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Donna Kennedy-Glans: Carney’s unity push risks replacing debate with managed consensus

Carney’s push risks turning Parliament into managed consensus and sidelining genuine opposition — especially in Alberta and the West

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For years, I worked alongside one of Alberta’s most respected business leaders, the late Charlie Fischer, longtime CEO of several major Canadian energy companies. An engineer by training with a sharp mind and commanding presence, Charlie could build almost anything — pipelines, plants, businesses — but he refused to steamroll differing points of view, including mine when we disagreed.

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A tall, larger-than-life figure with strong convictions, he was frequently courted by political recruiters. Yet the public spectacle of parties bashing each other in Question Period and in the media made him deeply uncomfortable. Even when former Prime Minister Joe Clark sat down with him and explained that the job of the official Opposition is to oppose and hold government to account, Charlie thought it was a waste of time and talent. He could never be persuaded to run for office.

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In Charlie’s world, engineers confronting a shared problem would sit down together to solve it, all the while knowing that competition remained the ultimate goal.

If Charlie were alive today, I dare to speculate he would welcome an invitation to join the Carney cabinet. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s brand of pragmatism has quietly overturned many of the ideological enthusiasms that once defined the modern Liberal party. Having inherited a broken and unpopular party, Carney has, in just one year, steered it toward a more results-oriented approach that borrows heavily from conservative priorities. It is technically possible that Charlie wouldn’t even need to be elected to be brought into cabinet — though he would almost certainly be encouraged to run as soon as possible.

Another reason? Carney has succeeded in making overt partisan politics less relevant — and Charlie deplored partisanship. When Liberal delegates gathered in Montreal for their national convention this past weekend, partisanship was swept under the carpet in favour of “widening the circle” to defend national unity.

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“This is not the time for politics as usual, for petty differences or political point scoring,” Carney told the cheering crowd. “United, we will build … a Canada strong that no one can ever take away.”

The tent is now so wide that if Heather McPherson, the NDP MP for Edmonton Strathcona, had been alert to the direction of events, she might well have reached out to Carney ahead of Monday’s by-elections to follow in the footsteps of Nunavut NDP MP Lori Idlout and her ideological rival Marilyn Gladu, the former social conservative MP.

Yes, the mechanics of power — judicial appointments, Senate selections and tight control of policy and purse strings — remain firmly partisan. But overt partisanship has taken a back seat to a bigger question: Who is better positioned to deliver what many consider a “conservative” agenda? To some of my friends, Carney is the best conservative leader the Liberals have ever had.

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I can’t help but wonder: Where is our Margaret Thatcher — that rare conservative leader who combined pragmatism with strong party discipline and deep conviction?

Thatcher celebrated the genius of the Westminster parliamentary system precisely because it produced “an alternative policy and a whole alternative government ready to take office.” The Iron Lady embraced robust, visible partisanship. “I love argument. I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me — that’s not their job,” she said in a 1980 interview.

Throughout her career, she repeated: “I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician.” Consensus, in her view, was “the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects.” When parties become “substantially similar,” she warned, “the differences dwindle to insignificance and so the choice becomes meaningless.”

Choosing to shove partisanship under the carpet carries risks for Carney. If Parliament becomes little more than managed consensus, the real ideological fights will migrate to the unelected institutions — the Senate and the judiciary.

Consider the “independent” Senate created under Justin Trudeau. Despite the lofty talk of merit over patronage, these senators generally vote with the government. The same pattern appears on the bench, where premiers from Alberta to Quebec have pleaded for greater provincial input into federal judicial appointments, citing concerns over ideological tilt and the elevation of activist lawyers.

Conservative MPs I speak with are understandably frustrated by the diminishment of partisanship. They point to the government’s sidelining of all-party committee work, opposition motions and substantive debate in the House of Commons. Their constituents lament that it has all become political theatre; they want to see less talk and more action.

In Alberta, where regional grievances already simmer and separatist sentiment remains concentrated among conservative voters, the denigration of partisanship carries real consequences. It erodes trust in federal institutions, diminishes the role of the official Opposition as a legitimate voice for regional interests on energy, fiscal fairness and resource development, and leaves many Western Canadians feeling that Ottawa operates as a closed shop dressed in the fashionable clothing of independence and unity.

Back to Charlie. Like everyone who had the privilege of knowing him, I wish he were still with us as Canada navigates this uncertain future. We could sorely use his nation-building drive, his engineer’s pragmatism, and his genuine respect for dissenting voices — even when they challenged his own. While he deeply disliked partisanship and its public spectacle, he was ruthlessly focused on results. He would almost certainly do whatever it took to get things built.

The deeper question for Carney is whether his government’s outcomes will ultimately be worth the price of diminished partisanship — and whether Canadians, particularly in the West, will forgive its marginalization.

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