Don’t be fooled by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s smoke and mirrors: his government might appear different from former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s on the outside, but deeper down, it’s the same old Liberals.
Take Carney’s Cabinet.
Yes, Carney’s Cabinet is dramatically smaller than Trudeau’s. That’s a good thing. The federal Cabinet in recent years had become extremely bloated, with obscure jobs and no fewer than 36 members.
Carney wisely trimmed the size of Cabinet down in bold fashion, appointing a new ministry of just 24 members. It’s the smallest Cabinet in decades. And several long-time Trudeau era ministers, like former immigration minister Marc Miller and former health minister Mark Holland, are on the outside looking in.
Holland announced shortly before the new Cabinet was revealed that he doesn’t plan to run for re-election, but that was no doubt triggered by his ouster after backing former finance minister Chrystia Freeland for the party’s top job.
Karina Gould, who also ran for the leadership and was the outgoing government’s house leader, didn’t make the cut either. Freeland did make the cut, but she received the transport post in what can only be seen as a major demotion.
But here’s the thing: it’s the same old Trudeau Liberals.
No less than 87 per cent of Carney’s Cabinet were members of the Trudeau Cabinet. And the only newcomers have served as Trudeau backbenchers for years.
Key Cabinet ministers, such as Canada’s new finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, were in the Trudeau Cabinet for nearly a decade. Champagne is the man who quarterbacked the tens of billions of dollars of handouts the Trudeau government gave to EV car manufacturers and battery manufacturers, an “investment” that’s proving to be an utter catastrophe for taxpayers.
Real change would have meant firing key ministers and appointing a wave of backbenchers and outsiders to a genuinely new Cabinet.
This is not a clean break from the Trudeau era or a changing of the guard. It’s a reshuffling of an old, tired deck.
Then, there’s the scrapping of the consumer carbon tax.
That’s excellent news. But here’s the thing: it might not be gone for good. Carney scrapped it through an Order in Council. The legislation is still on the books and Carney could always bring the carbon tax back, without having to pass legislation, with another Order in Council down the line.
Even if he doesn’t, Carney has talked about jacking up carbon taxes on industry, which will simply be passed down to consumers, and imposing carbon tax tariffs on certain imports from foreign countries, which would be disastrous given the current trade conflict Canada finds itself in with the United States.
Carney famously said Canadians won’t feel the impact of imposing heavy carbon taxes on things like steel, but steel is used for everything: it’s in our homes, our cars, and in critical infrastructure. Of course, Canadians will feel the impact.
On the surface, Carney has made two crucial changes: slimming down Cabinet and scrapping the consumer carbon tax. But dig deeper, and both changes are superficial: the Cabinet is the same cast of characters, and the carbon tax could return with the stroke of a pen.
If Carney really wants Canadians to believe he’s changed his longstanding views on carbon taxes, he should recall Parliament and repeal the legislation that enacted the federal carbon tax backstop in the first place. So long as it’s on the books, the feds can breathe the carbon tax back to life at any time.
Make no mistake: Carney’s Liberals are Trudeau’s Liberals. This is the same old and tired government. Sure, it might have a fresh coat of paint, but that’s about all the difference there is.
Jay Goldberg is the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. He previously served as a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
