Just how conservative is Mark Carney’s government?

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Like many people, you may be under the impression that the Conservatives lost the 2025 election. Lately, however, that interpretation has come under challenge. According to this new interpretation, the Conservatives actually won. The country has a Conservative Prime Minister, and his name is Mark Carney.

According to political scientist Stewart Prest, Mr. Carney heads “the most conservative Liberal government in more than a generation.” Author Patrick Luciani, writing on the Conservative-leaning website The Hub, goes further: he’s “the conservative prime minister we’ve been waiting for” – indeed, he’s “delivered more than any Conservative leader in a generation.” You hear this kind of thing more and more nowadays.

Is it true? Is Mr. Carney a conservative? The question is complicated by the current intellectual anarchy on the right: If self-described conservatives can’t agree on what conservatism means, even in the most basic terms, it’s hard to know who else qualifies for the label.

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Even adopting a fairly conventional definition – smaller government, lower taxes, freer markets, stronger on defence, tougher on crime, tighter on immigration, and more generally attached to traditional social values – you run into a more basic objection: compared to what? Freer, stronger, tougher than whom?

Merely to describe a government or political leader as “conservative” doesn’t tell us very much. Not only is the definition of the word in doubt, but it’s not clear how it should be measured. Is it by what a government professes to believe? Or what it actually believes? By what it intends, or what it does? The Harper government is often thought of as conservative, mostly by reputation and the general vibe it gave off. Its actual record was rather less so.

Certainly it is unhelpful to think of it in binary terms: as if a government were either conservative or not, full stop. In the real world, we are inevitably in the realm of degrees. Which implies the use of relative, rather than absolute, yardsticks. Again: conservative, compared to what?

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One popular yardstick is simply to measure things relative to the status quo, or to whatever was the case immediately prior to the period in question. By this measure, the Carney government looks very conservative indeed: abolishing the consumer carbon tax, cutting personal and corporate taxes, reducing the size of the civil service, loosening regulations on resource development, roughly tripling spending on defence, partially privatizing airports, slashing immigration, the list is long.

But much of this could best be described as a reversion to the mean, from what was arguably the extreme liberalism of the Justin Trudeau government. By abolishing the carbon tax, for example, the Carney government was only returning Canada to the status quo circa 2015; ditto the repeal of the more onerous development regulations.

The cuts to the civil service to date have barely made a dent in the massive expansion of the Trudeau years, while the immigration changes have been more aimed at tightening a couple of out-of-control boutique programs than reducing the intake of permanent residents.

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More conservative than Mr. Trudeau, in short, is not a particularly exacting standard. In the same way, the cuts in spending imposed by the later Harper government look a lot less conservative when you consider they were measured against the all-time peaks to which the same government had driven spending earlier, allegedly in response to the financial crisis. In fact, the Harper government was responsible for nine of the 10 highest-spending years in our history prior to the Trudeau government, in real per capita terms (that is adjusting for both inflation and population growth).

Another common way of reckoning where a government or party lands on the conservative-to-liberal spectrum is with reference to where the centre is, or is thought to be. Often the “centre” is simply another word for the status quo, but where it is not is usually measured relative to where the public is. By this measure, again, it’s not clear the Carney government is all that conservative.

Current polls have the Liberals at between 45 and 50 per cent public support, with about 30 to 35 per cent of the vote to its right (mostly the Conservatives, plus a percentage point or two for the People’s Party) and about 20 per cent of the vote to its left (the NDP, the Greens and, less reliably, the Bloc Québécois). That puts the median voter somewhere among the Liberal centre-right.

What it mostly shows, however, is how pliable a concept the “centre” is. Not long ago, a party that favoured the kinds of policies the Carney government has been pursuing would have been considered well to the right. We know, because that party was the Conservative Party. For most of the period from 2012 to 2023 the Conservatives were at or below 33 per cent in the polls, about where they are now. That put them to the right of public opinion – too far right, according to some.

But then public opinion moved. Without any change in policies, the Conservatives soared to the low to mid-40s, as centrist voters deserted the Trudeau Liberals – only to see those voters return to the Liberals once Mr. Trudeau was replaced by Mr. Carney. What does that tell us? That politics is a battle for the centre-ground, certainly. But also that the centre-ground can shift. It’s not just about moving to the middle. It’s about moving the middle to you.

Public opinion shifts, becoming more or less receptive to conservative ideas, partly in response to circumstances. When, for example, the government is swimming in revenues, the public is likely to be far less responsive to appeals to cut public spending than it might be when deficits and debt are raging out of control.

How conservative or otherwise a government should be rated might likewise be expressed relative to the situation facing it, adjusting for exigency. A government that proposes to cut spending, privatize and deregulate, not because it has run out of money and options but because it genuinely believes in it – which acts, not out of necessity, but by choice – should be considered more conservative than one that is reluctantly compelled to enact the same measures.

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The Chrétien government, for example, imposed the most drastic spending cuts since the Second World War (not counting the snapback of emergency spending after the pandemic): a 16-per-cent reduction, in real dollars per capita, over three years.

Well of course it did. The government was spending 36 cents of every tax dollar just on interest on the debt. It was running out of buyers for its debt.

It’s not that the Chrétien Liberals had sincerely been converted to the cause of smaller government or even smaller deficits – they had just been elected on a pledge to do as little as possible about them. It was just the only choice available to them. And to their credit they took it.

You could make the same argument about the Carney government. Would they have abolished the consumer carbon tax or walked away from the oil and gas emissions cap had the Conservatives not succeeded in making them radioactive? Would they have tightened bail conditions or limited asylum eligibility if these were not popular Conservative talking points? Would they be fast-tracking multibillion-dollar resource projects, slashing corporate taxes and spending massively on defence if Donald Trump had never rampaged onto the scene? Maybe, but I doubt it.

But they have, and the public has rallied behind them – because of that very improbability. The public tends not to trust governments that truly believe in what they’re doing. Their preference is for government by the reluctant. They may agree that spending needs to be reduced, but they don’t want it done by someone who actually enjoys it. They want it done by people who weep bitter tears over every cut – who won’t go too far.

This is the “only Nixon could go to China” rule. When the public wants something conservative done, they generally hire liberals to do it. When a liberal initiative is called for, only conservatives will do. Again, this should probably be factored into any assessment of how conservative or liberal a government is. Anybody can run against type, earning public acclaim by doing the opposite of what they were expected to do. It takes real conviction to live up to the stereotype.

Politics is a pretty easy game, if you don’t mind governing as your opponents. The great advantage the Chrétien Liberals had in government was that they didn’t have to face the Liberals in opposition. The Mulroney Conservatives had laboured mightily to rein in the deficit, in the face of a non-stop, 24-hours-a-day Liberal hysteria campaign, in which the most trivial reduction in spending was depicted as being motivated by unspeakable cruelty.

The Official Opposition in the mid-1990s, by contrast, was the Reform Party, whose only complaint was that the Liberals did not cut further and faster. Were the Chrétien Liberals more conservative than the Mulroney Conservatives, because they did in three years what their predecessors failed to do in nine: balance the budget? Or did they just face less resistance?

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The Carney Liberals are enjoying something of the same advantage. The best response the Poilievre Conservatives have been able to offer to the Carney government’s increasingly conservative agenda is “they stole our policies,” which is hardly an advertisement for a change of government, or “they don’t really mean it,” which, again, is exactly what the public wants.

I don’t envy them their position. All I can advise is, take the win: The government is moving your way because public opinion is. Pocket the gains, and try to move the yardsticks further. Go to places where even the Carney Liberals can’t go. That doesn’t mean extreme or needlessly radical positions – you still have to take the public with you. It means policies that, while defensible as policy, also happen to be inimical to Liberal interests: because they would divide the Liberal coalition, or erode Liberal power bases, or both. At some point, even the mightiest empire falls.

And if not? Then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you induced the Liberals to govern in a more conservative vein – more conservative than they were, more conservative than they might otherwise have been, more conservative, by some measures, than any government since Mulroney or possibly St. Laurent. That’s accomplishment enough.