Mark Carney is proving to be very popular — with conservatives

Toronto Star

2 days ago

It's still early days, but so far I'm pretty impressed with what I see from Canada's new conservative government.
Voters clearly wanted a big change after a decade of Justin Trudeau's Liberal approach, and boy are they getting it.
There was the throne speech, delivered by no less a personage than the King himself. That alone was a great homage to our enduring traditions and storied institutions. No more of those tiresome apologies for the flaws in our collective story. Time to celebrate being Canadian! True conservatives had to love it.
And the speech itself was all 'build, baby, build,' in the words of our new PM, Mark Carney. Let's get those resources out of the ground and on their way to foreign markets. Plus a tax cut! No wonder what remains of the left — the NDP rump in Parliament, the unions and environmentalists — was left seething on the sidelines. Clearly, their day is over.
Then this week, the capper: the government's first big piece of legislation is called the 'Strong Borders Act' and it's all about giving new powers to police and security agencies and tightening up the asylum system that spun out of control while the Trudeau Liberals ruled the roost.
It's a sprawling bill and despite the name it's about a lot more than the border. It would give Canada Post greater authority to open your mail. It would let police and others demand that digital service providers hand over personal data about their users, without having to get a warrant in many cases. All in the name of fighting crime.
The usual suspects — the NDP again, civil libertarians, refugee advocates — are up in arms. But it's all being done in the name of security and managing our relationship with Donald Trump. The government seems to be using the Trump crisis as cover to give law enforcement agencies powers they've been seeking for years.
Given the PM's record so far, it's no surprise that people in parts of the country that lean heavily Conservative are getting behind him. A new poll of Albertans, out this week, shows they're just as impressed with Carney as they are with Pierre Poilievre.
I have just one big question about this: what do the Liberals make of it all? What do they think about the new government's tilt to the right?
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OK, OK, enough along those lines. Yes indeed, our new conservative government is a Liberal government, though a Liberal government of a very different stripe.
Others have noticed this paradox, if that's what it is. Jonathan Pedneault, late of the Green Party, said during the recent election campaign that Carney was 'starting to look like a Progressive Conservative.' And writing in the Winnipeg Free Press, David McLaughlin, once chief of staff to former prime minister Brian Mulroney, says 'Canada elected its first progressive conservative prime minister in over 30 years' in the person of Mark Carney.
McLaughlin goes on: 'From cancelling the consumer carbon tax, to pledging to build pipelines and offering a middle-class tax cut, Carney is actively placing conservative alongside progressive in his party's governing policies … Welcome to the new Canada, where PC doesn't stand for 'politically correct' but 'progressive conservative.' '
I prefer to think of Carney as a conservative progressive, but let's not quibble over labels. The important thing is the Liberals have pulled off a rather astonishing reinvention. If nothing else, it's proof of their fabled ideological flexibility or, if you prefer, their shameless opportunism. Whatever works, they'll do it. Whatever's needed to meet the moment, they'll pull it out of their tool bag.
It's all the more remarkable since many of the same people are involved. The minister who presided over the immigration file in 2021-2023 while the system plunged into crisis, Sean Fraser, is now Carney's justice minister. What does he make of the tough measures to crack down on asylum shopping? Just curious.
Perhaps only the Liberals could do all this, and perhaps they could do it only at a moment of crisis. An actual Conservative Party government in 'normal' times would run into a wall of resistance if it championed 'build, baby, build,' slashed taxes, ripped up the asylum system and trampled on privacy rights in the name of fighting crime.
Instead, we'll see if the 'conservative' government we've ended up with can manage the trick. So far, they're off to a good start.