Carney Hasn’t Betrayed His Voters

Promises Don’t Disappear If We Dislike The Promise

I understand, probably more than most, the hysterics that can grip politicos and political tragics. I did refer to Nate Erskine-Smith’s firing from Cabinet as a betrayal of the left, because I am loyal to my guy and I thought his firing was a mistake. But with the benefit of any amount of hindsight I understand it wasn’t a betrayal, it was a mistake. I still maintain it was one, but I get it, and the hysteria I indulged in was unnecessary, as much as it was understandable.

But given that I’ve been plenty critical of Carney when he deserves it, I must confess I don’t get this round of “Carney is betraying the left” discourse coming about Bill C-5. I don’t like the bill, as I wrote earlier this week, but this is, by any reasonable standard, a structure to deliver what Carney promised. He said in the leadership race that Federal emergency powers would be on the table to get projects built. The Liberal platform committed the government to use “every tool at its disposal” to get projects built. This is a government that is doing what it said.

We can not like the mechanism they’re using to achieve that outcome, but the idea that Carney has done anything other than what he clearly promised is laughable. We’re having two different newscycles these days, one about the merits of C-5 and C-2, the border bill, which lefties oppose in part or in full, and then a newscycle about how the NDP are a dead party. A lot of people still in the NDP or with traditionally NDP sympathies - or in Althia Raj’s case I have no fucking idea why she’s doing this - attempting to gaslight leftwing Canadians into believing Carney is betraying them. He’s not.

I know this feels like I’m ragging on the Star a lot these days - I’m a subscriber and a fan of the paper, and I think it is an important bastion of progressivism here. I am grateful for its existence and think it does very good reporting, and heavily suspect it will be one of the few places that actually continues to do important work reporting on the NDP, as budgetary strain and irrelevance cuts down the amount the Globe and the Post cover them. But at some point the Star’s self-appointed role speaking for the Canadian left and what voters actually voted for needs to end.

Now, if the Star would like to claim that their own readers didn’t know what Mark Carney was running on when they voted for Mark Carney, that’s their right, but in that case they’re either calling their readers idiots or admitting they don’t know how to do their jobs. I doubt Althia is trying to, but she is implicitly saying that if Canadians didn’t realize they were voting for C-5 by voting for Carney, then they didn’t know what they were voting for because her paper fucked up. It’s an interesting choice to admit it, and one that I think is unfair to the Star - their coverage was quite good! I wouldn’t be thrilled to find out Raj disagrees.

The problem for the Star, and for the many others pushing Carney’s Betrayed His Voters content these days, is that Canada is in a more small-c conservative place than we were 6 years ago. This is a truth that we don’t want to acknowledge, but it is. We talk about how Conservatives need to be in touch with the country as it actually exists, not merely the one they wished existed, but that’s also true of the Liberals in specific and the left in general.

If the Star and left critics of Carney want to be productive at their actual goal, which I assume is making Carney a more left wing, and therefore (in their eyes) better PM, there are many things they can and should be doing. They can and should be using their platforms to elevate interesting policy minds on the broad left and not just merely quoting the same groups that have been in every single piece for the last 10 years. Find the voices that can make nimble, interesting critiques of Carney from many angles, and continue to elevate them.

They can attempt to give the NDP any amount of legitimacy by helping the process of their renewal - why haven’t the Star offered Matt Green and Avi Lewis and Charlie Angus op-eds to talk about the election loss and the lessons from it? Why aren’t they cornering the market on renewal of progressive ideas, and why did Avi Lewis’ big post election Where We Go From Here leadership soft launch get posted to Twitter and not the pages of the progressive paper of record? I’d be pretty pissed at the failure to get that.

But the left critics of Carney are mostly retreads of the same arguments that we’ve lost in the last half decade or more frequently the pangs of idealism that rightly get dismissed for what they are. There are real concerns about the concentration of ministerial power with C-5, but the criticisms of it that amount to defences of the existing systems will rightly be seen as fighting a losing war. But the fact that the closest thing to a constructive fix to that problem that I’ve seen canvassed came from these pages is a problem.

Mark Carney won on being a different kind of Liberal, a marked change from Trudeau. We know from Abacus’ poll that said that the Liberals would have lost by 18 if Trudeau was still leader that it wasn’t just tariffs that did this, it was the fact that Carney pitched himself as a meaningfully different Liberal and people believed him that won him the election. Getting mad at Carney for not being Trudeau 2.0 in that context is absurd.

There’s room for interesting and useful left criticism of Carney. I’m just not seeing much that would qualify. Pretending that he’s betrayed his voters for things he very obviously said he’d do isn’t courageous, it’s an abomination. And it will only ensure legitimate criticism gets ignored. The Star is playing a dangerous game that I’m not sure they can win.