Prime Minister Mark Carney. Photo courtesy Liberal Party of Canada/Facebook.

Trump imposed tariffs, insulted us and threatened us. Unsurprisingly everyone wrapped themselves in the Canadian flag and swore to keep their elbows up. The federal election was fought on the question as to which leader and party had the best chance to show the bully to the south that we Canadians were not lackeys. We were distinct, better, and would show it by rebuilding and restructuring ourselves to meet our more virtuous national objectives. Of course, there was no ready-made blueprint telling us what an invigorated sovereign and better Canada should look like.

In this setting, those on the left of the political spectrum saw a glimmer of an opportunity. Economic delinking, with the possibility of political and social delinking from the American empire, might be put on the table. There was a faint possibility that the necessary reflections and struggles might lead to a politics of greater respect for the multinational reality of the land we call Canada. The collective aspirations of Indigenous peoples and Québecois might be accorded a legitimacy which they have not yet attained. There was even some hope that thinking about what kind of sovereign polity we want to be might give substantial impetus to a radical departure from the neoliberal idea that more is always better, that quantity is more important than quality. The counter idea that the development of a political economy not driven by profit-maximizers but by satisfying human needs and protection of the environment might come to make sense to more people as their imagination was fired up.

None of this is happening. While there have been some feel-good statements about the need to consult Indigenous peoples as we continue to extract and exploit, the agenda is neither “reconcile, baby, reconcile” nor “democratize, baby, democratize.” Rather it is, as the winning Carney Liberals have explicitly said, “build, baby, build.” More pipelines, more mining, more infrastructure, less taxes for the ultra-rich and middle class, homage paid to environmental improvements by the means of costly market and technical aids (like the spectacularly unsuccessful carbon capture schemes or the development of disaster-prone and expensive nuclear plants, both of which will benefit profiteers but not the environment), more policing and criminalization of the poor and dissidents, less tolerance for refugees and more spending on defence as Carney has announced his desire to participate in Trump’s Golden Dome and in the EU’s ReArm initiative to dramatically raise armaments’ spending, a kind of militaristic Keynesianism spelling disaster for peace-seekers and environmentalists alike. Meanwhile, the position of Minister for Labour has been eliminated—replaced by a Minister for Jobs and Families—while a new Minister for AI has been appointed, tasked with managing the job losses inherent in AI development and promoting the massive, ecologically damaging energy demands it entails.

These federal strategies have encouraged junior governments to pursue goals which they (as right-wing, corporate-dominated governments) have always had, with more gusto than ever. They are enacting legislation which will let their chosen private profit-seekers rip up our good earth, at the expense of the environment and Indigenous peoples. In Québec, Bill 97 intends to create industrial zones in about 30 percent of its precious forest areas. In British Columbia, Bill 15, the Infrastructure Projects Act, sets out to get projects off the ground more quickly by allowing the provincial government to override environmental assessments, public consultations, and Indigenous consent processes. Ontario has two such bills on its agenda: Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, and Bill 17, the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act.

The score box reads dismally. The dominant class and its cheerleaders, intent on doubling down to maintain a social system which proudly features gross inequality and inequity, are clearly out on top. The working class and its leftist protagonists, hoping to fuel a movement for a radical rethinking of our polity to get closer to a social system which advances equality and altruism, find themselves at the bottom.

Why was it so hard for leftist voices to make themselves heard? Why was it so easy for the ideas and goals of capitalists to be further embedded?

There is an obvious answer. In Canada’s political economy, as in any market capitalist economy, the creation of overall wealth and welfare is to be left to competing individuals freely choosing how to deploy their talents and resources in order to garner more wealth for themselves. It is ‘natural’ for governments to help individuals do their thing. Governments are in the ‘business’ of inveigling those with resources (and in Canada a handful of people control most of the wealth) to invest their assets. They declare themselves open for business; they pass laws and regulations which will give investors an assurance that their investments will not be subject to the volatility and the gyrations of domestic politics; they remove barriers to profit maximization, often referred to disparagingly as red tape; they offer........

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