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.”
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.
Get angry, but not irrationally.
Give the Carney government and MPs grace by telling them about what change you want to see.
I still have some faith that Carney is smarter than most politicians, that if there is a popular push for more progressive reforms, he would go along with it.
If opposition is limited to "I'm angry that you canceled the DST! I'm angry that you passed Bill 5!" that can be passed off as too vague of a criticism and doesn't really suggest a suitable alternative direction. Carney did a bunch of right wing stuff because they were confident they would get overwhelming house support, he would have something concrete to show for his first two months in this term. The NDP are kind of disarray and the party apparatus lost touch with local, grassroots campaigns that got people to support them. Even former NDP MP Charlie Angus would say as much.
It's kind of hard for any public opinion to sway a PM whose whole career has been the role of a central banker, ie., someone whose job is to know better than the whims of the moment. I think this will be exactly Carney's blind spot, that he will be too hard to allow himself to not know better than the hoi polloi.