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.
Slogans and cancelling Prime for a few years isn’t going to stop the US from rolling over us, militarily or economically if they really want. It’s great everyone is willing to fight a 30 year insurgency but who wants that. I’ll be dead before seeing any kind of Canada again. Yes I selfishly want the chance at retirement I was promised my whole life. I don’t want a war if it can be avoided.
Anytime I bring up that this time is the last time Canada can build nukes with at least some plausible deniability that they aren’t aimed at the US, I’m told they’ll never allow it and it’s immoral and it’s not the Canadian way. It’s the only chance to hold off an American threat for long enough to get through this but apparently hardly any Canadians want them. So negotiation is the only way. And we’re not strong enough or unified enough to force our hand. Time is needed to forge new alliances and firm trade partners.
Carney was always a compromise to stave off a horrible outcome. No one is going to be happy. The right didn’t win, the left can’t get what they want and the middle has to scrape and fight to just maintain some of what we have. Nowhere near enough people want what the NDP is selling. Too many in the centre were dismissed, or called racist, or misogynistic, or homophobic, or fascist or whatever for veering from the party line. So too many gave up or just turned right just to feel like they’d get something.
The way this country over reacts to any kind news, real, exaggerated, contrived or just out and planted by agitators is so fucking disheartening.
True. Alliances are key for Canadian sovereignty and security. The nation should be cementing existing relationships with maximum effort. As patriotic as myself and other Canadians feel these days, it must be acknowledged - no imaginable scenario exists in which Canada alone has enough military might to act as a deterrent against US aggression.
Imagine that a fully functional nuclear arsenal wasn’t a generation away, and Canada had one right now. Even then, if the US made the insane decision that Canada was lebensraum, our nation’s military might alone could not prevent that.
I’m not even against a Canadian nuclear weapons program per se. But it makes no sense for Canada to pursue a nuclear weapons program right now, if the objective is to hold off a US threat. It’s comforting to imagine that there’s some panacea to the threats that Canada is facing right now, but I don’t see how nuclear fits that bill in any way.
It’s unfortunate that we even have to think these things. But anyway, that’s my 2c.