4mo ago

A Carney in charge of the circus

noraloreto.substack.com

The reality is that the next federal election will not save us, and regardless of what you think of my writing, you certainly know this deep down. Even a Carney reprieve is unlikely to stave off an even more rabid Conservative party in the next election after this one. But if we aren’t clear-eyed about what is happening, then we sure as hell cannot see where we’re going. And to have a banker, a CEO’s man in the office of Prime Minister, it is going to bring with it a world of challenges that near certainly will pave the road for someone worse than Poilievre.

29 comments

The anti-Carney bullshit has started. They're afraid. Good.
- I mean yeah they (the conservatives) are afraid but Nora Loreto is a leftist activist. If anything, this is more inline with the left's anti Harris movement than the CP trying to do some damage control.
  
  She specifically writes that it's no different between the Liberals and Conservatives, and goes further to say Carney would pave the road for someone worse than PP. That's just straight up delusional.
  
  They need to hear about perfect, the enemy of good
  
  Only, thankfully, in Canada we don't have a stupid two-party system that forces people to make impossible choices. In Canada such a framing would only apply to the ridings swinging between L and C. But other than that, we're a pluralistic democracy and I see no reason why left wing critiques of the center should be shouted down.
  
  Six of one half dozen of the other.
  Spreading anti-Carney bullshit helps no one but the Conservatives.
- What a bad faith thought-stopping thing to say. Check my post history, I'm not here to shill for whatever.
  
  And yet... the end result is the same.
  The Harris supports genocide crowd in the US helped elect a fascist dictator who whole throatedly supports the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Do you think that electing a career politician who has never had a real job and who says nothing but I'm going to magically fix everything and I'm not Justin Trudeau who is going to cut taxes on the wealthy, cut services to everyone else to pay for it, run up the deficit and the debt, then retire to a fat lobbyist job when they are defeated in the next election is going to help your cause? Naivity will help elect a Trump wannabe in Canada, embolden the anti-rights christofascists, and enable the racists who support them.
  If you're campaigning against the Liberals you are campaigning for the Conservatives.
  You may not think you're shilling but I have news for you.
This is trying to pretend that Carney, and therefore Liberal Party, is to the right of CPC. PP saying that we need to answer hardships from trade war with tax cuts for oligarchs, disqualifies him and party from consideration.
Oh substack, the platform that allow Nazis and such.
Carney has a reputation for being a Keynesian, as far as I know, which means we should hope to see a new wave of federal investment in infrastructure and a topping up of social programs. The wave of painting him as "every CEO's best buddy" seems really weird in that context, because the CEO's mantra since Regan has been "austerity and tax cuts".
Like, yes, he's not going to overthrow the system, but maybe Loretto should spend more time talking smack about the NDP's choices in the last eight years rather than complaining that the party of the system isn't radical enough to upend it.
I'm so tired of the leftist obsession with the Liberals, and how our constant attempts to be "right" do more to empower the far right at the expense of the centre than they do to bolster the left in any meaningful way.
It's like the whole movement is built on being a wet blanket.
- My understanding is that Carney is a pragmatist, rather than a Keynesian per se, so he's not shied away from using Keynesian economics in times of crisis. I think he self-described himself like that in his first post-election speech. So, I would think that if the trade war with the US becomes a crisis, a Carney cabinet would not shy away from government stimulus. But that's not to say that in "regular times" he would do not operate as a run-of-the-mill neoliberal.
Carney will conventionally do the most conventional thing that can be justified by conventional economics, as is his passion. It will not solve our problems. Neither will it lead to an "even more rabid" future Conservative party, if he somehow does keep them out of power this time. The party and the people will have seen rabid populist wreck-everything politics fail to win an election in Canada and bring the USA to ruin. They are likely to want to try something else.
- It will not solve our problems.
  Well, yea, I mean that's the whole point of the article.
  Now one might agree or disagree with the claim of an "even more rabid conservative party", but recent experience kind of validates that, right? Biden was a parenthesis in between two fascist waves, and similarly Draghi (someone exceptionally similar to Carney) was a parenthesis between the 5SM and Meloni. Elsewhere in Europe, too, centrists like Macron or Starmer of Scholz have not addressed the underlying issues that bolster the far right and seem to just be only helping to move the Overton Window so that they end up being "the left".
Finally some leftist critique of what's been going on with the Liberal party lately. I feel like everyone got so swept up in the fervour of "oh my god, the Conservatives might not win a landslide this election, this is a miracle!" that they forgot that electing someone further to the right of Trudeau in an already centrist party is no win for leftists.

29 comments