Carney’s Comms Catastrophe Continues

Will Someone Fucking Fix This?

Did Mark Carney just defund every women’s shelter in this country?

I’m pretty sure the answer’s no - I mean, it literally is no, since the Estimates process and previously approved funding cannot be overridden by a story in the Hill Times - but I can’t say for sure what the impact of Carney’s (alleged) 81% cut to Women and Gender Equality Canada is. A cursory glance of the website suggests that it’s mostly a distribution hub, coordinating/middlemanaging (delete as you see fit) funding to various women’s businesses, organizations, and charities, and so it’s entirely unclear what an “81% cut” and just under 200 full time equivalent staff being fired will mean.

Does this mean that grants to female entrepreneurs will now be granted by the Department of Innovation, Science, and Industry, or are we shutting down those grants? Does this mean that we are moving shelter funding to Health Canada or gutting it? Does this mean we’re cutting support for charities that help victims of violence or just running it through a different org structure? Nobody knows! You know why? Because Mark Carney refuses to fucking do any fucking Comms!

I know that I am banging the table for this but at some point it becomes obvious that this government’s stubborn refusal to do the basic blocking and tackling of governing a country - media management - is going to be its downfall. I’m not predicting they'll lose the next election because they’re sticking their heads up their asses, but every time they allow a story like this to circulate for days without clarifying themselves, they’re making their lives harder.

As I laid out previously, these cuts in aggregate are not actually that big of a deal. But in specific there are going to be fired civil servants, and programs that don’t get funded any more. If the answer is that women’s shelters and violence prevention are where this government’s looking, then we need to be swarming the streets in protest. If it’s not, then we need someone to explain that this is about departmental reorganizations and eliminating duplication in administrative systems. Right now, we’re getting government by leak, and no clarity about whether what is in the reports and memos constantly referenced in these leaks are accurate or fairly described.

The Carney government is acting like clarity and information is an optional extra to be given when they want to and not the default position out of necessity. The reason governments need to be on the front foot isn’t a moral obligation to Canadians or some high minded virtue, it’s because nature abhors a vacuum and Vassy and Cochrane have shows that need to run. The concept of “Take Out The Trash Day” or “dumping” news is slightly antiquated in a modern, internet media landscape, but it is still true that there are a fixed number of segments on Power And Politics and a fixed number of articles that can lead the homepages of our news sites. Understanding that, and giving the press enough to fill their quotas so that unfavourable stories don’t fill the gaps is a necessary part of the job, and we’ve decided we’re just not doing it.

Let’s assume for the sake of this argument that this isn’t Mark Carney gutting our violence prevention and support programs for victims and in reality, the 81% cut is mostly reallocations of funding envelopes to other departments - that wouldn’t be that big of a deal. (Again, if Carney is actually proposing real, meaningful cuts to those things, I’ll do everything to help the charge to reverse that.) If the biggest impact of this is staff at Industry or Justice have to do a bit more work to judge applications for funding under programs previously administered by Women and Gender Equality Canada, then it’s a nothing burger. But people will still have seen a headline about cutting women’s funding, and the fact that it was departmental politics won’t matter. And this will happen again and again and again.

What happens if/when the government decides to, say, use AI to screen out and consolidate funding requests to various agencies and departments, so that a human doesn’t have to sort through dumb pitches in between the various serious proposals for scientific research? Will hypothetical cuts to the administration at Health Canada - again, simply by automating a screening process - be allowed to be written as “Carney Cuts Cancer Research"? Cause that’s going to be what happens if we don’t get our heads out of our asses.

Carney’s implicit bet is that the NDP are too useless, too incompetent, and too damaged by the election to mount an effective opposition to him. That might be correct, and the fact they’re entering a leadership race where Heather MacPherson is a relative moderate says a lot about the chances of them being a force moving forward, but it’s a risk. If the narrative that progressives hear is that Carney is slashing services to vulnerable communities, then yes, a 12% NDP vote that costs us a dozen seats in the Horseshoe and defeats Ben Fanjoy is possible. And if it’s possible that this will be an issue, can we just nip this in the bud?

There are not an endless supply of easy, politically painless cuts - a fact that DOGE and Elon made painfully clear in the US, not that we needed to know it - but there’s a difference between PSAC decrying Carney’s brutal austerity and the public starting to believe we’ve elected a genuine conservative. There is no reason our comms should be this weak. There is no reason we should be letting these kinds of sloppy stories get out there. We are failing.

It is beyond time for Carney to draw a line in the sand on the idiotic spending cuts discourse and talk to Canadians. It is time for Carney to treat us like grownups and talk about the kind of cuts that are, and aren’t, on the table. If he doesn’t, damaging stories only somewhat true will continue to drag the government down when it doesn’t have to - and Carney will only have himself to blame.