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.
I have been spending the last few decades bottling up my anger into a very, very large tank. Let me know when you need me, I'm hoping I'll be able to supply enough for everyone.
I always knew Carney could potentially turn this way. I was expecting it. I still would have voted for him (if PM was a position we voted for and I was not voting strategically, which my riding lost anyway) but my vote for him was mostly a vote for a pro-Europe alignment, which I still think he'll deliver, albeit probably not in the size or shape I was hoping for. But with really only two choices, it's really hard to pretend we're still able to call this actual democracy. We need electoral reform, and badly, and I'm not sure if we'll really get another chance. We're on a bad path and I don't see any escape routes.
“I don’t see any escape routes” “really only two choices”
The NDP are right there. You can prattle on as long as you want but if you want to see change then you have to ask for it. He NDP has popular ideas and they were behind so much of the good stuff the Liberals put their name on but people act like voting for them just isn’t possible for some reason and then moan when people they did vote for don’t care after about them after the election.
The only thing that truly matters is your vote and if you don’t use it properly, while complaining that you’re getting what you ordered, there’s just no helping you.
Yes, that's exactly who I voted for. This is what attitudes like yours have wrought. They lost my riding to the Conservatives. Because they're a fucking disaster of a party right now. Don't blame me. I didn't fuck them up. Their lack of credibility comes largely from their own members, organization, and choices. Not from voters nor any other external factors, and if you're blaming external factors you're wasting your time. Yeah there are some, but this was mostly self-inflicted and utterly predictable (in fact it was predicted). I'm a Peter Kormos/Charlie Angus style NDP supporter, and there's a reason the people with actual grassroots support always get sidelined and marginalized. The NDP is a sucky choice too. The people who would represent me very well are out there. Unfortunately, I'm not given an opportunity to vote for them.
First Past The Post is part of the problem. The NDP is another part of the problem.
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.