Canada’s Most Popular Conservative Is Mark Carney
https://thewalrus.ca/canadas-most-popular-conservative-is-mark-carney/
Canada’s Most Popular Conservative Is Mark Carney
https://thewalrus.ca/canadas-most-popular-conservative-is-mark-carney/
8 Comments
He’s a centrist technocrat that governs **for every** Canadian. Not just pushing Liberal (or Conservative) agendas.
I know our far right/left media does not like that fact, and they’ll continue to attack him for being level headed and pragmatic, but the average Canadian is delighted (as the polls suggest).
I wonder where he would sit, with the same policies, in the 1970s Progressive Conservative party. Definitely on the “Progressive” side. Would he be seen as a “Red Tory”?
Carney is what the Conservatives have pretended to be for a long time.
But he is a liberal in the classical sense.
That doesn’t automatically mean he is taking social and environmental concerns into account. It just means he favours open markets and economic growth as solutions to most of our problems. Which isn’t always the case IMH, which is why the NDP has value
The Conservative Party can have value too once they drop their negative issue politics.
The thing is, most internet denizens who have been self-proclaiming themselves as “Conservatives” for the past couple of years (i.e. since COVID) actually can’t stand the guy – based on what they post online *and what they say when they call into AM radio stations* (that’s how you know these aren’t just all “Russian bots”).
I don’t understand it myself – I’ve never considered myself a “conservative” – perhaps a fiscal conservative at best.
But I think what I’m saying is that the word “conservative” itself has shifted to the right in the past 6 years, and perhaps now when you use that term you’re referring to someone who is just a few steps away from the “far-right” demarcation point.
The headline is nonsense of course.
The premise is that Carney’s actions are self-evidently “conservative”. There is no attempt to validate this.
It’s as easy to make the opposite argument, that Carney’s actions are self-evidently “liberal”.
Still waiting to see him do anything remotely notable besides give nice soundbites. It is funny seeing Liberals flip flop between “look at him being tough on Trump and not conceding” and also “he needs to concede to Trump right now so we don’t piss him off” to excuse anything he does. But if you are someone who politically doesn’t really want any significant changes and thinks solving the housing crisis is as simple as “build some more houses I guess” then he probably seems amazing.
Too bad for the conservatives that they cannot get a right wing leader than more people like. They have sold their soul to the small but very vocal and powerful fringe element and thus are stuck in perpetual ground hog day limbo. To get elected leader of the party you have to pander to that element and talk up their polices. But associating with some of those people and their policies makes it very tough to get elected nationally.
Mark Carney is not ideologically a conservative. He is a Liberal of the Radical Centrist tradition. He’d of fit right in with Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. I know it’s been a long time since the last time Canada had a Liberal PM like this, but there’s more than one tradition in the Liberal party. In fact, the Trudeaus were the exceptions, not the norm. Mark Carney is very much the norm.