Prime Minister Mark Carney has baffled Conservatives. This can be seen in the party’s failure to update a strategy that was targeted towards Justin Trudeau’s obnoxiously progressive tenure in office. Whether they like it or not, Carney is not Trudeau. All this approach has accomplished has been to permit the current prime minister to remain high in the polls by simply being a different person than Trudeau, who had become so broadly unpopular that anyone displaying a modicum of competence would have succeeded with voters.
The bigger risk for Conservatives is to fall for the argument that Carney represents a larger departure from his predecessor than he actually does. He certainly talks like a moderate, but that doesn’t make him one. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist, and the greatest trick Mark Carney ever pulled was convincing Canadians that he’s right-wing.
Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, last seen losing to Trudeau in 2021, has fallen for this argument, telling Global News this week: “If you look at what the Liberals have done with Mark Carney, they have a leader who is more to the centre, centre-right.” O’Toole added that his party should “ignore the culture war issues” and “focus on the long-term prosperity of Canadians.”
These are things that a certain class of Conservative thinks sounds pragmatic and reasonable, yet would result in entrenching the permanent Liberal government that is being constructed before our eyes, because there would no opposition to it.
For starters, the claim that Carney is centre-right is simply not true. Yes, he removed the consumer carbon tax, but the industrial carbon tax remains, along with the “clean fuel regulations” and the Impact Assessment Act. The memorandum of understanding signed with Alberta commits Ottawa to approving a pipeline — eventually. However, that project will be placed under so many environmental conditions that there is only a very narrow path that leads to a pipeline ever actually being built. Carney removed the electric vehicle mandate, but replaced it with a tailpipe emissions standard that accomplishes much the same thing.
The Liberals’ Major Projects Office is tasked with selecting infrastructure to build based on what the government considers to be in the national interest, all of which will be subject to the same investment-killing regulations brought in under Trudeau. This isn’t fast-tracking, it’s another layer of central planning on top of everything else.
And the economy is not the only area that the current government has remained more or less aligned with the Trudeau years. On free speech, the Liberals passed legislation this year making it easier to charge people with “hate speech,” and Carney has created a consulting committee to advise on how to reintroduce the online harms act to further regulate online speech.
