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.
Strategic voting is a huge mess. The NDP doesn’t even get the chance to really fail and when they do get to influence policy they do generally positive things like when their coalition was able to get the Liberals to behave.
Maybe they wouldn’t be able to hack it, but they at least have generally better goals for the country and we desperately need to threaten this cancer of an idea that there are only two parties. Right now the country is either far right or half-ass centerist and things just keep getting worse. We’ve tried the Liberals and we’ve tried the conservatives and they both don’t work that well so we really have nothing to lose and worst case scenario we would prove that we aren’t a two-party system in a cheap disguise.
The last election was dogshit awful for strategic voting because of just how bad PP is and Liberals still only barely made it. And Carney’s still gunna let that loser try again after being kicked out of the riding I’m from.