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To millions of urban progressives and even some would-be Conservative voters as well, it also promised stern resolve in the face of Donald Trump’s threats and a posture of dogged independence from his hard right administration on the world stage. Above all else, a re-elected Liberal government would (unlike Poilievre’s Conservatives) use its mandate to protect workers, reinvest in Canadian culture, and develop a more self-reliant economy amid the disintegration of free trade. This was, at least in theory, a sweeping vision for reform anchored in a tough-minded but fundamentally egalitarian liberalism.

Or so it seemed. The Liberal practice of campaigning on the left then governing from the right is, by now, a hallowed Canadian tradition worthy of its own Heritage Minute. But, even to early critics of Carney ), the speed with which his government has spurned the soaring vision of economic patriotism and national renewal that got it elected has been astonishing to behold. With this having apparently served its purpose back in April, a much more conservative ethos has become the government’s modus operandi.

Let’s start with the cuts.

There has always been a certain slipperiness to Carney’s economic rhetoric which has, from the very beginning, leaned heavily on the Goldilocks pledge to “spend less� while “investing more.� And for what it’s worth, the government does at least seem intent on keeping one half of this promise. 

In letters sent out by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne in advance of this fall’s federal budget, every minister in cabinet was recently instructed to find “ambitious savings� — read: cuts — over the next 3 years (in particular areas, the Department for Women and Gender Equality, the cuts look set to be much deeper). The same principle will evidently extend to Crown corporations and other publicly-funded institutions like the CBC — which could find its annual funding slashed by up to $198 million over the next three years. Cuts similarly loom at the National Research Council, The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Statistics Canada, and countless others that play a vital role in civil society (notably, the Canada Border Services Agency, the Department of National Defence, and the RCMP have all been given much lower targets). 

This is, to say the least, an odd idea of “nation-building.� If enacted, cuts on this scale  even those made by Stephen Harper and could eliminate  from the public service. What’s more, there was little indication during the campaign that such cuts would be coming (the deliberate slipperiness of their campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, the Liberal platform committed to “capping, not cutting, public service employment.�) In record time, it would seem, the government’s promised new vision of economic nationalism has quickly given way to something more akin to DOGE North, the slash-and-burn “Department of Government Efficiency� in the U.S. initially helmed by Elon Musk.

When it comes to the Carney government’s abrupt reversals, its budding austerity program is just the beginning. In a fruitless effort to make nice with Donald Trump, it is elsewhere pushing a border bill that has been  ²¹²Ô»åÌý by Amnesty International as an attack on the rights of those seeking asylum. Taking this futile strategy even further, the government has also capitulated to Trump by  plans for a Digital Services Tax on Big Tech companies and is reportedly  signing on to his proposed multibillion-dollar “Golden Domeâ€� missile defence initiative. 

On that latter point, in a  for the Globe and Mail, former Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy summed up the absurdity of the Carney government’s posture: “After winning an election on a clear promise to assert a more independent foreign and defence policy — including a move away from reliance on U.S. weaponry, military strategy and security doctrine — this is more than just a baffling development. It’s a betrayal of the vision Canadians voted for.�

Whether you voted Liberal or not, you have to admit Axworthy has a point — and it’s one  as well. Taken together, the Carney government’s approach is one that shares more ground with the right than with the activist spirit of postwar governance that gave us Medicare, public pensions, and the National Housing Program. 

It’s also one with clear (and dubious) precedent in recent history. In 1993, when the Liberals were returned to power after nearly a decade of Conservative rule, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin duly thanked the electorate with a budget slashed unemployment insurance, gutted social assistance, cut billions from health, education, and other social transfers to provinces and territories, handed pink slips to some 45,000 public servants, and federal funding for affordable housing. Three decades later, these cuts still over our country’s social fabric, living on, as they do, in the likes of underfunded services, weakened infrastructure, deepened social inequality, and an over-financialized housing market that will take decades to repair. 

Having signalled the opposite in the election campaign last spring, the Carney government evidently hopes to lead Canadians down this same path yet again, into a bold new era of dramatically-reduced social expenditure and trickle down economic development where cuts are sold to us as investments and becoming “Masters in our own homeâ€� means nothing more than a deregulated business climate; where it’s made easier to , millionaires  ³Ù³ó±ð¾±°ùÌý, and our “economic destinyâ€� is something we realize by bending the knee to foreign giants like Google and Netflix; where Ottawa spends  on security and defence while imposing austerity elsewhere; and, in the face of all this, the government has the audacity to call it “nation-building.â€�

The tragedy, of course, is that Canada desperately needs the kind of progressive, interventionist approach so many were led to believe a Carney government would bring. Another round of deregulation and pro-corporate policy-making, it hardly needs saying, won’t lower rents or shorten hospital wait times, just as gutting an already underfunded public sector will not magically spur growth or make our democratic institutions stronger. Trump’s threats, by the same token, will not be deterred by a policy of conciliation — let alone by new in American military hardware. 

This is, quite plainly, not the sort of nation-building millions thought they were voting for. If Carney was sold to the electorate as a banker with a social conscience, Carney in practice seems to quite simply be a banker: a technocrat unable or perhaps unwilling to look beyond the discredited market dogmas of the past forty years or envision any proactive role for the federal government in the economy beyond making life easier for large companies and the people who own them (be they Canadian or otherwise). For decades now, this approach — and its attendant economic effects — has delivered us top-heavy growth, stagnant wages, and depleted social programs. In the United States, and throughout much of Europe, it has helped erode confidence in democratic institutions while weakening civil society and injecting new life into the far right. 

As a strategy for “nation-building� it is oxymoronic. But, in a moment of economic turmoil and global uncertainty, it is also one bound to leave us much less well-positioned to weather the storm. It’s been barely three months, but Canada’s new government has already traded wartime stock footage and the slogans of the Quiet Revolution for austerity and cuts without missing a beat. Elbows up, indeed.