The real battle over the Carney government’s Bill C-5 will unfold not in courtrooms but on railroad tracks, forestry roads, at ports, and in cities across the country. Photo by Thien V/Flickr.

Voters elected Prime Minister Mark Carney as a rebuke of Trump and Trumpism. Yet it appears Carney has pulled a bait-and-switch: rather than continuing Trudeau-era politics, the PM has veered sharply to the right, pushing Canadian liberalism to its breaking point. Soon, he will face a crucial decision: back down or abandon liberalism altogether.

Carney’s agenda so far has been one defined by austerity, tighter immigration and border controls, and the expansion of policing and militarism. But the issue most likely to provoke sustained and intense backlash—and to rupture Canadian liberalism—is Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, which passed in June. C-5 allows the federal government to exempt so-called “nation-building” projects of its choosing from environmental review. According to most legal interpretations, it will also allow the government to bypass requirements for Indigenous consultation, let alone consent.

When I say liberalism here, I mean the central political philosophy underpinning what are commonly called “Western” democracies. Rooted in Enlightenment-era thinking, liberalism positions individual political rights and equality as the foundation of a free and just society. In principle, it’s appealing—but in practice, it has always been marked by a yawning gap between its aspirational ideals of universalism and its deeply unequal, often genocidal, reality.

The precise contours of this gap have varied across time and place, but a useful example lies in the American Revolution. On one hand, it was a fight for democracy and the principle that “all men are created equal” (noticeably excluding women even at the aspirational level). Yet the state it created was built on and entrenched systems of slavery and genocide. Its lofty rhetoric and Enlightenment ideals only applied to property-owning white men, thanks to a racial regime that drew narrow boundaries around who counted as a “civilized” human—and thus who........

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