Just two months ago, the federal Conservative were sailing towards an easy election. The Liberals were crumbling under Justin Trudeau, and Poilievre’s victory seemed so inevitable that right-wing ideologue Jordan Peterson hosted a triumphant interview titled “Canada’s Next Prime Minister.”
But with the election of Trump, the US-Canada tariff war, and the replacement of Trudeau with Mark Carney, the tables have turned. Poilievre has struggled to pivot and the Conservatives have lost support, while the Liberals have surged ahead in the polls. The fear of Poilievre has turned to hope that Carney can beat him. But Carney is no alternative.
The banker: Carney’s service for the 1%
Carney spent 13 years climbing the ranks of giant investment bank Goldman Sachs, before joining the Bank of Canada in 2003. In 2008 Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Carney as Governor of the Bank of Canada, just before the global recession.
During the recession Goldman Sachs distinguished itself by misleading investors and profiting from the housing market collapse, while getting billions in government bailouts and paying themselves big bonuses. Meanwhile Carney bailed out Canadian banks with public funds. “We provided over $30 billion of liquidity to the Canadian banking system,” Carney said– being careful to use the term “liquidity” instead of bailout. In total Canadian banks got $114 billion during the recession and continued to post profits, while ordinary people lost their jobs.
Carney and Harper were on the same side during the last economic crisis. They are now only bickering over how much of the credit for the corporate bailouts goes to Carney or the Conservative Finance Minister at the time, Jim Flaherty. But Carney says Harper offered him the job as Finance Minister in 2012.
Instead, Carney became the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. With a salary of $1.4 million, Carney imposed the UK Conservative government’s 1 percent cap on wage increases (below inflation) on Bank of England workers, sparking the first strike in 50 years– during which they wore Carney masks on the picket line.
The bully: Poilievre hijacks anger at Bay Street
Trudeau has been in power for the past decade during Carney’s absence, using lofty rhetoric as a substitute for real change. Because the federal NDP propped up an increasingly unpopular Trudeau government, Poilievre was able to monopolize the anger at the cost of living crisis and channel it to right wing conclusions.
Poilievre claims to represent workers and stand up to corporations. As he said in his 2023 speech to the right-wing CD Howe Institute, “I almost never speak to crowds in downtown Toronto or anywhere close to Bay Street…After 8 years of Trudeau, life is increasingly a living hell for the working class people of this country.”
But Poilievre doesn’t want to improve the conditions of workers through status for all, raising the minimum wage, lowering rent costs or investing in healthcare and other public services. Instead, behind his populist rhetoric and claims to challenge the elites lies a bully: military spending to bully oppressed countries, reinforcing borders to bully migrants, building prisons to bully people who use drugs, and “anti-woke” rhetoric to bully movements.
Neither the banker nor the bully, but building solidarity
Carney and Poilievre are two sides of the same coin: one has been the banker for the 1%, and the other has diverted the resulting bitterness away from real alternatives. Now the election of Trump and the growing US-Canada trade war have caused a spike in Canadian nationalism.This has allowed both Carney and Poilievre to pretend to support workers under the guise of national unity, which has further pushed the NDP to the margins.
But neither the banker nor the bully have anything to offer. With the threat of a million job losses and another recession, both Carney and Poilievre support military spending and greater border control that will further divide workers along national lines; both support tax cuts for the wealthy and oppose government spending on social programs, which will further wealth inequality; and both are hostile to left alternatives to neoliberalism.
In response to the tariff war, the decent work movement is fighting to ensure no one is left behind: including status for all, income and EI supports, and moratorium on evictions and rent increases. If the NDP can echo these movements, it can expose Carney and Poilievre and provide real alternatives.
For more information and to take action, go to https://www.justice4workers.org/tariffemergency.
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