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Canada’s Left Is in Crisis. Can Avi Lewis Revive It?

As Mark Carney’s deceptive centrism pushes the country to the right, Avi Lewis offers a compelling alternative.

After his much-celebrated speech at Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney won global applause for offering what seemed like a ringing declaration of independence from Trumpism. Carney both acutely diagnosed the hypocrisy of the liberal international order (noting that it had always held adversaries to a standard from which the United States and its preferred allies were exempt) and presented an alternative perspective where middle-powers such as Canada would chart their own way.

On paper, Carney offered an alluring vision, but the reality of his policies is much more muddled, as his response to the current Iran war makes clear. Over the last two weeks, Carney has issued a series of contradictory and confusing statements on Iran, making clear that his supposed resistance to Trumpism disguises a deeper complicity with the autocratic president.

As the BBC notes, “Carney expressed strong support for the initial strikes when they launched a week ago, arguing for the value of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. According to Carney, the war was necessary to prevent Iran ‘from further threatening international peace and security.’” A few days later, Carney said he supported the war “with regret” because the bombing of Iran seemed “inconsistent with international law.” On Friday, in the wake of reports that a Canadian military base in Kuwait had been hit, Carney stated, “We are not engaged in these actions of the U.S. and Israel. We’re not engaged in offensive actions, and we will not be engaged in those actions.”

Carney’s shifting response to the crisis is in keeping with the dithering of other US allies such as Germany and France, which have also tried to stay on Donald Trump’s good side by providing rhetorical support for the conflict while avoiding any tangible commitments of their own. The core problem with these obfuscatory policies is that they betray a fundamental principle of international law: the prohibition of wars of choice. Or, to put it another way, they violate the need for governments to be “principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights.” The person who said that? Mark Carney, at Davos.

Writing in the Toronto Star, Lloyd Axworthy, who served as foreign minister of Canada in a Liberal government from 1996 to 2000, contrasted Carney’s initial support for the Iran War with the Liberal government’s much stronger opposition to George W. Bush’s equally illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Carney, Axworthy argued, had abandoned a core Canadian commitment to building a world “constrained by rules.”

The Iran War is not the only example of Carney’s shape-shifting and abandonment of progressive principles. As I argued in a recent profile of the Canadian prime minister, Carney has always been a two-faced figure. His signature move has been to combine progressive rhetoric with right-wing policies.

The Carney that Canadians encounter on the campaign trail, or in his 2021 book Value(s), often sounds like a left-liberal or even Bernie Sanders–style social democrat, upbraiding neoliberalism for corroding social solidarity and its failing to deal with pressing problems such as pandemic preparedness and climate change. But his policy solutions are almost always an intensification of the neoliberalism that he claims to reject. In office, Carney has pushed for austerity on social policy, much greater military spending, and new trade agreements to shore up globalization.

Writing in Spring last December, Alex Hunsberger accurately noted that “the new Liberal government is effectively a Conservative government under different branding. Tax cuts, austerity, and a huge increase in military spending are the hallmarks of an agenda that looks far more like imitating US President Donald Trump than standing up to him.” Carney has also abandoned previous Liberal Party commitments to the environment by canceling a carbon tax and pushing for new pipelines.

It would be easy to dismiss Carney as a fraud, a politician who uses anti-Trump rhetoric to push a Trumpist........

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