Many of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decisions so far echo proposals made by the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre, such as eliminating the carbon tax.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Imagine waking up again in early 2025, before the April election. A candidate who you do not recognize steps to the podium and lays out his platform: axe the carbon tax, drop countertariffs on the United States in adherence to free-market doctrine, foster rapprochement with the oil and gas industry, and cancel the capital gains tax hike. Without knowing which party he stands for, you might be forgiven for thinking he is running for the Conservative Party. Alas, this is exactly the approach Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney has taken.
That the Prime Minister has now also paused the federal EV mandate only strengthens the case; Mark Carney could just as easily have run as a Conservative. The mandate, which once required Canadian automakers to guarantee that 20 per cent of their sales were electric by 2027, was a hallmark Trudeau-era policy meant to reduce carbon emissions. However, with the automotive sector under tariff pressure from the United States, the Carney government has decided that economic relief is more important at present. It is one more amongst a slew of decisions that make Mr. Carney an ideological blur.
LNG Canada expansion among first five major projects to be identified for fast-tracking, sources say
Shannon Proudfoot: Carney was elected on a wave of tariff panic. Now he has other problems
In fact, many of Mr. Carney’s actions in the first year of his premiership echo the spirit of proposals from the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives also promised to eliminate taxes on carbon and a deal where Canada would remove tariffs on the U.S. They also stressed the need for cutting red tape on energy projects and infrastructure, as well as advocating for tax cuts for the middle class. And on issues where Mr. Carney came from the left, for example on deficits, the Conservatives were forced to converge to his stance.
Of course, there are still reasons that Mr. Carney fits better within the large-tent Liberal Party, which has historically been home to a diverse leadership ranging from fiscal hawks to advocates of nationalized oil.
He is a technocrat first and foremost, which the party leadership loves, and means circumstances determine policy direction more than ideology. His intention to recognize Palestine is an example where party values coincided with shifting global opinion and geopolitical realism. The Liberal label also gave him more flexibility on deficit spending, which he has made extensive use of – although this election also saw large deficits proposed by the Conservative Party. And while cutting the carbon tax was strategic, it is hard to imagine that Mr. Carney, an economist and former climate envoy to the United Nations, does not himself believe in their efficacy.
Does this mean the Conservative Party was “right” in April? To some extent. Trudeau-ism, which was content to “let the bankers worry about the economy” and argued there was little “business case” for exporting liquefied natural gas, was rankling even moderate Liberals by the end, including his own cabinet. And as tariffs and wars now dominate the agendas of Western capitals, more classically right-wing notions like emphasis on the economy and military build-up are naturally in vogue. In that sense, Mr. Carney is simply responding to the times, and the Conservative Party deserves some credit for its foresight.
Yet the manner and enthusiasm with which one embarks on this is also important.
Whether one endorses tariff concessions to the United States because the costs of retaliation are perceived to be fundamentally too high, or simply as a conditional token of goodwill to reset talks, matters for how our negotiations with the U.S. ultimately play out. Whether one pauses EV sales requirements because of short-run economic realities, or a general failure to accurately weigh the risks of climate change, matters for how we should expect the government to deal more broadly with a rapidly warming planet.
While I do worry about the long-run preservation of our green initiatives, it is perhaps a feature, not a bug, of the Canadian political system that a Conservative candidate can propose large deficits while Liberals can compromise on net-zero objectives. That parties are often not too far apart in actuality and that dogma can give way to rational policy (or at least what is perceived internally to be) when circumstances change is something to be celebrated. In fact it is probably this feature, that Canadians are in greater agreement than we think, that has protected Canada for decades from the worst excesses of U.S. polarization on social issues.
Thus, while reasonable people can disagree on whether Mark Carney should govern as conservatively as he has, it at least says something of the quality of our politics that he does.