Canada’s Future & The New Carney Government

It makes my heart sink every time Democrats down here exume neoliberal figures rejected by the public, even as Trump’s policies become more extreme by the day. Hakeem Jeffries misses Obama. Jon Stewart gives Peter Buttigieg a fawning interview. Nancy Pelosi blocks AOC from an important committee position. As you note about Carney, so it seems to me here. Unless these blind fools wake up they are paving the way for the Trumps and Poilievres. The people I know personally who oppose Trump share the same blindness. They blame Trump voters for our problems but reject the idea that by blocking Bernie they are just as responsible for our troubles.

Someofparts, you have echoed my feelings. I have been reading Paul Krugman’s Substack recently (I had ignored him for years when he was writing for the NYT) and while he is on point about some things, he seems entirely clueless about the condition of people who vote for Trump.
Krugman keeps going on about how great the ‘economy’ was under Biden, ignoring the reality of the Rust Belt around the Great Lakes, the Southern Tier in New York State, the deserted factory towns and gas well-littered wilds of Pennsylvania.
He travels the world (he was writing yesterday from Portugal) but apparently has never spent time in the ‘flyover country’ of the US, listening to the ‘locals’ talking about their adult kids dying ‘deaths of despair’ in their 40’s and 50’s, sat among the emaciated meth addicts who drift along the sidewalks lined with rotting buildings, roamed the aisles of the local dollar stores where clerks and patrons alike sport the gap-toothed smiles of people with no money for dental care. And where the products are almost all ‘Made in China.’
He could spend a week on a tour of Walmart Super Centers, maybe talk to a few of the morbidly obese patrons, motoring along in their motorized wheel chairs, buying more high-fructose corn syrup-laden processed foods and picking up their insulin prescriptions at the pharmacy counter. (Hope is coming for weight-loss though… just take Ozempic!)
And, I doubt that he has ever hung out at the gas station and convenience store in Pine Ridge, South Dakota and watched the results of our own attempt at genocide.
Some days I think I am going crazy! Between the people who look at Trump as the Second Coming and the ones who believe all will be well if only we can elect a Kamala Harris or a Pete Buttigieg, I see no hope for the future of the United States.

I think the NDP would be very ill-advised to put their losses to the CPC solely at the feet of strategic voting for the Liberals. I’m seeing two or three ridings where that looks like a factor, but there’s clearly a number of additional things in play:

– turnout in the BC ridings they lost to the CPC was significantly higher than in the 2021 election and both the LPC and CPC were *much* better at getting out new vote,
– three or four of the ridings lost were new candidates – two of these had been held by very high profile names in the party with great personal popularity,
– their electoral mechanics likely wasn’t that great – I’m not plugged in to their network, but I don’t think I saw a single bright young thing from central at any of the all-candidates’ meetings I attended and that is *very* unusual (I live in a battleground riding that only ever flips between the NDP and LPC, where the NDP candidate was the previous MPP trying to transition to the Federal level and she got utterly *obliterated*)

From a technical perspective, bottom line, the NDP has good latent support but their actual turnout vote is distributed quite inefficiently. They suck at their central challenge of getting the demographics they skew towards actually out to the ballot box. This is going to particularly bite for them if the CPC gets better at eating their lunch among the youngs, which is clearly a strategic priority for them.

And no, proportional representation is not the fix for this – proportional representation in a Federal system with significant regional cleavages and an increasingly marked rural-urban split is a real bad idea. (More emotively, I would rather shoot myself in the groin than have a PPC asshole sitting the House.) Frankly, the NDP should put their big boy pants on and concentrate on sucking less. Notably, I think they should look to some of the old Western-based provincial establishment (who actually governed) for some advice on how to be compassionate hard-headed realists.

They need to appeal to a significant concentration of actual adults as competent, which frankly they don’t. Well-meaning, yes – competent, no. It’s been a long time since they’ve offered me a candidate who wasn’t either a union apparatchik or a lifetime politician (not actually a completely overlapping Venn diagram). I would love to be offered a candidate who’s actually done something substantive with their prior life, backed by policies other than magic money via inter-generational theft. The label on the tin isn’t going to matter much to me – and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.

As a lone American fortunate to be married into a Canadian family I truly wish the best for Canada. My wife just became a dual citizen so she will get personal experience in our (US) first past the finish line roller derbies (elections).
Without proportional representation I see no path forward for the reforms necessary to ward off the horrific challenges looming.

Carney likely doesn’t consider himself a neo-liberal. He probably considers himself something new.

Rachel Reeves, UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced a new term in a speech in 2023: Securonomics. Reeves was Carney’s work colleague at the Bank of England and so they likely share a great many beliefs, which we can likely infer from her speech (https://labour.org.uk/updates/press-releases/rachel-reeves-securonomics/):
– Securonomics is anti-austerity.
– It’s “a new partnership between an active state and dynamic open markets”.
– It posits there “are two errors of (neo-liberal) economic policymaking”: “a fundamental under-appreciation of the role of government”; and “the assumption that the people and places that matter to a country’s economic success are few in number”.
– It posits that nations “have discovered the limitations of globalisation”: “supply chains that prioritise only what is cheapest and fastest struggle when a crisis strikes “; “a globalised system can be gamed by countries like China who have undercut and ignored the international trading rules, and made it impossible for our own to compete”; and “we have allowed the production of critical technologies to slip from our grasp – costing us jobs and compromising our security”.

The meat of Securonomics is in the following statement from Reeves:
“In an uncertain world, we cannot rely on a handful of industries for our economic success nor can we outsource the supply of critical goods and services to the lowest bidder.
Confronted by the challenges we face in the years ahead, no government can simply ‘get out of the way’ of the market.
And no democratic government can be content with a lack of decent work, falling wages and the dimming of people’s hope for a better life.”

And then there’s this statement from Reeves: “That’s why it is time for us to admit that globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead.” That sounds mighty familiar. I imagine Carney was drawing from that statement when he said, “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States – a system that Canada has relied on since the second world war, a system that while not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades – is over.”

We also probably need to consider Carney’s work in getting the UK’s National Wealth Fund started (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/statement-of-strategic-priorities-to-the-national-wealth-fund):
“The NWF should embed three principles into its additionality assessments to ensure
front office staff are empowered to have a proactive mindset and the NWF can
cornerstone a sector’s development:
1. The NWF should prioritise crowding-in private capital at the sector level over time,
rather than focusing narrowly on the individual project impact. It should target
investments that will play the biggest role in supporting the government’s sectoral
policy goals.
2. The NWF should ensure transactions target market weaknesses and investment
barriers, not just market failure.
Investment Principle 4: NWF investment is expected to crowd in significant private
capital over time. This includes:
• Supporting sector development by crowding-in at sector level and targeting
market weakness.
• Unlocking projects that otherwise would not have gone ahead.
3. The NWF should consider opportunities where it can demonstrate investment
leadership, including being a first-mover in nascent sectors and a lead investor in
catalytic deals.”

From all that, we can infer these so-called Securonomist still believe in low taxes but they also want government-driven economic development but they don’t want the expenditures on the government budget. They’d prefer to have those on the books of an independent government agency. Which isn’t a terrible model: development and investment are good policy whether internal or external. And it may be better to take investment and development policy out of the direct control of politicians anyway. But then again, that does fall into the supremacy of the Professional Management Class.

“Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that well not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.”

I can guarantee that, if Trump were somehow replaced with Kamala Harris, or, for that matter, Mitt Romney, Carney would back, shouting “All Is Forgiven!”

What you are saying Ian is crucial; if Carney fucks up, PP will be in. And let’s be honest, given Carney’s priors his chance of fucking up is nearly 100%. Liberal’s self-lauding at the moment is strange to me, do they not realize that these Conservatives won over 41% of the vote? Getting over 40% of the popular vote rarely happens in this country, that is actually an astoundingly good result, it’s only a ‘failure’ in this case because of how high the Conservatives were polling a few months ago. And that their Liberal party ‘won’ with a neolib’s neolib? Not that Trudeau was anything but that either, but this guy is a literal drill baby drill bankster-in-chief hand picked by not one, but TWO conservative governments, one here and one in Britain. It’s like that old joke goes, “How do you elect a Conservative in Canada? Run him as a Liberal”.

IDK, I don’t see much room for optimism with this situation. Carney at least seems like an intelligent man, but the ideological blinders of a man with his history seems nearly impossible to overcome. And the NDP, lol, where do I even start? The biggest political tragedy in my lifetime in this country is Jack Layton dying, *sigh*

So I do respect most commenters on here and listen and sometimes act on what they say–

I was calling out Eschaton some time back (I really lost respect for Duncan Black back in 2020 when he surrendered to Audience Capture and shared “I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary!” as if that were something to be proud of, when she only stayed in the primary during Obama’s Night of the Long Knives to destroy Bernie.) People said no, he is good, even though (my point) his audience is a bunch of dumb shit libs who are like, “Vladimir Putin stops Americans from having affordable health care,” or “China is a danger to Our Way of Life,” etc.

But to add to my earlier point about AOC, he did post this today– https://www.eschatonblog.com/2025/04/the-worst-people-at-worst-time.html#disqus_thread

So Hakeem Jeffries has not only 78% or so of Dems opposed to the Deportation without Trial regime, but a large minority (I think I heard like 47% of R’s and expect that to get higher) & he’s telling his Reps NOT to go to Central America, give up and go with the Admin plan!! I am guessing the Epstein crowd has some really awesome Compromat on Mr. Hakeem.

His readers give intelligent and cogent responses, like this– “Simplest theory I got is that Democratic and Republican leadership are appointed and sponsored by the same Campaign Donors.” And then you get ShitLib, Surrender Monkey, Kill the Messenger responses like this– “Fuck the Bulwark, and fuck Bloody Bill Kristol.” I’ll agree on the 2nd half of that sentiment, but come on!!

And I have ridiculed the ultra-Shit Lib site Lawyers, Guns and Money on here from time to time. (Ironic that they are named for an “outlaw” musician.) But they are not all dumb. That site runner did a ridiculous Post when Trump let Bibi end the Cease Fire and start the killing again, like “Oh, Trump is back to his usual killing of Palestinians.” Over half of his audience refused to play along and said, basically, “Oh, you mean they’re going back to the Biden-Harris genocide again? Uhm, as far as I know, Trump was not in office from Oct. 8, 2023 to Jan. 20, 2025, so yeah, now Trump is making Joe/Kamala’s genocide his own.” A minority pretended the straw man was valid.

Partisans often can’t think. It takes real integrity to actually judge actions and not words. The Dimmies won’t even bother with the words now, and they stopped doing any actions for their base during the 2 term Obama sell-out. “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters” continues to apply. But Obama remains the clown who really finally killed off the “American Experiment,” and I am grateful to him for that. His legacy is 2 Trump terms– talk about a Shit Sandwich thrown to all his followers.

Posted at NCap tonight –

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/china-leapfrogging-the-u-s-in-tech-innovation.html#comments

It’s a post about the astonishing leaps China is making in computing. Talking to an IT friend about it tonight, the consequences are profound and point to future rich with possibilites. China is moving into this world, and here we sit. Comments on the post are interesting, including this video of a fully automated EV factory –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yezR-mH12xs

At the end of the post is this coda –

“I really don’t want the focus to be on Trump. He’s not the fire; he’s just an accelerant. The fire is the greed of the rich, their capture of government, and their constant shortsightedness when faced with the gleam of more wealth.

How crass, how tragic, how low, how mean their desires. That we went along, that we fed them, how sad for ourselves.”

And from Colonel Smithers in comments there was this –

“In the late 1990s, I worked for NatWest Bank and noted how engineers jumped ship from clients Northern Telecom, Sony and Ericsson for … Chinese firms … Some of the engineers … freely, even cheerfully, admitted that their hiring managers told them to build for the future, build the best and not to worry about financial control, a most welcome message after years of having to put profit and shareholder returns ahead of investment and innovation.

A dozen years ago, I recalled these conversations when told by a British automotive engineer based in Germany that in a decade or so China would eat Germany’s lunch as Chinese car manufacturers were investing and innovating, but German firms preferred to bribe politicians for protection and focus on financial engineering.”

We deserve to be part of this bright future. We deserve to think about better things than how to get the vermin out of our house.

And Eclair, I hear what you are saying about Krugman. I know people in those abandoned towns who died in their 50s. I have friends even now who live with the shame of being unable to afford basic dental work, who are only in their 60s but need a mobility scooter to shop, who pick up their diabetes meds at the supermarket pharmacy. These are people I love. Decent people who worked hard and don’t deserve any of this.

Meanwhile, along with everything else I’ve thrown into this gumbo of a post, check out Grumpy Chinese Guy on Tiktok. If China doesn’t save us all, it won’t be for lack of trying.

https://www.tiktok.com/@neil778027

M Level – The last straw for me with Lawyers, Guns & Money was the Russia-gate bandwagon. Balloon Juice, Suburban Guerilla and many, many others got curated right out of my blogroll over that debacle. Kos became unbearable because of their hostility to Bernie.

Yet, as you noted about AOC (and thanks for the alert) I must say that just today I was also really disappointed with my man Bernie. I clicked on a post expecting to hear him say something rousing, something inspiring and instead heard him talking about Ukraine with disappointing ignorance. As he sees it Russia has been the unprovoked aggressor and the Maiden coup never happened. I’m guessing that the name Victoria Nuland means nothing in the language of his people.

The ignorance in this country is like the mosquitoes on the patio in this building, insidious and impossible to escape no matter what form of protection one uses.

but apparently has never spent time in the ‘flyover country’ of the US, listening to the ‘locals’ talking about their adult kids dying ‘deaths of despair
—–
Perhaps he and the rest of the managing class has done that and blamed the suffering on the victims in some form. Ironic that it makes them so much similar to the Trump supporters blaming it all on immigrants and pro-noun use.
That’s why Trumpers and the Dems hate each other so much. Nothing brings to the surface ill feelings like see a monster in the mirror.

RE: Carney and ‘drill baby drill’, my judgement is based on his stated energy and natural resources policies during the election, things like speeding up development licenses, building “energy corridors”, exporting more abroad etc.. Eg: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-poilievre-energy-platform-corridor-1.7508253

Carney is too smart to say something as crass as ‘drill baby drill’, but that was essentially my reading of what he is advocating ¯\(ツ)/¯

This is no doubt very wonkish of me, but there is one quite piece of administrative policy Carney has proposed which gives me a bit of hope for both his administration itself and his longer term impact on Canada: He proposes to split the federal budget into operating and capital portions. His explicit rationale is that while he wants to balance the operating budget, he doesn’t think the capital budget needs to be balanced.

This is an important philosophical shift which could change the whole conversation around government budgeting in Canada. The mere fact that you have to talk about the capital budget as a different thing forces the admission that government spending involves creating assets, making it harder to talk as if government spending is just a black hole where money somehow disappears for no reason, and harder to talk austerity nonsense. It’s much easier to defend a useful deficit if it’s a deficit in the capital budget than if it’s a deficit in the overall, undifferentiated shmoo government budget.

Even if Carney doesn’t himself do that much useful with the territory gained by that change, other governments probably will.