Joe Oliver: Team Carney is already in need of a reset

Prime Minister Mark Carney signs a document at the end of a meeting of the federal cabinet in West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 14, 2025. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

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What a Trudeauesque beginning to the Liberals’ fourth consecutive term — theatre, false starts, evasion and unaccountability, but absent the sunny ways! The technocrat’s prologue risks rivalling the drama teacher’s denouement.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney presents a reassuring figure because of his economic chops. Yet he initially directed his finance minister not to table a budget this year. When such blatant contempt for accountability produced a backlash, he backed off and now a budget will come in the fall. What it most needs to do is address Canada’s economic decline. Over the past decade, we have had the largest increases in government spending and debt in the G7 and the second slowest growth in real GDP per capita in the OECD, ahead of only Luxembourg. Carney plans to hide the ballooning deficit by distinguishing operating and capital budgets and reclassifying much expenditure as investment. Credit agencies and investors will not be fooled though the PM presumably hopes a credulous public will be.

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The overarching public concern that helped get Carney elected was Donald Trump’s tariffs, which, in spite of warm atmospherics at their White House meeting, the president has not yet reduced — as he has for China and the U.K., his most formidable foe and one of his best friends, respectively.

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And now we learn that Carney had earlier reduced most of Canada’s retaliatory tariffs to zero, which may explain why Trump was so complimentary at their meeting. During the campaign candidate Carney stoked the fear factor and promised to keep his “elbows up.” It turns out he has kept his head bowed and his hands up, and now he has to make up $20 billion in lost revenue from the cancelled retaliatory tariffs. Give him credit for chutzpah but not for candour — which seems to be a pattern.

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His ministers have also made missteps. Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s minister of climate change, now minister of culture and identity, could not let go his radical obsessions and last week undermined the prime minister’s apparent willingness to at least consider new pipelines. Just how sincere that willingness is can be questioned, however. Despite claiming to favour resource development, Carney will not commit to removing the regulatory and statutory impediments to development. Talk is cheap.

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The Liberals do not seem to realize that the world, not just the U.S., is moving away from exorbitant green policies. Former U.K. Labour prime minister Tony Blair recently said net-zero policies are increasingly viewed as “unaffordable, ineffective, or politically toxic” and efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the short term are “doomed to fail.” Canadians increasingly understand that for economic, strategic, health and social reasons we should develop, not shut in, our immense natural resources, and they have lost patience with gestures that hurt but cannot meaningfully reduce global emissions.

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For her part, new Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Anand startled many observers by reciting Hamas talking points while condemning Israel’s war in Gaza. Then her boss threatened sanctions against Israel if it continues military action aimed at securing the release of its hostages and disarming the genocidal terrorist organization that started the war with a massacre. No wonder Hamas just thanked Canada.

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Carney and Anand seemed either oblivious to or unconcerned by the fact that one-sided criticism risks exacerbating domestic antisemitism and increasing the vulnerability of a community experiencing unprecedented attacks against its institutions, as well as harassment, threats and violence directed at its people. In 2023, according to police reports, 70 per cent of religiously-motivated hate crimes targeted the Jewish community, which represents less than one per cent of Canada’s population. Federal, provincial and municipal governments have failed inexcusably to protect Jewish citizens from illegal aggression that would not be tolerated if directed at any other identifiable minority. As a result, antisemitism has been almost normalized. The prime minister has an ethical obligation to provide moral and practical leadership to counter this assault on Jewish Canadians’ human rights.