Mark Carney is now poised to easily win the federal Liberal Party’s leadership contest. 

While many expected a close contest versus former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, it now appears that Carney has well over 50 per cent support, is dominating fundraising, and could win on the first ballot. Further, he also has the most Liberal MP endorsements despite the fact that he has never been in Parliament.

But Carney is not driving this momentum on the back of progressive policy. Rather, he is making a dog-whistle promise to Canada’s capitalist elite that he is even more conservative than the already centre-right Justin Trudeau: That he will adopt key policies from Pierre Poilievre, but be an even-keeled steward of Canada’s capitalist project.

To his credit, Carney is poised to fill this role. He boasts a resume that appeals to both right-wing capitalists who love the economic elite, but also liberals who venerate institutional respectability. In other words, Carney is telling Bay Street and others that he will deliver a conservative program better than the Conservatives ever could. With this in mind, Carney’s early moves have been deliberately calculated to poach many of Poilievre’s plans, albeit framed more tactfully.

Indeed, Poilievre himself has been harking with frustration that Carney is pilfering his platform’s central elements. Even though Poilievre insists Carney is being disingenuous in his copying, the fact remains that Carney’s right-wing maneuver has been effective at jarring the Conservative Party.

This is the foundation Carney’s campaign is built upon. At his official launch, he started a full assault upon the ‘far-left’: “We can’t achieve our full potential with the ideas of the far left. They too often see government as the solution to every problem, with the reflex to spend and subsidize.” 

It’s quite telling that mild social democratic policies are branded by Carney as “far-left.” It’s a clear indication just how right-wing Carney is positioning his potential Prime Ministership at a time when many view the NDP as *anything* but far-left. It’s equally telling that he is mimicking Pierre Poilievre, another man who disingenuously brands his rivals as left-wing extremists.

One early fault line dividing Carney and Poilievre from Justin Trudeau is the capital gains tax, which both have promised to slash in a big giveaway to Canada’s capitalist class. While I and many leftists have been long critical of Trudeau, he and the NDP cooperating to increase the capital gains inclusion rate was a good thing. As I noted in Spring Magazine, the reform partially closed the gap between how labour income and capitalist income is taxed. 

But big banker Carney is taking an axe to this reform. He wants to tell construction workers who labour on a building that they must pay taxes on 100 per cent of their income, whereas the capitalist who sells that building for a profit gets a massive 50 per cent rebate on their taxes. Both Carney and Poilievre are pushing the debunked trickle-down economic justification for cutting taxes on the rich. As reported in the Financial Post, Carney is cutting taxes for the rich as “part of a broader economic plan to stimulate investment.” Poilievre said much the same, arguing that if we don’t cut taxes for the wealthy, they will flee the country.

Both men essentially believe that the capitalist class holding Canada hostage is a good thing; that we must subsidize them so that they can trickle that wealth upon peasant heads in some undefined future.  Carney and Poilievre, of course, will be personally well-off in the meantime while the working class waits for the trickle. 

Similarly, both Carney and are using Trump’s recent aggression to fuel a right-wing economic turn. Both have argued that Trump attacks mean Canada must bend the knee and embrace ‘competitiveness’ over justice. As Poilievre has said: “President Trump has said he wants to tariff our country. We cannot afford economically destructive Liberal taxes that will drive even more business and jobs out of our country.”  In an extremely similar tone, Carney is seizing the moment to push austerity. As per the Toronto Star, “Carney said the Liberal government he now seeks to lead hasn’t shown enough fiscal discipline over the last decade” and quick changes are needed. 

Ultimately, as Nikolas Barry-Shaw aptly noted in The Breach, this is a crisis that can be used to drive Canada rightward in service of the elite:

“For the country’s corporate class, the crisis has spelled opportunity. They’re pushing their long-standing wishlist of corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and austerity… expressing appreciation for the U.S. president’s bullying.”

I and many others have argued just the opposite: that Canada must embrace socialist solutions to Trump’s threats, because Canada’s capitalist class are closer to Trump than the average Canadian working-class person. Canada has tried generations of neoliberal capitalism as pushed by Carney and Poilievre, and they’ve utterly failed to build a robust and self-reliant economy. Worst still, Carney is doubling down on private capitalist orthodoxy while Canada struggles, emphasizing his desire to spur private profits while cutting their costs. Carney feels private investment is the solution to Canada’s housing crisis, for instance, when capitalists have failed to produce the supply to meet the demand for decades now. 

Canadians are rightly frustrated with the status quo, but Carney is the status quo personified. He is offering a bargain to the 1 per cent in Canada: I can give you what Poilievre is promising, with less drama.

Like Michael Ignatieff, Mark Carney didn’t come back to Canada to help the working class; he came back to crush it.

Christo Aivalis is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.