On this Canada Day in 2026, we really need to have a serious talk about the “leadership” of this country. And not in oversimplifications and trite hockey metaphors. The fact is, the barbarians aren’t at the gate. They’re in the Prime Minister’s Office. Mark Carney is the Great Canadian Bamboozle.
Swept into power after assuming the Liberal leadership after Justin Trudeau’s retirement, Carney did the two things Canada needed him to do at the time — stand up to the criminally insane Donald Trump, and save the country from the humiliation and indignity of a “Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre”, which honestly it probably wouldn’t have survived. However since that time, the mask of “great Canadian hero” has come off. Yes, Carney was an alternative to Poilievre, but sadly, that distinction has becomes little more than skin deep.
Where are the Canadian values in the Carney government? They’re just plain missing. The Prime Minister has done little for the country but consolidate power for himself by making recruiting MPs from other parties his first priority — not because he values diversity of opinion, but on the contrary, because he wants to consolidate the sort of power that a PM wields in the British Parliamentary system has an absolute majority.
And to achieve this, he has abandoned virtually every principle the Liberal Party has stood for, or at least has traditionally pretended to stand for. He has shown little but contempt for the country’s First Nations. He started his government by abandoning women’s issues, beginning with abolishing the ministry for women and gender equality and effectively relegating it as a back-burner issue. He has now officially told the country that the environment doesn’t matter, if it impacts business.
In short, he’s pretty much ruling as a Conservative. But he’s not going to tell you that.
The signs are all there, however. He waxed nostalgic about how Trudeau Senior’s national energy policy left him feeling betrayed as youth in Edmonton. He talks a good game about “data sovereignty” for Canada, but doesn’t see a problem with Canadian data being essentially controlled by Microsoft and other large American corporations. But the faux-nationalistic chest-beating and tired hockey cliches can’t hide the truth — as a country, we will be weaker than we’ve ever been in the face of the neo-liberal menace which has gradually been siphoning away everything we hold dear as a country. EI has become kind of a joke, and its decimation continues to accelerate, even as it is more needed than ever in the face of job purges led by “efficiency gains” of artificial intelligence, which Carney never fails to promote. Waiting lists in Canadian hospitals keep getting longer and longer, because Ottawa is constantly cutting transfer payments to provinces, and on top of that cutting the federal government payroll, which leads to more unemployment and a shrinking tax base not only for the provinces but also the federal government itself. The government is getting leaner and meaner with every passing month.
But oddly enough, the federal deficit is at a record high. Which would seem weird, if you didn’t realize that we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to push the neo-liberal accelerationism to new highs. And of course we’re doing all that without raising any taxes. I mean, Canadians are already very highly taxed, and as I’ve previously mentioned we’re getting less and less value for the value of our tax dollars, but that’s only half the story. Our corporate taxes are, frankly, a joke. The big reason why we’re paying more and getting less, as individual taxpayers, is that the overall tax burdens has shifted since the 1980s. 46 years ago the corporate sector paid a majority of the tax burden in North America. Now they pay less than half of the tax burden paid by individual taxpayers. That’s the neoliberal accelerationism I’m talking about.
So while increasing military spending and data infrastructure are not necessarily bad things, they also overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporate interests — not even necessarily Canadian corporate interests — while the burden of paying for all this investment will fall overwhelmingly on the people, who are increasingly poorer, less cared for, and less free. That’s a reference to many bills like C22 which Carney is ushering through Parliament, something I plan to write more about later, but I want to get this piece out today.
But you wouldn’t hear about that from the Canadian corporate news media, any more than the American corporate news media mentions Donald Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state — which many honest observers would describe as a descent into madness. Because in the corporate world, nations no longer matter. We are effectively ruled by billionaire media owners who control what we see and hear, and Carney’s pseudo-nationalism has done a great job bamboozling the people of this country, while corporate tax cuts have sent a clear message that the rich should get on Carney’s side because he’s looking out for them.
We’re more like the USA than we like to think. We may think they’re dumb for having voted Trump in, but we’re hardly better. We took the word of an establishment figure without checking any receipts, and like our neighbors to the South we’re soon going to be facing a bill that’s much, much higher than we can imagine.
