Carney to defund Canada

We've seen this movie before

Screen grab from CityNews of Carney and Smith cosplaying as red necks

In 1995, the Liberal Party introduced a revolutionary budget. It pulled tens of billions of dollars out of public services and transfered the savings to the banks through paying off public debts. EI was fully defunded. Services evaporated. Crowns were sold off. Transfer payments to the provinces were cut.

It was the crowning acheivement of the Chrétien-Martin era — the budget that heralded in no uncertain terms, that neoliberalism was firmly Canada’s prevailing political ideology. You can read more about it in my new book, The Social Safety Net.

It took years for those cuts to make their way through the provinces and municipalities, but we see their impacts still today: crumbling healthcare that is more and more private, incredible levels of student debt, a national housing crisis, and so on.

Thirty years later, it seems that history repeats itself. Once again, we have a Liberal government that is promising to fix all the problems that we face, by defunding the Canadian state.

Carney’s target is radical. Like, truly radical. Or, as the Globe and Mail calls it, “ambitious.” They are asking ministers to make annual cuts starting at 7.5% and moving to 15% in three years. It was like my public sector finance class in undergrad where we were told to take an Ontario ministry budget and cut it by 10%. I asked if I could instead increase a budget by 10%. No, my prof said. In protest, I took the ministry of northern development and mines and managed to cut 30% by cutting mines.

Carney’s target, though less aggressive than my protest assignment, is also more “ambitious” than anything that Stephen Harper was able to acheive.

Fast tracking oil and gas projects, promising new pipelines, defunding the state, bowing to Trump, pushing through large projects regardless of Indigenous reaction, tripling military spending, ramping up surveillance at the border and sticking to the anti-immigrant trend announced by outgoing Justin Trudeau — Carney has been busy in his less-than three months of being PM. Busy and signaling to the corporate class that he is their guy.

The problem with this strategy is that it’s the exact opposite of what Canada needs right now, or of what Canadians said they wanted by voting for him. You cannot build a stronger Canada by cutting 15% out of the state (more, if we assume that the Department of Defense’s budget will triple). You cannot build a stronger Canada by allowing the historic gap between the rich and the poor to persist. You cannot build a stronger Canada without investing in research, development, culture, public broadcasting and arts. And you certainly cannot build a stronger Canada by jumping in bed with the same country that wants to annex you.

Because if we believe that Canada deserves to exist, we need to have strong internal systems to protect and secure Canadians. The biggest threats we face don’t come from China, or even the United States. The biggest threats we face come from our own corporate class. The biggest threats are human trafficking to force low-paid work, the conditions of work for temporary foreign workers, refugee claimants who are denied their claim and forced into unsafe situations, a toxic drug crisis that has murdered tens of thousands, a housing crisis that pushes people out onto the streets, or over extends their budget by forcing them to work too much to pay rent to line the pockets of REIT investors, a food insecurity crisis that has lead to almost 75% of one Ontario town’s residents to rely on the food bank, environmental catastrophe upon environmental catastrophe. And these crises conspire to make classrooms and hospitals more dangerous, children more violent, health outcomes be worse and mental health crises explode. Women are less safe. The elderly are less safe. Racialized people are less safe. The working class is less safe.

Carney doesn’t actually care about any of this. He is a bought and sold politician; a man who is an expert in working for the corporate class. As my last two books explore, Canada is corporate controlled, dominated by a few corporate leaders who have tilted politics towards their interests, and this control is destroying us. The corporate class is the lobby that the politicians look to, to lower taxes and deregulate systems — all at a cost to all of us. When Carney agrees to not charge taxes to the wealthiest tech companies on the planet, he is saying: here — Canadian taxes will subsidize your operations. Don’t worry about it. We don’t need your money to pay for our services. We don’t really need those services at all.

This is happening against a backdrop where the govenrment wants you to believe that the real threat to you is posed by China, Russia and Iran. That the only real way to keep you safe is to raise our collective military spending to $150 billion. That would be equivalent to what is spent, in total, for all primary through to higher education combined in all of Canada ($152B in 2021/22). The military, which produces some of Canada’s most violent extremists. The military, to which four people who have just been arrested for creating an anti-government melitia, are connected. The military, an engine of sexual violence. I can’t think of the last time that UBC or UofA or Queen’s or the Toronto District School Board accidentally spawned a group of armed students who practiced to take down Canada from the inside.

This is a descent into fascism. By defunding the state and over-funding the military, Canada is careening towards disaster. And unsurprisingly, the voices that are paid by the corporate class, are cheering this descent on. Canadians desperately need income inequality to be rebalanced — it’s the source of so much of what makes us all unsafe — and yet, by choosing to defund the state, Mark Carney is clearly picking his side, and probably hoping that his increased spending on security forces will save him from the consequences.

To read more about all of this, you must borrow or purchase the Canada in Decline series — Book One, The Social Safety Net and Book Two, Corporate Control, anywhere you get your books.