The Prime Minister hits the ground running, unconcerned by deficits, principle or the rights of Parliament

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Tuesday marks a couple of anniversaries of sorts for Mark Carney. It will have been 100 days since he was elected leader of the Liberal Party and, as such, became Prime Minister of Canada. And it will have been 50 days since the general election confirmed him in that position.

What have we learned in that time about his philosophy of government, and – a related but distinct point – his approach to governing?

We know that he is in a hurry, or certainly wants people to think he is. Parliament was recalled less than a month after the election, which would not be considered particularly hasty in other parliamentary democracies – the British House typically returns inside of a week, two at the most – but is lightning-fast by Canadian standards.

Mind you, it had been more than five months since it last sat. And having sat for four weeks, it is scheduled to rise on June 20, not to return until September 15. All told, the Commons is scheduled to sit just 73 days this year, the fewest since 1937. (Britain’s will sit for 196.)

So for all the rhetorical flourishes about doing “things we haven’t imagined at speeds we didn’t think possible,” he’s maybe not in that much of a rush. Some of us think it would have been quite possible to bring in a budget this spring, but that’s been put off until the fall.

Still, if he’s not in much of a rush to reveal his fiscal plan to Parliament, he is in a rush to make significant decisions without it, and to push through major legislative changes, some of which he had not previously disclosed – as they might have been, for example, in the recent election campaign.

So we have the sudden decision to increase defence spending by $9-billion in the current fiscal year, instantly bringing Canadian military spending up to the two per cent of GDP target we promised our NATO allies we would reach years ago. That’s praiseworthy, but it’s a little different than the 2030 target Mr. Carney ran on.

And without further details, or a sense of how it would be paid for – Mr. Carney has ruled out raising taxes, so either there will have to be cross-government cuts in spending that were not previously advertised, or the deficit will have to go higher – it’s hard to judge how well considered this is.

Looming in the offing, moreover, is the NATO summit later this month, at which member states will be asked to raise “core” defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 (another 1.5 per cent would be devoted to defence-related infrastructure). That would mean roughly tripling defence spending in real terms.

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How that squares with Mr. Carney’s pledge to bring “operating” spending in line with revenues within three years – limiting borrowing to that required to cover capital spending – we can only guess at, but it suggests a whole bunch of operating spending is about to get reclassified as capital spending.

And even if it is all legitimately capital spending, it still has to be paid for, which is to say borrowed. The economist Trevor Tombe estimates a purely debt-financed defence buildup would bring the federal debt-to-GDP ratio to north of 50 per cent.

One thing we know about Mr. Carney, then, is that he is not overly vexed about deficits. Neither does he seem particularly attached to principle. The carbon tax was a central, even defining part of his economic and political philosophy – until it got in the way of his election chances, at which point it was jettisoned, mercilessly, complete with phony presidential-style signing ceremony.

Standing up to Donald Trump, while steering a new, more independent course for Canada, including trade agreements with more “reliable” partners, was all that he wanted to talk about during the election. Since then it’s been all about striking a new economic and security agreement with (checks notes) the United States, tightening up the border, perhaps even participating in Mr. Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” system of ballistic missile defence.

But if Mr. Carney is concerned to protect Canada from Mr. Trump, he is even more concerned to protect his Liberal government from the Conservatives. Of the seven priorities in the mandate letter he sent to his 28 cabinet ministers (it was 22, before the election), fully six (“expediting nation-building projects… bringing down costs for Canadians… making housing more affordable … strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces… returning our overall immigration rates to sustainable levels … spending less on government operations”) were directly aimed at Conservative voters. Progressive voters who flocked to his side to save them from Pierre Poilievre may be somewhat dismayed to see him implementing Mr. Poilievre’s agenda.

Certainly that seems to be the gist of his early legislative agenda, with an admixture of cynicism and contempt for Parliament. The three major government bills introduced so far – C-2, the Strong Borders Act; C-4, the Making Life More Affordable for Canadians Act; and C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act – are noteworthy, not only for their conservative tilt, but for combining in one bill manifestly different pieces of legislation, with different objectives and different impacts: the dreaded “omnibus bills” that Liberals used to oppose.

C-2 yokes together a number of provisions for tightening refugee policy, which might at least be considered part of the promise to “get control of immigration” on which Mr. Carney ran, with a set of quite appalling measures expanding the government’s powers of surveillance that were never mentioned on the campaign trail.

C-4 is advertised as enacting the Liberal election promise to cut the base rate of income tax from 15 per cent to 14 per cent. Yet tucked within it one finds – surprise! – a little mini-bill exempting federal political parties from provincial privacy legislation, much as they are already exempt from federal legislation: a transparent attempt to head off a pending appeals court judgment in British Columbia, after a lower court found the province’s legislation applied to federal parties. What on Earth does this have to do with cutting taxes?

Likewise, C-5 combines measures to implement Mr. Carney’s campaign promise to remove federal barriers to interprovincial trade – the provinces’ own barriers will take a great deal more work to uproot – with a quite separate, and potentially more controversial, set of provisions to fast-track government approval of development projects that meet a certain list of criteria.

As with the other bills, members of Parliament will be forced to vote on the whole package, up or down, as if it were one bill with a single purpose, rather than an ungainly mishmash of different pieces of legislation, some of which they might support but much of which they might oppose. In each case it amounts to an abuse of power, which no amount of urgent-sounding rhetoric (“the largest transformation of the Canadian economy since the Second World War”) can paper over.

The substance of the bills is in many places as objectionable as the process. Several observers have taken issue with the surveillance-state provisions in C-2 – empowering the government, for example, to demand that internet service providers hand over information on their subscribers, or Canada Post to open your mail.

But the refugee provisions are no less draconian. It may appeal to people’s impatience to deny asylum applicants a hearing if they file their claim more than a year after they arrive (in the general case) or two weeks (in the case of those crossing the border from the United States), but it does not alter the fundamental right that is at stake: the right to due process, to have your claim heard by an impartial arbiter before you are sent back to a country where you may face persecution or worse.

If you are suspected of robbing a bank, but evade capture for more than two weeks, it does not give the government the right, once it gets its hands on you, to imprison you without trial. You still get your day in court. Neither would it be sufficient for the government to make its own assessment of how much danger you would be in if it did, as the bill proposes it should do with refugee claimants: It would have no right to send you there without a hearing, period.

C-4’s main provisions, likewise, may be odious together, but they are just as odious separately. The tax cut is a massively expensive proposal that will do nothing to improve productivity while conferring a windfall gain on upper-income taxpayers. The privacy exemption is a wholly unjustified special privilege of a kind the parties are wont to confer upon themselves: See “do-not-call list.”

As for the “Building Canada” provisions of C-5, there are two main lines of objection. One is the danger that important environmental, Indigenous or other concerns may be overlooked in the haste to approve projects with important political backers. The other, perhaps opposite concern: Why should some projects be exempt from the sort of scrutiny to which others are obliged to submit? Is this not “picking winners” by another name? If there is consensus that Canada’s approval process is too burdensome and too slow, doesn’t that argue for reforming the process generally – for everyone, not just for the favoured few who tick the right political boxes?

But that would take time. Fine. What’s the rush? Why not divide each of these contentious bills into its component parts, and let Parliament consider them separately, giving each the sort of scrutiny that we theoretically elect MPs to provide? Or if the matters are that urgent, then why not let Parliament sit through the summer, rather than shutting down until September?

I realize that would cut into Mr. Carney’s performance of “Julius Caesar in One Act,” but I’m willing to take that chance.