The Mark Carney juggernaut is Canada’s big political story of 2025. He walked into the top elected role in Canada’s government before the public even made him a member of Parliament. He revived a party disdainfully rejected by the Canadian public and rallied it to a near-majority win. As Prime Minister, Carney has made headlines. What he hasn’t done is much to change the country in its domestic direction or its trade relationship with the United States.
Pressure from Alberta, the federal Conservatives, and U.S. President Donald Trump are the main reasons the current Liberal regime differs at all from the previous one. It was clear from Carney’s book Values that he lauded Trudeau-era Canadian initiatives towards net zero carbon emissions, including the consumer carbon tax he reduced to zero earlier this year.
Yes, Carney has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Alberta government to get a pipeline built. However, that pipeline is only a concept. As a concession, Alberta finally gave way on higher carbon taxes for industrial producers. This means the whole country will get them also. Either way, Canadians will still pay more carbon taxes.
Trudeau-era deficits are here to stay. They will be at least $57 billion annually through 2029-30. Along the way, Clean Electricity Regulations will get increasingly stringent. We know the Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credits will cost the government $103 billion by 2035. What we don’t know is how much more our energy bills will go up. We just know that they will, because if clean energy paid for itself, such drastic government interference would not be necessary to skew the market.
Meanwhile another bad agenda advances: the infusion of so-called “woke” values over our airways and internet, representing a corresponding threat to free speech. Bill C-9 lowers the threshold for “harmful content” beyond previous standards for hate speech, ones in alignment with court decisions. The legislation also adds provisions for hateful symbols, without defining what they are. Regulators will do that later. Just ask gun advocates where that can end up.
Proposed amendments to Bill C-9 would also take away a religious defense from allegedly hateful comments against protected groups. Marc Miller, a longtime Trudeau friend, now Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, has already said that certain Bible verses are hateful. It is hard to see this as an attack on the Bible that will turn law enforcement against the wrong people. Will atheists, Christians, and Jews be able to say Mohammed was a false prophet, or will that be off limits too?
Carney started a Major Projects Office, ostensibly to get Canadian projects done. What’s missing is a legislative agenda to roll back the regulations the Trudeau Liberals created. The regulatory environment is so intimidating and uncertain that companies gave up on doing anything. Carney’s answer is to let those regulations remain but allow his government to veto many of them entirely at their own discretion.
This misguided solution creates its own problems. It increases the politicization of what used to be an objective process. The Trudeau cabinet gave itself veto powers on project approvals, which is why the Northern Gateway Pipeline was cancelled. The Carney government goes to the next level by allowing itself to veto some parts of the entire system. If regulations are there for a reason, do we really want them cancelled entirely for hand-picked projects?
Of course, Carney was elected on a wave of anti-Trump sentiment, given the U.S. president’s talk about making Canada the 51st state. Despite Trump’s comment that he’d find Carney easier to work with than Pierre Poilievre, Carney rode a wave of Trump Derangement Syndrome to victory.
Time quickly showed that Carney was not going to be the tough adversary he was touted to be. It came to light he had quietly dropped tariffs on U.S. goods before the election. In early May, Carney and Trump stood together, both with thumbs up for the cameras. Carney said nothing when Trump called cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland “a terrible person” even though Carney is her son’s godfather. Instead, Carney lauded Trump as a “transformational president.”
Carney even introduced a new impediment to trade talks. In September, he pledged Canada would acknowledge a Palestinian state. Trump said that would make it “very hard” for the U.S. to reach an agreement with Canada.
Perhaps the story of 2025 is not so much Carney, but a fickle and fooled Canadian public. Voters went from being anti-Liberal and anti-Trudeau to being pro-Liberal to be anti-Trump. As the year ends, Trump has changed little and neither have the Liberals. More than anything else, 2025 was the year of the duped Canadian. In the name of seeking change, we got more of the same.
