What can we expect from Prime Minister Mark Carney?

We're back to '90s business liberalism.

Former central banker Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister on March 14. (Facebook/Marc Carney)

Mark Carney was sworn in today as Canada’s 24th prime minister and he comes as somewhat of a blank slate.

The former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and chair of Brookfield Asset Management, is the first Canadian prime minister to have never held elected office, leaving him without a voting record in parliament that might give some hints as to where he stands on key issues.

But based on his leadership platform, public pronouncements and what he’s left unsaid, we can reasonably infer that Carney is a ‘90s-style business Liberal in the mould of Jean Chretien or Paul Martin.

There’s a reason Conservative former prime minister Stephen Harper sought to recruit Carney as his finance minister in 2012, or so Carney says, and it’s certainly not because Carney is a progressive in any form.

He’s a “technocrat on steroids,” McGill University political scientist Daniel Beland told Al Jazeera’s Canadian correspondent, Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, “a consummate insider and a consummate elite,” in the words of

David Moscrop

.

We know from Carney’s victory speech, delivered after winning a resounding 86% of the leadership vote, that he plans to “immediately” eliminate the “divisive” consumer carbon tax and reversing a planned modest increase to the capital gains tax.

During the campaign, he pledged to increase military spending to 2% of GDP by 2030—two years earlier than former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s goal but three years later than Defence Minister Bill Blair’s.

Carney has kept Blair as defence minister, as well as Mélanie Joly at Global Affairs Canada and Patty Hajdu at Indigenous Services Canada.

Chrystia Freeland, who placed second in the Liberal leadership race with a pitiful 8% of the vote, was appointed transportation and internal trade minister. The new finance minister, a position Freeland occupied before her dramatic resignation in December, is François-Philippe Champagne.

Carney downsized Cabinet by a third—from 37 ministers under Trudeau to 24—so that it could be “focused on things that matter most to Canadians.”

Within this context, the rebranding of former labour minister Steve McKinnon as minister of jobs and families is instructive.

“The former emphasizes the worker, and the latter emphasizes what capitalists take from the worker,” wrote long-time Liberal

Jake Landau

in his newsletter.

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As he was preparing to enter the race in December, Carney penned a Globe and Mail op-ed outlining his “New Year’s resolutions” for Canada.

Consisting mostly of platitudes (“Embrace change”), there was one resolution that does provide a hint as to approach towards governance:

Enforce real rules on government spending. Canadians must be confident that their tax dollars are being spent wisely. Governments can’t give into reflex spending that treats the symptoms of our problems, rather than curing the disease. But we also cannot slash our way to prosperity. We need a government that keeps its word to spend less, so we can invest more [emphasis added].

“Spend Less. Invest More” is one five sections of Carney’s platform. “In recent years, the federal government has been spending too much,” read the first words of that section.

Focusing on excessive spending and not insufficient revenue is a choice. which is furthered when Carney pledges to focus on “reining in wasteful and ineffective government spending” and delivering income tax cuts, “so that Canadians can keep more of their hard-earned money and better cope with the higher cost of living.”

Carney said his intention is to run a deficit to “invest and grow” Canada’s economy, but only for capital projects, which he said would “catalyze many multiples of private dollars.”

Operational spending, meaning the services government actually provides, will be balanced, meaning cut, over the next three years—a pledge which he appears to have walked back a bit.

Another platform plank, dubbed “Creating One Canadian Economy,” focuses on eliminating provincial trade barriers, which has been all the rage in elite circles since President Donald Trump decided to effectively shred the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement.

In February, then-internal trade minister Anita Anand, whom Carney made minister of innovation, science and industry, announced the removal of half of existing internal trade barriers, but good luck finding out what exactly those are.

“Policy barriers to selling Canadian goods and services across the country are so few that you can list them on a paper napkin,” writes Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives senior researcher Stuart Trew in The Breach.

“What these corporate-backed groups really mean when they talk about removing internal trade barriers is dismantling regulations that protect workers, consumers, the environment, and nascent industries.”

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Carney’s rigid deference to market logic is further reflected in the platform plank that deals with housing, which pledges to build four million homes “over the next several years.”

He doesn’t say how many need to be affordable, let alone provide a metric for affordability, making it difficult to see how his plan is any different from the status quo.

“Canada faces an urgent housing crisis. We simply do not have enough homes. This is our time to build,” the platform reads, adopting the view shared by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Trudeau that a lack of affordable housing is nothing more than a basic issue of supply and demand.

Pledging to “supercharge” the building of homes, Carney vowed to block municipal or provincial “tax or regulatory measures that impede building the homes that Canadians need.”

He said his government will use federal infrastructure funding to lower development fees, which “unfairly increase housing costs and create barriers to building new homes.”

On affordable housing specifically, Carney pledges to increase access to Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation grants and low-interest loans to affordable housing providers, but doesn’t provide any numbers.

He does raise the prospect of expanding the $4.5-billion Rapid Housing Initiative, which provided funding to convert under-used buildings into low-income housing.

According to economist Marc Lee, this was one of the more successful Trudeau-era affordable housing programs.

Trudeau's Decade of Promise and Contradiction

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Carney has been conspicuously silent on Indigenous issues, journalist Karyn Pugliese notes in a story for APTN News.

The only mention of First Nations, Métis or Inuit people in his leadership platform comes in his aforementioned housing section, in which he vaguely vows to partner with Indigenous communities “to address housing availability, safety, and affordability by advancing solutions that respond to local priorities across urban, rural, and northern communities, and support the extraordinary leadership and innovation already underway.”

In her APTN piece, Pugliese notes that Carney refused a request for a one-on-one interview with the Indigenous broadcaster and was the only leadership candidate not to provide a written response to a six-question survey on Indigenous issues sent to each contender.

When an APTN reporter asked Carney specifically about Mi’kmaq fishing rights in the Maritimes, he responded that he’s spoken to Mi’kmaq MP Jaimie Battiste (Sydney—Victoria), who dropped out of the leadership race to endorse Carney’s campaign, about the need for child welfare reform.

This lack of attention to Indigenous issues led Javin Ames-Sinclair of the Zagime Anishinabek First Nation in Treaty 4 to cast his leadership ballot for Karina Gould, who placed third with little more than 3% support.

Ames-Sinclair told APTN:

All I’m hearing is economic development. Economic reconciliation is incredibly important, but there’s way more to it than that. And I want someone in my country who carves that space, knows the files, knows the things that are important to our people, and I just don’t see that drive and that vision from anybody else on the slate.

I actually cried thinking about the future because I think that Trudeau really was an ally and he had a lot of drive. And I think the way that Mark and Crystia are speaking about Indigenous reconciliation, in general, it is just not what I would expect.

Indigenous people are, of course, not monolithic in their views. Some see Carney’s hyper-focus on economic issues as an asset.

“ He’s an economic, I wouldn’t go as far as say genius, but that’s the word that comes to mind at the time, at this moment. He knows more economics than anybody else,” Métis Association of British Columbia VP Earl Belcourt told Pugliese.

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Climate is supposed to be Carney’s passion. Beginning in 2020, he served as the UN special envoy on climate action and finance, and has been a staunch proponent of environmental sustainability goals in finance.

Yet like former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, Carney’s first act as prime minister was to eliminate the consumer carbon tax. (This is not the only similarity between Kenney and Carney.)

There are plenty of critiques of carbon taxation as a market-based solution to a market-created problem, but that’s not what Carney, a long-time supporter of the policy, is saying.

The section of Carney’s platform dubbed “A New Climate” plan, which is the shortest by far, notes that the carbon tax has been “too divisive.”

Carney’s platform pledges a “new approach that leaves Canadians better off, while reducing our emissions,” which will “place more of the burden on big polluters.”

An accompanying news release provided more details, including tightening Canada’s Output-Based Pricing System for industrial emitters to “provide policy certainty for companies and investors to drive investment to the lowest carbon opportunities.”

Perhaps the most promising aspect of Carney’s climate plan is the adoption of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism—a fancy way of saying a tariff on emissions-intensive products from countries with weak climate policy frameworks.

Carney’s shuffling of former environmental activist Steven Guilbeault out of the environment portfolio indicates a broader break with the policies pursued by Trudeau, which drove the oil and gas industry bonkers, despite being remarkably conciliatory.

In his capacity as UN special envoy, Carney endorsed a November 2023 report by the Energy Transitions Commission, which argued that 65% of oil and gas reserves “must be left in the ground,” but now he sings a different tune.

"We as a nation need to build some new pipelines for conventional energy," Carney told the CBC in February, pledging to accelerate the approval of new pipelines, which would likely mean the repeal of Trudeau’s Impact Assessment Act.

Notably absent from Carney’s public pronouncements is a position on the draft oil and gas emissions cap, which would be the world’s first if successfully implemented.

On March 12, the Parliamentary Budget Office concluded it would permit industry to increase production, but not as much as it would without the cap in place, representing “close to historical highs.”

The general thrust of Carney’s climate vision is a more collaborative, rather than punitive, approach, which does not bode well for the emissions cap’s future.

As the UN climate envoy, Carney helped establish the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which seeks to work with banks to pursue investment policies consistent with the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Since the beginning of this year, Canada’s six biggest banks have left the alliance, following the exodus of the biggest American banks. Remaining members are now musing about whether to ditch their commitment to limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius altogether.

The fate of the alliance reveals the severe limitations of Carney’s preferred approach to climate.

Many Canadian progressives are understandably breathing a sigh of relief now that the Liberals have elected a leader who might actually be able to defeat Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and his noxious brand of politics in this year’s election (although I remain doubtful).

But with Carney’s exceptionally elite-driven, business-friendly brand of liberalism, I suspect some might come to yearn for the days when Trudeau pledged to “grow the economy from the heart outwards.”