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Mark Carney Is Dismantling Canada

The prime minister is taking apart the political order he inherited. What replaces it?

Mark Carney is often described as a disruptor prime minister, and this explains, to many people, how he managed to beat Pierre Poilievre in 2025. Canadians wanted change from the status quo and from the Justin Trudeau Liberals, and, until Carney came along, Poilievre was the only candidate offering it. Against Trudeau, Poilievre was unquestionably the disruptor candidate—the guy who was going to fire people, repeal things, bulldoze through Ottawa’s gatekeepers, and drag the country into something new, whether everyone was ready for it or not.

Then Carney arrived and offered Canadians change without Poilievre. He offered them a way out of the Trudeau era without requiring them to embrace Poilievre as the only vehicle for change. He didn’t look disruptive, but he looked different enough—and, more importantly, stable enough—that people who wanted change but didn’t particularly want Poilievre suddenly had another option.

But what if we’ve diagnosed Carney incorrectly? Because if we’re assessing him as a disruptor, we’re going to keep asking the wrong questions about what he’s doing and, more importantly, what he plans to leave behind. What if Carney is something else entirely? What if he’s a dismantler?

I think there’s a very strong case to be made that he is, and that isn’t entirely negative. Some things need to be dismantled. Some institutions are so bloated, broken, slow, or trapped in their own processes that shaking them up isn’t enough. But dismantling is very different from disrupting, and the distinction matters because a dismantler doesn’t just change how an inherited system works. He removes the inherited system and creates an empty space where something else will eventually have to go.

Poilievre is a disruptor. He wants to radically change what the federal government does, but he still imagines himself taking control of the same government, the same Parliament, the same public service and the same political structure. He wants to march into the inherited house, fire the contractors, rip out the Liberal’s ugly cabinets, and install his own.

United States president Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a destabilizer. He shakes everything at the root to see what falls out, spends an enormous amount of political capital on shock and awe, and then moves his agenda through while everyone else is staring at the chaos. Immigration raids, shootings involving federal immigration agents, sudden tariffs, annexation threats, attacks on allies, and military strikes on Iran all arrive in overlapping waves, until nobody can tell whether the latest crisis is the actual policy or merely cover for another one.

Carney doesn’t operate that way at all. In fact, he does the opposite. Carney projects calm, normalcy, and an almost aggressive form of “everything is fine” energy. He exudes competence and stability, he likes tradition, he appears to value relationships, and he’s very good at maintaining them. He doesn’t come at institutions with a wrecking ball while shouting that they’re corrupt; he comes at them like the new chairman of the board, thanks everyone for their service, commissions a review, and then quietly makes half the organizational chart disappear.

The longer I watch Carney, the more convinced I am that this is what defines him. He dismantles everything around him that he believes has to be reinvented, and then he either builds something very different in its place or intentionally leaves the second part—the rebuilding—to someone else.

The most important evidence for Carney as a dismantler is sitting directly across from him in the House of Commons, although I’m not sure the Conservatives have realized it yet. Carney hasn’t merely beaten the Conservative Party. He has dismantled the political purpose the Conservatives spent a decade building for themselves.

Poilievre’s entire project depended on a clear division between the Liberals and Conservatives. The Liberals were the party of the consumer carbon tax, endless consultations, expanding bureaucracy, environmental roadblocks, weak defence spending, slow infrastructure approvals, uncontrolled immigration, rising crime, and an economy that seemed to require three permits and a federal grant before anyone could build a shed.

The Conservatives were supposed to be the opposite. They would axe the tax, cut the bureaucracy, build things, develop resources, restore defence, tighten immigration, get tough on crime, and make government move faster. Then Carney walked in, looked at the most popular parts of Poilievre’s political identity, and started taking them.

He eliminated the consumer carbon price. He embraced pipelines, resource development, major projects, faster approvals, economic nationalism, defence spending, a smaller public service, and a harder-edged view of national sovereignty. His first major legislative project, Bill C-5, gave cabinet significant powers to move nationally important projects more quickly, and the Conservatives helped him pass it.

Poilievre and the Conservatives keep pointing at Carney and complaining that he stole their ideas. Of course he did. That’s part of the dismantling. A conventional opponent tries to prove your ideas are wrong. Carney recognized that the more effective strategy was to take the useful ideas, separate them from Poilievre, and leave the Conservatives guarding the empty box they used to come in.

Poilievre seems to have believed that because he’d spent years talking about these policies, voters would naturally choose him to implement them. That was his arrogance, and Carney made use of it. He understood that many voters wanted parts of the Conservative program but didn’t necessarily want the person delivering it, the online army surrounding him, or the exhausting atmosphere of grievance and retaliation that followed him everywhere.

That alone would have been a political dismantling, but Carney went further. The opposition didn’t just lose control of its ideas; it began physically coming apart. Four members of Parliament elected as Conservatives crossed the floor to join the Liberals, while a New Democratic Party MP also moved to Carney’s benches. Those defections, followed by Liberal victories in three April 2026 by-elections, turned Carney’s minority into a majority without another general election.

The Conservatives’ response has mostly been to become more suspicious of one another. Everyone is a traitor, an eastern insider, an establishment plant, or a secret Liberal. The party that was supposed to replace the government has been reduced to a paranoid, infighting husk pointing at Carney and yelling that everything he’s doing originally belonged to them.

Yes, it did. That’s the point. Carney knows who his opponents aren’t, and he makes use of their weaknesses. Poilievre’s weakness is arrogance, and Carney has turned it against him: every complaint that the Liberals stole his ideas only reinforces the impression that Carney can deliver change without him.

Carney is taking his policies, taking his MPs, taking the centre-right voters who don’t like Poilievre, and taking the political space in which the next Conservative leader would normally try to rebuild. Meanwhile, Poilievre is settling scores inside his own party and making videos about the Dairy Queen hamburgers he likes—apparently they’ve gone from $2 to $3.99—while Carney reshapes Canada’s defence alliances, trade architecture, federal workforce, energy strategy, and relationship with the provinces.

The price of a Dairy Queen........

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