Mark Carney can apparently do no wrong. Scroll through comments on news articles, and you’ll encounter an energetic online army defending the prime minister’s every action.
Cancelling a tax on the world’s most profitable tech giants? A genius chess move in his trade war against Trump.
Advocating for new pipelines while the country burns from climate change-fuelled wildfires? A tough decision to shore up Canadian sovereignty.
Boosting spending on the military to record and wasteful levels? A responsible counter to supposed perils like Russia or North Korea.
Expanding surveillance powers to crackdown on refugee rights? Well, at least he’s not Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
The U.S. President’s tariffs and threats have left Canadians anxious and disoriented, giving Carney an opportunity to move fast and with far too little scrutiny. He’s pushing through pro-corporate policies that go beyond anything he outlined on the campaign trail. The agenda is so right-wing, in fact, The Globe and Mail last week gleefully noted that “Brian Mulroney could have endorsed it.”
Yet denialism is widespread. It makes some psychological sense: many are still rationalizing their choice in the last federal election. Millions of progressive Canadians parked their vote with Liberals, after the establishment media manufactured an image of Carney as a saviour against Trump. Even though the prime minister is now unravelling that hope in a hurry, it’s hard to accept the betrayal.
Carney’s latest move, however, will be more difficult to explain away. This week, he instructed his ministers to find tens of billions in cuts to “the day-to-day running of government.” That will reduce spending in the public service by an astonishing 15 per cent over the next three years—the “worst cuts in modern history,” according to economist David Macdonald. “For cuts this deep,” he writes, “it would require across-the-board job losses and major service reductions.” If you’ve had frustrations with federal public services, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
This is one way Carney is choosing to pay for his big ticket items: personal income tax cuts that mostly benefit the richest Canadians, and financing the biggest expansion of military spending since World War II. His recent promises to meet NATO’s ballooning target—intended to placate Donald Trump—means Canada could eventually spend $150 billion a year on the military. Even his existing plans will already require $10 to $20 billion more in military spending, with each dollar squandered on a warship or fighter jet or bomb being a dollar less spent on far more pressing social and economic needs.
Even Carney has convolutedly acknowledged this trade-off and rip-off: “If we are moving to the higher and higher levels of defence spending because that’s necessary, then we will have to make considerations about what less the federal government can do in certain cases, and how…we’re going to pay for it.” And while Trump appears unappeasable—yet again threatening elevated tariffs on Canada this week—the weapons and corporate lobbies in this country are cheering.
It’s scarcely possible to pass all this off as clever Trump whispering. What it more accurately underlines is a long-standing pattern in Canadian politics: Liberals so often advance a right-wing economic agenda of cuts and downsizing of public services beyond the wildest dreams of Conservatives. The cuts that Carney is proposing exceed what was done by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who downsized the public service by 10 per cent. It harkens back to Jean Chrétien‘s Liberal government, which cut 18.9 per cent between 1994 and 1998. (Though unlike Carney, both Chrétien and Harper at least cut back military spending.)
“The Liberals were not perceived as black-hearted accountants,” the most senior civil servant noted of Chrétien‘s government of the time. “They were perceived to believe in government.” This gave them a unique ability to radically diminish the government’s role in regulating big business—and improving our lives. Many of the economic and ecological problems we confront today—the obscene scale of inequality, the deterioration of health care, a dire lack of non-market housing, the planet-wrecking boom in the Alberta tar sands, and a welfare state that is now among the stingiest in the industrialized world—can be directly traced back to the Liberal cuts, downsizing, and privatization in that era.
There’s another element of deja vu. To justify his neoliberal revolution, Chrétien leveraged widespread fears about how Canada was about to hit a supposed debt wall—a fake crisis that had been ginned up by the corporate lobby and the establishment media as a pretext for cutting government down to size. Carney by constraint is dealing with a real crisis, a tariff war imposed by Trump. But all the same, this Liberal government is exploiting it to push through policies the corporate elite have long coveted—gutting environmental and labour regulations and anything that stands in the way of more corporate profits—and which the population wouldn’t tolerate in any other circumstances.
The austerity being tabled now is likely only a taste of what’s to come. For all of Carney’s insistence that the government will not touch transfers to provinces—which fund health care, education, social assistance, and much else—the scale of new military spending will require even deeper cuts to make up the difference. Carney’s admission that he will merely “maintain” these transfers may offer a clue: refusing to increase them in line with inflation and population growth will simply be a cut by other means.
It’s no wonder that Carney is trying to push through his agenda as fast as possible, while Canadians remain disoriented. The prime minister’s newly-appointed top senior civil servant, Michael Sabia, is clear about this Canadian-style shock doctrine: “windows of opportunity open and close,” he wrote in a letter to civil servants on Monday. Sabia would be one to know: once upon a time he helped none other than Brian Mulroney privatize a rash of Crown corporations. Carney has even openly signalled he’s preparing to purge any civil servants who don’t get in line (with “high-level talk of recruiting other business achievers” to replace them).
We need to drop the Carney denialism in a hurry, and get angry instead. The prime minister, a consummate technocrat who knows how to cater to elite interests, is taking Canadians for a ride, while servicing his natural constituency: bankers, tech broligarchs, oil barons, and arms manufacturers. It’s time we open our eyes, clue in to what’s happening, follow the money—and put up a fight.
When I went to journalism school 10 years ago, my parents thought that they would eventually read my articles in The Montreal Gazette. Today, that newspaper is a husk of its former self. But I get to explain that I’m working towards critical, independent, and sustainable journalism.
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– Amanda Siino, Development Director, The Breach
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18 comments
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Thank you for the work you do. It is helpful.
Get over it. All you have is innuendo and fear mongering. None of what you raise alarm over has happened… But rest assured your pearl clutching will not agree well. See I can prognosticate too!
Agree with the analysis. Next steps, beyond getting angry? Already there.
(After a bit of trouble with the Catcha thing.)
As an NDP campaign volunteer I was shocked to learn that many people that voted NDP in provincial elections turned Liberal in the federal election. Now we can see that we’ve voted for a con agenda with the face of P.P. replaced by the face of Carney. We are going to be paying for this for years. If Carney caves on supply management we can say goodbye to what little food sovereignty we have now.
All of Carney’s ‘big ideas’ sound like Trumpism with a semi-human face. Everyone should read Ives Engler’s book CANADA’S LONG WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY….it’s short and its damning.
Since the fifties, our governments have quietly gone along with American coups and regime changes around the world…..most if not all of which benefitted the Corporate sectors.
Our family stuck with the NDP…but many of the signs we’d secured prior to the election in our door knocking evaporated during the election period…….to be replaced by ones for a Liberal Candidate who participated in shutting down Palestinian support rallies on our university campus.
And now??? A deadly quiet prevails, as Alberta progressives do what this article suggests: make excuses for Carney.
Apparantly, he has a secret plan…and all this Trumpist imitation is just smart negotiating tactics.
So we dream on, further each day into our climate disaster.
Thank you for this excellent report! The April election was a choice between neoliberalism (Carney) and neoliberalism + social conservatism, which we HAD to reject. So we are in the clutches of the American Banker (Carney) in essentially a majority government, since there is no actual opposition other than Elizabeth May.
I have a plan that could save Canada 100s of Billions w/o sacrificing any social services and environmental or military impacts. – make politicians irrelevant.
It makes a mockery of the progressive vote, especially the Greens, rallying behind the Liberals in order to stop Poilievre. I doubt that he’d be any worse.
For all the folks who didn’t vote Liberal or Conservative, we accepted at face value that – he’s a banker. No surprises here.
The public service needs to be slashed. Up 40% with no improvement in services and in fact poorer service. As for everything else, well you voted for him so you get what you voted for.
Mr Carney, you are acting like a Trump and big corporation stooge, dismissing billions of Canadian tax $$$ from USA, digital corporations that could have been better used in Canada, i.e., lowering our country’s Debt.
Why, Mr. Carney, are you allowing large corporations, Canadian, USA, and others to run roughshod over our environmental laws, polluting our air, water, and land? This polluting has to stop; we should not be giving up control.
Russia has been bogged down in Ukraine, a country one-quarter its population, for over 3 years but NATO members are called upon to increase defence expenditures from 2% to 5% because of the ever present “threat of Russian expansionism” and because a big bully in the White House intimidates the Western alliance.
NATO already spends over half of the world’s total of $2.5 trillion dollars in military spending, but this never satisfies the military-industrial complex that decades ago former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.
Let PM Mark Carney come to Vancouver’s Downtown East with its homelessness and rampant drug use and explain to the residents why doubling the defence budget should be Canada’s top priority and will make their lives so much safer.
Exactly! Well said. Carney had made earlier statements showing he gets climate crisis; and promised substantial spending on social housing to ensure affordability to lower income households; and promised to strengthen the CBC. All of which made it easier for me to support him. But what’s happened is 1995 all over again plus promises of a massive military buildup. As you write, it’s time to get angry.
Did you know that you can contact Carney on his government website at https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/connect/contact and leave your “thoughts and suggestions”?
You brought all these immigrants to our country, and now there taking over all across Canada, and your letting it happen
Well, that’s the last time I will be duped into voting Liberal to deny Conservatives the win. They win either way apparently, so next election I’m voting my conscience… Go, Green Party!
This is an article that seems designed to make you angry. It certainly has a slant to it and I’ll not sure that everything in it is correct, but let me raise a few brief points for consideration:
– At the time that Carney put aside the 3% tax on a handful of US tech companies (which will be revisited anyway in cooperation with Europe) … the gamble was to avoid Trump hitting us with the MUCH LARGER 25%, 50%, or higher tariffs that Trump was considering. The gamble didn’t pay off … but I can see why the 3% gesture was made.
– While many Canadians are leery of new pipelines, if our current pipelines mostly go south into the U.S., we need to consider pipelines going east and west. Yes, the future may have more green energy, but for now we need a quick reshuffle of energy in order to cope with our new situation.
– Since our new situation with the U.S. seems to call for reliance on other military partners, I don’t think we had much choice but to pledge the same military spending as other members in the group. However, Carney made a point of ensuring that money spent on ports, railways, manufacturing, technology (things that we need) can also be counted in that total. Plus it looks like we will be manufacturing weapons for us and for our partners.
– Cracking down on refugee rights? I don’t know anything about that or about some of the other claims of this article.
– IN SHORT, what would you do if you were Carney? There are some new challenges abruptly ahead and in view of these complex situations, it seems to me that he is not bringing unreasonable in his actions so far.
The People’s Party of Canada under Maxim Bernier tries to soften the blow of US tariffs by including supply management in trade talks. His opponents believe that they can stay in power indefinitely if they protect and promote supply management, but they will not restore or promote inter-provincial trade without which Canada won’t survive the tariffs.
The hegemonic US increasingly does not have military solutions or options besides creating havoc in “shithole” countries as a way of leveraging and threatening any possible opposing forces either directly/internally or via a bordering or other strategically located region/country. The “economic hit man” was an enforcer enforcing terms of American trade agreements/deals that supported an empire dependent upon strict control of supply and demand.
In Canada, the crowds lining the highways, byways and overpasses cheering on the 2022 truckers’ convoy – they knew this was their only chance at showing the world that their lives matter. Three years later, thirty three percent of eligible voters in my riding did not cast a vote last April. We have to give them hope.