You might call it premature, even peculiar, to declare Mark Carney a failure. Isn’t he riding high in the polls? Didn’t his party just sweep three byelections? Hasn’t the once-mighty Pierre Poilievre faded into bitter wallpaper? And you’d be right. But also wrong, because Carney’s big problem isn’t selling, it’s delivering. And yes, it matters, including to the ongoing sales job.
Consider the trade file. He was billed as the guy who could manage Trump but negotiations have stopped, tariffs are flying back and forth causing much self-inflicted harm on both sides of the border, as is rhetoric digging the hole deeper on both sides. Failure.
Carney was also sold as the guy who could fix Canada’s economy so we didn’t need the U.S. anyway. Including sweeping away internal trade barriers. But they’re still in place and nothing is happening. Not even empty talk, at which Canadian leaders normally excel. Failure.
On productivity we got the empty talk, including about building things at speeds not seen in generations, presumably invoking our glorious traditions including in World War II. But what have we built? What are we building? What has the Major Projects Office approved and what would it matter if it did? Faced with a crisis, they saunter into committee. Failure.
Oh sure, you get memoranda, conferences, international trips, a “green taxonomy”, a “sovereign wealth” Canada Strong Fund full of borrowed money, a Defence Investment Agency and Build Canada Homes. But also stories like Blacklock’s “The Department of Natural Resources yesterday said it will pay a British Columbia consultant $84,000 to find five countries that will buy Canadian softwood lumber. The notice came nearly a year to the day that Prime Minister Mark Carney promised federal leadership to ‘supercharge’ market diversification at a $1.2 billion cost.”
So “supercharge” does not mean what he thinks it means. Nor does an “austerity and investment” budget that rebrands all spending, however frivolous, as investment, which also doesn’t even count as a rhetorical achievement. More than twenty years ago Andrew Coyne complained of being “accustomed to hearing ‘investments’ used as a euphemism for spending.” And accelerating toward a brick wall on debts, deficits and interest payments isn’t success and won’t be.
Also, in our allegedly tolerant society, Carney has been unable to stem surging antisemitism, even uninterested in doing so. As for his pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defence, much of the commentariat bizarrely took it as a fait accompli before anyone pried into how it would be measured, what it would be spent on, or where the money was to come from, never mind whether it actually happened.
Even the UK, a dubious, got rid of Keir Starmer, partly because not even his own Labour party believed he could deliver on defence, and wanted him to. Immediately, the Times reports, his Labour successor Andy Burnham, “was attacked by Tan Dhesi, the Labour chair of the defence select committee, who called for him to ‘urgently commit’ to find the extra money that was ‘imperative’ to Britain’s security. ‘Defence is definitely one area where vibes alone just isn’t going to be enough,’ he told Burnham bluntly at prime minister’s questions.” Amazingly, it also reports, “The Conservatives have pledged to boost defence spending by slashing the welfare budget…”
Ignore the “slashing” cliché. Instead try to imagine Pierre Poilievre pledging to cut social programs to fund core government responsibilities. Or someone from within Carney’s own party rebuking him in public in this wise… on anything.
Some may say it shows how effective Carney is at stifling dissent. But being insulated from effective criticism isn’t a pinnacle of success, it’s a pathway to failure. Like getting away with serial ethics violations, which sets you up for disaster when people get tired of your arrogance after you’ve made it your brand.
I realize reality is somewhat out of vogue nowadays. But it still matters, including in Canadian politics, because in the long run results are crucial here as elsewhere no matter your apparent partisan lock on Laurentian boomers and new immigrants.
Again, you may reply that seedy regimes can cling to power for long periods of time. Which even if true would be cold comfort for specific incumbents, often turfed in tinpot dictatorships by people no more competent or appealing than themselves. But if, say, the Ottoman Empire gives the impression that failure doesn’t matter, remember that they were hammering at the gates of Vienna as late as 1683. But inexorable internal rot led it to crumble slowly but surely over the next few centuries.
So yes, switching from Trudeau to Carney can create a dynamic façade and win byelections. Albeit against Tories as cowardly on principle as inept on tactics, and an NDP led by a prating nit. But the NDP’s big problem, and the Conservatives’, is that the Liberals believe pretty much the same things but present as competent. And there’s the rub.
They’re actually incompetent because their worldview is wrong, including thinking government micromanaging the economy in woke ways brings glorious results. Instead, a new Aristotle Foundation study (with whom I am associated, but not on this paper) warns, “the Canadian government’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies are eroding merit-based hiring in the federal public service – with potentially serious consequences for the country.” Now if you hated big government, policies to make it bloated, ineffective and petulant would be just the thing. But if you’re the sort of person who favours a “Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan”, and yes, we’ve had one for four years “to reduce barriers faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities and create a safer, more inclusive country”, you’d like it to do something other than spend money. But you would be disappointed.
Even the Hill Times, no right-wing outlet, just hollered “‘Grossly deficient’: understaffed workplace-safety program struggled to regularly inspect workplaces, evaluation finds”. It is difficult to imagine that Carney wants such a situation, let alone that it can benefit him politically or otherwise. Especially as the government’s capacity is crumbling across the board because of policies he openly favours. His flawed methods are undermining his cherished aims.
For instance mandating “equity targets” in academia, which another new report, this one from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says are undermining research productivity. When Liberals bloviate “Canada is building the capacity to compete in the industries of the future” they plainly think innovative research is vital. Yet they’re stifling it, with purpose though not on purpose. As Tristin Hopper observed in the National Post “Ever since 2017, Canadian universities have been subject to strict identity-based hiring quotas as a condition of receiving federal research funding.”
What I found most startling here wasn’t that setting aside merit reduces meritoriousness. It’s that Canada has “2,285 university-based Canada Research Chairs whose salary and office expenses are covered entirely by federal grant money.” I realize all have won and all must have prizes. But shouldn’t we be awash in inventions? Or are they all decolonizing their fields while Americans launch startups and capital flees Canada?
On which point Chris Selley just remarked that instead of rising to Trump’s “Lake America” bait we might usefully have considered our own extraordinary efforts to trash our heritage, from renaming Ryerson University and Young-Dundas Square to toppling and beheading statues of Sir John A. But you really can’t rally Canadians round our burning flag.
Or consider this micro-issue: “In its search for a ‘world class design vision’ to restore the official prime minister’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, the federal government is prioritizing the use of Canadian materials and mandating Indigenous involvement in the multi-million-dollar project.” So you just know the result will be hideous and barely habitable. But also waaaaay behind schedule… as it already is. And it’s just a house. Now imagine pipelines, or the whole economy. Yet how can we give it to Trump upside the head if ours sputters and stalls?
Somebody recently grumped about a Trump press release including “FACT: The U.S. economy is approximately 13 times larger than the Canadian economy and home to over eight times as many people” as bullying. But what I want to know is why their population is only eight times bigger but their economy 13 times. Especially if Trump is a dunce with ruinous policies as well as a bully, shouldn’t it be easy as well as imperative that ours grow faster?
Even their pivot to Communist China as a “strategic partner”, which superficially shows the virtue of cunning if not the virtue of virtue, is a loser, because the PRC’s economy is a house of cards and its politics a madhouse. And yes, I realize some people regard Carney as in a conspiracy to destroy Canada. But conspiracies are conducted behind the scenes and while he may stalk off when asked tough questions, his plans are openly proclaimed and openly executed. Including appointing the notoriously pro-Beijing globalist Dominic Barton, of all people, to head the characteristically vapid Invest in Canada thingy. It’s just that his ideas are wrong.
