From Elbows Up to Shock Doctrine

The Carney government's right wing budget is a giant corporate giveaway cynically branded with the language of civic solidarity

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When he launched his trade war earlier this year, Donald Trump inadvertently stirred something deep within the Canadian psyche. Faced with both a policy of economic warfare and the US president’s periodic kidding-not-kidding threats of annexation, a long dormant kind of nationalism seemed to awaken from its slumber. As opinion polls registered a surge in national pride that transcended the traditional divides of age, language, and region, Canadians demanded a tough response from their leaders and signalled their desire for economic and cultural independence by boycotting US products en masse.

It was a moment unlike any other I’ve experienced in Canada. And, despite the palpable sense of angst and uncertainty, it seemed to hold tremendous potential.

For as long as I’ve been alive, economic integration with the United States has been treated as a fact of life by most of our political class and, as I wrote for The Walrus back in April, that consensus has gone hand-in-hand with decades of stagnant wages, declining union density, and rising social and economic inequality. The era of so-called free trade, put simply, has also been the era of neoliberalism, and it’s no accident that the surrender of Canada’s economic sovereignty to our much larger southern neighbour has coincided with decades of fiscal austerity and the broader reorientation of the democratic state towards the corporate sector. Throughout much of the postwar era, the dominant strain of Canadian nationalism had been progressive, even quasi-socialist. With the triumph of free trade at the end of the 1980s, this looked to have been buried for good. Suddenly, however, all bets seemed to be off. Corporate continentalism was finished, economic nationalism was back on the table, and as the language of nation-building returned to the political mainstream, the crisis looked to contain the seeds of a progressive alternative.

Amid the meteoric ascent of Mark Carney, that sense of possibility quickly receded. Notwithstanding his background in the world of high finance, Carney proved adept at channeling the national mood while remaining somewhat vague about his actual intentions. He was, as I argued before his victory in the Liberal leadership race, a kind of political tabula rasa who scanned as a social democratic nation-builder or a centre-right technocrat depending on what you want you wanted to see. And even then, a discerning ear could readily detect in Carney’s Davos-speak the makings of a governing agenda correlating strongly with the latter.

Soon after the Liberals’ election victory, this impression was confirmed. In July, the Toronto Star revealed that federal departments had been instructed to identify “ambitious savings” of up to 15 per cent. In a futile attempt to placate Trump, the newly-sworn in Carney government steadily rolled back retaliatory tariffs, withdrew welcome plans for a Digital Services Tax on large American tech companies, and signalled its openness to partnering with the Trump administration on its proposed multi-billion-dollar “Golden Dome” missile defence initiative. Having campaigned on a promise to make Canadians “masters in their own home” and gestured at a renewed spirit of nation-building that spring, the prime minister was soon trying to cajol the White House and talking like a banker again.