a day ago
Michael Taube: No, Globe and Mail, Mark Carney isn't the second coming of Brian Mulroney
Mark Carney has been prime minister of Canada since March. He's been called many things by many people in this short time period. It never came to mind that he would be described as a 'progressive conservative' along the lines of Brian Mulroney.
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This, in a nutshell, is the nonsense that the Globe and Mail's editorial board is currently peddling.
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'That Mr. Carney was going to drag the Liberal Party back to the centre after years of an NDP-lite government under Mr. Trudeau was to be expected,' a June 28 Globe editorial noted. 'But more than mannerisms have changed. Since April, the Prime Minister has cut personal income taxes, boosted defence spending dramatically, pledged to cut the cost of the federal bureaucracy, tightened immigration rules, eliminated federal barriers to internal trade, created a framework for breaking the stasis on big national projects and signaled that he will dismiss underperforming top bureaucrats,' they wrote.
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The Globe's editorial board suggested 'that's an agenda that Brian Mulroney could have endorsed.'
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This analysis likely raised a few eyebrows, and not just in the Mulroney household. Alas, the editorial writers then flipped their collective wig with this bizarre assessment. 'In fact, it overlaps a good deal with the actual governing record of his Progressive Conservatives. Mr. Carney is a Liberal but, in the early going, he looks to be governing much like a Red Tory — a progressive kind of conservative.'
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We shouldn't be surprised by the Globe's over-the-top analysis of Carney's leadership. It's become the raison d'être of this once-venerable publication to carry water for this particular prime minister.
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Nevertheless, let's be serious about our national leader. Carney is certainly a progressive, but he's no 'progressive conservative' in any way, shape or form.
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Left-leaning progressive conservatives, or Red Tories, generally combine two ideological components: classical conservative sensibilities (espoused by High Tories like philosopher Edmund Burke and former U.K. prime minister Benjamin Disraeli) and socialist-type policies such as government intrusion and developing a social safety net.
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As Gad Horowitz, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, wrote in the May-June 1965 issue of the defunct left-wing magazine Canadian Dimension, 'socialism has more in common with Toryism than with liberalism, for liberalism is possessive individualism, while socialism and Toryism are variants of collectivism.'
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Modern conservatism has little in common with classical conservatism. The former has largely incorporated classical liberal and libertarian ideals into its main ideology, while maintaining a smattering of social conservative principles related to individuals and families. That's why modern conservatives typically champion small government, lower taxes, free markets, private enterprise, greater individual rights and freedoms and so forth.
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Carney doesn't fit into these conservative-leaning parameters. His progressive values do fit within the context of the modern Liberal Party of Canada. While he's not exactly the same as Trudeau, I pointed out in a March 16 National Post column that they're 'remarkably similar.' How so? In my estimation, 'they're both left-wing, pro-government intervention, distrust privatization and free markets, favour wealth redistribution, champion radical environmentalist policies, support woke ideology and political correctness — and more.' That's what today's Liberals basically stand for, and Carney's personal and political record fits like a glove.
