love to see them be able to navigate on a pipeline,” said Tom Curran. “But we’re asking somebody who’s never been in that position of trying to bring people together from a political standpoint to suddenly do it.”

For Curran, a retired lawyer from Ottawa now living in Prince Edward Country, Carney should “push the pipeline through and start saying, ‘OK, we are going to sell LNG. We are going to sell oil and it’s going to happen.’ The only problem for him is, boy, that’s going to be a tough sell.”

“He has to move very quickly on that,” said Curran. “You know the old saying, ‘Do everything that people are going to hate in the first year of your mandate.’”

In fact, a Harvard Business School book titled “The First 90 Days in Government,” by Peter H. Daly, and Michael Watkins with Cate Reavis, said “transitions are times of opportunity and vulnerability.

“The people who selected you did so because they expect you to add value — and the quicker they see that you are doing so, the better it will be.”

Key players on a leader’s team will be waiting for them to “establish a tempo” and will take their cues about the urgency and importance of their own contributions from you.

“Leadership is ultimately about leverage,” the authors wrote. “Small initial successes yield leadership capital that can be invested to yield even larger returns.”

By contrast, slow and disorganized starts can undermine a leader’s ability to succeed, they said.

This is especially true when there are actors in the piece not necessarily co-operating in your success.

Blaise MacLean, a law professor originally from Nova Scotia now living in Bogota, Colombia, noted that in Premier Danielle Smith’s Alberta, “the premier doesn’t seem to be pulling along with the rest of the (Canadian) team.”

Tom Curran agreed, saying “she’s not someone that can be easily dealt with. It’s funny in a way because I’m not seeing a huge difference between what she is doing out there and what Quebec politicians have done for decades.

“We’re not used to hearing it from elsewhere,” he said. “Quebec has been highly successful in this regard: ‘Keep your nose out of our business. If it’s provincial jurisdiction, we’ll make the decisions.’”

Blaise MacLean noted that while Quebec famously had an external actor in French president Charles de Gaulle fomenting separatist feeling, Alberta now has its own in the form of Donald Trump, encouraging the Western province’s separatist element.

All of it is going to demand considerable political skill from Ottawa, and from a man who said, until recent days, that he wasn’t a politician.

For his part, the man who has never been anything else, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, should be grateful the Star panel won’t be voting on his fitness to carry on after blowing a huge lead in polls and losing his own seat in Carleton.

For Penturn, who voted NDP, Poilievre didn’t adapt to former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s departure and Carney’s scrapping of the consumer carbon tax.

“He just did the same old things he knew didn’t work.”

Tom Curran, who voted Green, said “he didn’t need to pander to the social conservative side. They were going to vote for him no matter what. He had to get those disaffected Liberals, and instead he kept coming up with another policy position for social conservatives.”

Blaise MacLean, who voted Conservative in the riding of Oshawa, mused about a Conservative gene that disposes them to public recrimination, as was seen between Poilievre’s campaign and Progressive Conservative premiers Doug Ford in Ontario and Tim Houston in Nova Scotia.

“Why don’t they join together?”

In a way, it will be just such a question that Canadians across the country will regularly confront as Prime Minister Mark Carney leads us into a new age of uncertainty.

(The Star thanks readers from across Ontario and abroad who volunteered their time to contribute to the panel and to discuss their personal decision-making journeys on this most important of elections.)