Mark Carney likes to catalyse.

It’s one of his favourite words. When he finally agreed to join a Liberal task force in September — bowing to repeated entreaties from a flailing government — he described himself as “a catalyst in a much broader effort.”  Read through official plans for “a Mark Carney government” and the term appears again and again.

A Carney team would

adopt

a new fiscal approach “so that scarce public investment dollars catalyse multiples of private investment.” It would “catalyse major investments in AI infrastructure to reinforce Canada’s leadership in AI model development” and also “catalyse massive private investment in cutting-edge industries.” It would “focus on ensuring that government capital investment dollars catalyse multiple times their value.” It would “fundamentally reform the tax system and incentives to catalyse building.”

In terms of official Ottawa vocabulary, catalysing Canada would be a relief even if all it does is replace “robust” as the reigning champion of overused terminology. Everything in the Trudeau government was robust. They held robust discussions, considered robust plans, got involved in robust examinations, called for robust inquiries and generally went through life being very robust.

Catalysing is different. A catalyst, according to one dictionary, is “a substance that enables a chemical reaction to proceed at a usually faster rate or under different conditions than otherwise possible.” More pertinently, it’s “an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action.” It doesn’t alter the action, it just makes it happen faster. Used in the context of Carney, it suggests the Liberal leader doesn’t consider his predecessor’s approach to such government mainstays as budgeting, investment, housing, immigration or affordability as necessarily bad, just badly done. The Trudeau regime was notably good on announcements, great at overspending but lousy at delivery and management. It was skilled at optics but not impressive at getting things done.

To give a for instance, the Trudeau team actively sought participation by private investment in major building projects. Its goal was “leveraging.” Ottawa would kick in a few billion dollars of seed money for much-needed investments, while “leveraging” it by drawing in several times the amount from private sector investors. Trudeau’s ministers liked the idea so much they tried it twice, with the $35 billion Canada

Infrastructure

Bank and

the

$15 billion Canada Growth Fund.

Neither produced

the

promised flood of investment dollars, perhaps because neither Trudeau nor his cabinet had the qualities or history to impress potential investors. They were politicians not entrepreneurs. The business of doing business was all a vague theory. Carney’s pitch is that he has the experience, the expertise, the contacts and the credibility they lacked.

While he definitely has the resumé, seeking to catalyse and actually succeeding at it are two different things. Carney has headed two central banks and an asset management firm with well-defined interests and skilled work forces attuned to their tasks. Plans, orders and directives could be clearly communicated and reliably implemented. That does not describe the federal civil service, a vast, sprawling entity resistant to risk, initiative or accountability, any of which might disturb the safety and security of a fixed and predictable work day. Trudeau left behind a bureaucratic blob that was 40 per cent bigger but not noticeably better. To offset its continued shortcomings he spent billions annually on consultants, advisers and outside experts, without achieving noticeable improvement.

How Carney will alter the situation will take more than just determination and brains. The way to reduce deficits without spending cuts or tax increases is to increase revenue. Eliminating the barriers to interprovincial trade is a good place to start, but also a graveyard of failed attempts. Former Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty worked assiduously to win approval for a single national securities regulator in place of a haphazard collection of provincial poor cousins, but fell victim to lethargy, obduracy and provincial self-interest (though it was his own party that

delivered

the final blow). Not to mention that supply management, Canada’s most notorious protectionist racket, is universally supported among the parties, Carney’s included.

Jim Balsillie, the former Blackberry chieftain who splits his time between research, think tanks and philanthropy,

likens

Carney to “a more confident and efficient version of Mr. Trudeau,” pushing tired theorems based on outdated thinking. Carney

counters

that he’s “a different person with a different life experience and a vastly different professional experience than the (former) prime minister. Different person, different policies, different approach to governing.”

While he’s certainly a change in personality, experience and business know-how, if he has a suite of ideas that differ substantially from his predecessor’s, he’s yet to reveal them. On Monday in Victoria he unveiled measures to help seniors deal with financial uncertainties, after Conservatives had earlier released similar initiatives. Both parties are pledging support for workers, incentives for business and spending on infrastructure. His biggest effort to date, cancelling the carbon tax, abandoned years of Liberal climate theology in hopes of protecting votes.

Carney acknowledges that Canada spends too much, invests too little, has a productivity problem and is notably lagging in such technology essentials as data centres, AI systems, supercomputers and the like. His remedy is “a more efficient and effective government — one that delivers better results while spending responsibly.” Every government in memory has promised less waste and greater efficiency at some time or other, yet somehow debt and spending continue to balloon.

Given the Liberals’ record on the economy, more of the same under new management sounds a bit like expecting Hudson’s Bay Co. to rise from the ashes following a quick shuffle in the boardroom. Carney may outshine Poilievre in his business experience and corporate achievements, but he also outshines everyone else in the party he’s leading. It’s the same cast that brought us to this juncture; unless Carney plans to personally handle all the top cabinet posts, some of the familiar old crew will have their hands on the same old levers. Canadians are still waiting to learn what would be new about another Liberal government, other than it would include Mark Carney.

National Post

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• Geoff Russ: Carney already eroding Canadians’ trust in government

The greatest victims of extremist interpretations of Islam are Muslims themselves. This uncomfortable truth undermines Canada’s approach to combating anti-Muslim bigotry, as outlined in “The Canadian Guide to Understanding and Combatting Islamophobia.”

The guide defines Islamophobia broadly as, “Racism, stereotypes, prejudice, fear or acts of hostility directed towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general.” This definition creates an intellectual sleight of hand, conflating prejudice against Muslims with criticism of certain doctrines or political movements operating under the banner of faith.

The term “anti-Muslim bigotry” serves us better than “Islamophobia,” as it clearly identifies what we should oppose: discrimination, prejudice and hatred directed at Muslims as people.

Islamophobia, with its “phobia” suffix, implies that any fear or criticism of Islam itself is irrational and racist. This linguistic imprecision has real consequences for civil liberties and public safety. The guide does reference “anti-Muslim hatred,” but wrongly conflates it with Islamophobia.

When we intentionally conflate criticism of ideas with hatred of people, we betray both liberal principles and the Muslims fighting for change within their own communities. These Muslim voices are often the first to be silenced by accusations of enabling Islamophobia and find themselves abandoned by the very western liberals who should be their natural allies — a perverse outcome of supposedly “progressive” thinking.

The guide’s recommendation to “centre diverse Muslim voices” sounds admirably inclusive until one realizes which Muslim voices are systematically excluded: secular and reformist Muslims, as well as those who reject the injection of extremism and antisemitism into Islamic doctrine.

Instead, the most extreme political interpretations are presented as the voices of the community. This betrays Muslims fighting for liberal values and denies the rich diversity of thought within Muslim communities themselves. It also creates the false impression that Islam is monolithic, rather than dynamic and evolving.

The consequences extend beyond intellectual discourse. Across campuses, literary festivals and public forums, speakers who critique certain Islamic doctrinal interpretations or practices are labelled as bigots and effectively silenced.

Extremists have weaponized western guilt and liberal sensibilities, learning that calling someone “Islamophobic” can end careers and shut down debate. Thus emerges the circular logic of Islamophobia: any criticism of political Islam becomes evidence of bigotry, and any attempt to expose this fallacy becomes further proof of prejudice.

The guide’s references to an “Islamophobia industry” further illustrate this problem by inverting reality. When critics highlight extremist literature in certain mosques or foreign funding of radical preachers, they’re addressing documented issues with potential national security implications.

Dismissing such concerns as products of an “industry of hate” shields legitimate security issues from scrutiny. This paralyzes police, security services and policymakers, who grow reluctant to investigate real threats for fear of being branded as bigots. The cost of this self-censorship is paid primarily by vulnerable communities, including Muslims themselves.

The guide’s dismissal of concerns about extremism as “fearmongering” ignores the substantial problem of radicalization in some religious institutions. This hinders an honest assessment of how religious institutions can become vectors for political influence that may undermine democratic values and social cohesion.

The guide’s media representation complaints also merit a challenge. While the media does report on world events driven by religiously motivated violence, the guide is wrong to demand de-emphasizing such events. The answer to biased coverage isn’t enforced silence, but more nuanced reporting, including platforming Muslims who clearly separate Islam from Islamist extremism.

None of this denies the reality of genuine anti-Muslim prejudice. From vandalized mosques to harassment of visibly Muslim women, bigotry against Muslims demands unequivocal opposition. Every citizen deserves equal protection regardless of faith. Fighting prejudice, however, shouldn’t require terminology that conflates people with ideology.

Islam, like all religions, needs the space for open critique and discussion, not blanket protection. This balanced position allows us to combat genuine bigotry while preserving the intellectual freedom that benefits believers and non-believers alike.

When we replace “Islamophobia” with “anti-Muslim bigotry,” we lose nothing in our fight against prejudice. What we gain is the clarity needed for both honest critique and genuine protection — clarity that serves us all in building a pluralistic society.

National Post

Dalia al-Aqidi, Haras Rafiq and Mohammad Rizwan are members of Secure Canada’s International Muslim Counter-Voice Initiative.

• Jamie Sarkonak: Federal bureaucrat-activists strike again with ‘Understanding Islamophobia’ guide
• Raheel Raza: Opposing extremism is not Islamophobic, despite what recent report suggests

“One can only correct inappropriate policies in a timely manner if one sticks to seeking truth from facts.”

That will be an uncontroversial proposition to anyone who draws distinctions between good-faith truth claims and instances of brazenly fabricated hogwash. It should be similarly uncontroversial by now to any reasonable person that U.S. president Donald Trump is either unwilling to draw such distinctions, or he’s congenitally incapable of doing so.

Either way, a bitter antipathy to the fact-discerning habits of traditional news media is a defining feature of the Trump administration, and Trump lieutenant Elon Musk, arguably the second most powerful personality in the Trump White House, has become a fountainhead of disinformation and hysterical propaganda, having transformed his platform “X” into something most closely

resembling

Beijing’s preferred media-manipulation device, WeChat.

It has gone beyond vindictive resentment over various news organizations’ disdain for President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” constituents. The White House went so far as to rescind the Associated Press news service’s customary access privileges for merely refusing to amend its style guide to replace “Gulf of Mexico” with Trump’s executive-order “Gulf of America” name change.

In China, uttering those words — one can only correct inappropriate policies in a timely manner if one sticks to seeking truth from facts — can land you in a lot of trouble these days. The editors of the nominally independent Caixin Media business news platform was punished for raising the admonition about seeking truth from facts in a December 2023 editorial that was mildly critical of the Communist Party’s reckless mismanagement of the Chinese economy. The editorial was made to vanish.

Around the same time, the Zhongtai Securities economist Li Xunlei published a column on the news site Yicai and on his personal WeChat account referring to a Beijing Normal University study showing that seven in 10 Chinese citizens were somehow surviving on about $280 a month. Yicai was made to scrub the column. Its headline on the multi-purpose messaging platform WeChat is accompanied by the message: “The content can’t be viewed due to violation of regulations.”

You’d want to be especially cautious in the effort to comprehend Trump’s just-announced additional tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese merchandise to a rate of 104 per cent — which Beijing has matched with what it’s at least arguably accurate to describe as reciprocal import duties of 84 per cent on imports of American merchandise. Trump has since raised his China tariff to 125 per cent.

China’s global outreach efforts stand to benefit enormously from the Trump administration’s conscious or unconscious decision to alienate the United States’ traditional allies and trading partners by launching what the White House has falsely described as “reciprocal” tariffs, as there’s nothing reciprocal about them (though many of those tariffs were put on a 90-day pause Wednesday).

Beijing is clamping down hard on any public notice of the wreckage Xi Jinping has been making of the Chinese economy. Even so, there’s good reason to believe Xi Jinping is quite serious about his professed determination

to fight Trump’s trade war barrages.

Paradoxically, during last year’s U.S. presidential election campaign, Beijing’s foreign-influence machinery was cranked into high gear, replicating Russia’s massive 2016 bot farm advocacy for a Trump win. Beijing’s online masquerades were out in full force last year to target the Biden-Harris Democrats.

Apart from making new friends from America’s new enemies, China is in a much better position to weather a long-haul trade war than the United States is. American buyers comprise less than 15 per cent of China’s $3.5 trillion export market, and the United States can’t easily reroute its textile and electronics supply chains in a repeat of Trump’s first term as president. India is now up against a 26 per cent American tariff barrier. Vietnam is facing a 46 per cent import duty hurdle, and Taiwan’s penalty is 32 per cent.

Canada is enduring a complex jumble of tariffs, threatened tariffs, and on-again, off-again tariffs in a potentially catastrophic dilemma: squeezed between two global hegemons and subject to extortion and trade blackmail by both of them, with no dearth of “domestic” forces pulling in China’s direction.

A caveat about China’s resilience: nobody really knows what the Chinese economy can sustain. Seeking truth from facts in China can be a very dangerous line of work. After being detained last April for having said unflattering things about the regime’s handling of the economy generally and Xi Jinping’s mismanagement specifically, the respected economist Zhu Hengpeng, by last September,

simply disappeared.

Zhu was the director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Public Policy Research Center, which reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party’s State Council. Three days ago, the centre

was shut down

and any activity carried out under its auspices were deemed illegal. The centre’s social media accounts have gone dark along with its website. “All activities carried out in the name of the former research centre are illegal and legal responsibility lies with the perpetrators,” according to a statement from the Academy’s Institute of Economics.

What got Zhu into trouble were comments he made in a private chat group hosted by WeChat. The platform is closely monitored, censored and manipulated by the Chinese state police. According to Global Affairs Canada, perhaps a million Canadians rely on WeChat for various uses.

Canadians should be familiar with the mischief the Chinese Communist Party makes with WeChat. According to the Hogue Commission on Foreign Interference and the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, Beijing has run clandestine disinformation operations through WeChat targeting Conservative shadow foreign affairs minister Michael Chong two years ago, and more recently targeting former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland during her challenge to Mark Carney in the Liberal leadership race.

In recent days, the SITE Task Force disclosed that it had detected a clandestine operation run by Beijing’s operatives on WeChat that was apparently aimed at bolstering Carney’s credentials as a potential prime minister, referring to Carney as a “rock star” and the “adult in the room” of the federal election campaign.

Asked Tuesday why Beijing would be singing his praises, Carney told reporters: “I have absolutely no idea, and yeah, I have absolutely no idea, and, well, I’ll leave it at that.”

Of course it’s impossible to know what Carney was thinking, but no reasonable person could be led to believe that Carney has no idea why Beijing would want him to come out on top in this month’s federal vote.

The Liberal party’s intimacies with the Chinese Communist Party go back decades. Beijing’s business-class proxies are deeply embedded in the Liberal party establishment, as the recent Paul Chiang scandal once again made plain. The evidence is irrefutable that in the last two federal elections Beijing undertook strenuous clandestine exertions to monkeywrench the vote in several ridings to the advantage of its preferred candidates and to the disadvantage of the Conservative Party.

During his time in the leadership of Brookfield Asset Management, Carney was back and forth from China frequently and was a vocal advocate of Beijing’s plans for a “multi-polar world” and Beijing’s hopes to challenge the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency with China’s own renminbi.

As it’s said, “one can only correct inappropriate policies in a timely manner if one sticks to seeking truth from facts.”

So let’s do that as often and as rigorously as we can.

National Post

Something’s different. Pierre Poilievre has transformed.

Over the years, he’s gone from attack dog backbench MP to senior cabinet minister, to, finally, confrontational opposition leader. While not all found his snark and direct approach to their taste, his unrelenting missives worked. Daily, he stood in Question Period, tearing holes into Liberal policies and non-answers from the prime minister, eventually torpedoing the party’s popularity, forcing them to push out their leader.

Up until recently, he was still in that mode. But there’s been a shift as of late. When asked by a reporter about the size of his rally Monday night in Edmonton, he didn’t fall back into that approach. Instead, he projected the light playful confidence befitting an opposition leader with these successes under his belt, one who realizes he can still fight without emphasizing his bite. This is how one becomes prime minister in Canada

On Tuesday, while holding a news conference at an automotive repair shop in Edmonton, Pierre Poilievre had what some might call an uncharacteristically light

exchange

with Globe and Mail reporter Laura Stone:

Poilievre: “Hi Laura. How’d you like our rally last night?”

Stone: “Well, I wanted to ask about your rallies and whether size matters.”

This evoked a smile and laugh from Poilievre.

This is where the niceties end. The framing of a question about whether he was operating in an echo chamber wasn’t what I’d call charitable. The reporter, herself, even admitted to exaggerating in her questioning:

“I actually want to know about your rallies and what your strategy is, and who you’re talking to, because you bring up things like woke mob, century initiative, bulldozing the CBC, I’m exaggerating, but getting rid of CBC HQ. At what point are you just talking in an echo chamber to people who already feel that way here? Do you feel like these are broadening the tent of support to liberal or undecided voters to get them on board with your campaign?”

But instead of getting his back up, which he has done in the past, Poilievre lifted his head high, maintained a smile and responded with grace. This time, asking questions of his own: “I think it’s pretty broad. I think, how many people do you think we had last night?

Stone responded, “Thousands.”

Poilievre continued, in a kind manner, clearly enjoying the process and pressing her on the numbers, “Well, that’s pretty obvious, I think you can be more precise than that.” Stone mentioned conflicting reports of 10,000 and up to 15,000, but was hesitant to estimate.

He pressed on, adding flattery, “One last question. How, when, was the last time we had a rally that big in Canada? You’re a very well-informed person. I know that if there were a bigger rally than that you would know about it.”

Poilievre has been masterful at being Socratic — answering a question with another question — for some time now. Who can forget the, “How do you like them apples?”

interview

, where he very stoically responded to an interviewer who suggested he was taking a page out of Trump’s playbook. But when Poilievre drilled down, the reporter couldn’t explain what he meant by the implied accusation. And yes, it was an accusation, not a question.

What was new this time was his grace in the face of pointed questions. Visibly and audibly, Poilievre did not allow the reporter get under his skin. He listened charitably, smiled, tilted his head as he asked questions for clarification and comfortably answered: “Listen, I think to have 10 or 15,000 people at one political rally, this is a movement like we’ve never seen, because people want change they want to put our country first for a change.” His change in tone and body language from apples until Edmonton, would have moved him from a B to A+ student in a rhetoric class — the difference between a fairly accomplished member of society and someone capable of leading the country.

What accounts for this change? If I were to guess, I think it took some time for his accomplishments to catch up with his confidence. The numbers at the rally in Edmonton and the glowing backing of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, no doubt, helped put that wind in his sails.

Harper

told

the crowd: “I am the only person who can say that both of the men running to be prime minister once worked for me, and in that regard, my choice, without hesitation, without equivocation, without a shadow of a doubt, is Pierre.”

Harper described Poilievre as “smart, articulate, possessing tremendous passion for our country and strong convictions about sound public policy.” He highlighted his growth from occupying several positions during his time in government, from backbench MP to opposition leader, pointing out that Poilievre didn’t simply parachute into the role. Here, Harper took one of two, not-so-subtle swipes at Liberal Leader Mark Carney. The second was at Carney’s claim he led Canada through the global financial crisis. Harper told the audience in no uncertain terms that it was his government and the late Jim Flaherty who deserves that recognition, not Carney.

Harper stressed to those in attendance that the most important characteristic a prime minister needs is “elected, accountable, political experience.” Poilievre has this in droves. This is inarguable. And now he’s shown us he can also display the grace that communicates he understands it to be true, unlike our parachuted-in, Monopoly man-like caretaker prime minister, who we may discover after election day has only been visiting.

tnewman@postmedia.com

X: @TLNewmanMTL

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