Tom Mulcair: Mark Carney’s Liberals are swinging right with no guardrail left

The Front Bench Panel discusses the government's EV mandate reforms and whether PM Carney is shifting from Trudeau’s climate plan.

Former Harper-era cabinet minister Lisa Raitt — and a fellow CTV News analyst — once summed up, with a knowing smile, what she’d been hearing from voters during the last campaign: They liked Conservative policies, but they wanted Mark Carney to implement them.

At the time, it was just a witty observation. Today, it looks remarkably prescient.

The Liberal art of straddling the centre has always involved a certain amount of légèreté de main. The magician winks left then turns right once the voters are distracted by his sleight of hand.

When Jack Layton invited me into the NDP caucus, prior to my first win for the party, I was surprised by the extent to which the Liberals were a subject of constant reference. The essence was that they were entitled and untrustworthy. That iteration of the NDP, in my view, tended to see itself less as a party of power than as a guardrail to keep the Liberals on track because they couldn’t be trusted to do the progressive things they yakked about.

The Liberals liked to refer to the NDP as ‘Liberals in a hurry.’ The NDP of that era tended to see itself as the ‘conscience of Parliament.’ Well, for now, that conscience is mostly a memory and the Liberals are having a grand old time swinging right, in part because that NDP guardrail has largely collapsed.

Over the last few weeks, hardly a day has gone by without Carney giving another rightward tilt to his steering wheel.

Strike at Air Canada? Bam, order them back to work! Forget about the the fact that collective bargaining rights are defined by the Supreme Court as being Charter rights. This from “the party of the Charter”!

Law and order? Announce a bail reform that would please the Reform Party. Auto manufacturers who were all tooled up to produce a mandatory 20 per cent of their fleet to be zero-emission light-duty vehicles by 2026 barely had to ask. Poof. The requirement was gone. Carney stated, without evidence, that this would provide “immediate financial relief.”

Canada maintains 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles because that’s what the Americans wanted. Being able to buy an inexpensive electric vehicle would’ve provided “immediate financial relief” to hardworking Canadian families but, apparently, they’re not that important.

Of course, Carney had already removed the consumer carbon tax just prior to the election. That helped him snooker Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, but it also made it impossible for Canada to meet its obligations under the Paris climate accord.

Last month, Poilievre went after the electric vehicle mandate, the way he’d gone after the consumer carbon tax. He called it ideology. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly seemed to prove him right: The fight to have policies to fight against climate change can disappear with the stroke of a pen; because it’s ideology.

It’s all ‘smoke and mirrors’

Trudeau often spoke of the need to take care of the environment and the economy at the same time. That’s been thrown overboard by the new government, as Joly said in a recent interview: “We have to be pragmatic, this is not a time for ideology. We need to make sure that we help [the auto] sector – it’s the backbone of Ontario’s economy, it’s the backbone of Canada’s economy."

I was in the room in Paris in 2015 when Justin Trudeau grandly intoned that “Canada is back,” meaning the Liberals were back. He signed the Paris Accord, then failed to ever develop a credible plan to meet our obligations. It was all smoke and mirrors.

During his nine years in office, consecutive reports by Canada’s Sustainable Development Commissioners pointed out that we had no way of reaching our stated goals. It didn’t matter. Canadians who saw the fight against global warming and climate change to be existential, saw Trudeau as their guy.

• More opinion and expert analysis

But Trudeau was the master Liberal magician. He knew how to flash left and turn right. With Joly, that’s all over. The new Liberal government doesn’t even pretend anymore. Trudeau put in a respected environmentalist, Steven Guilbeault, as minister, then he got cabinet, including Guilbeault, to approve a massive offshore oil project at Bay du Nord in N.L. People hardly noticed.

Trudeau’s spokesperson on the environment carried a lot of weight. He knew the game. Apparently, no one trained the new team in the fine art of faking it and people are starting to notice.

‘Climate competitiveness’?

Joly is ham fisted and wouldn’t even say whether the 2030 or 2035 targets were still on, preferring to talk about 2050. Mark Carney knows more about climate change and the environment than any other political leader. That’s what makes the abandonment of Canada’s climate goals all the more galling.

Carney has taken to speaking of “climate competitiveness,” meaning that if we’re competing against countries like the U.S. -- that deny climate change and who’ve abandoned the Paris Accord -- we may as well go along.

In Britain, it was former Conservative Prime Minster Rishi Sunak who delayed a ban on gas and diesel cars and some key green policies, effectively abandoning electric vehicle mandates.

The industry was caught off guard because they were ready to meet their obligations. In fact, Great Britain has been a world leader in the fight against climate change. It mattered little. The Conservatives there, as here, simply don’t believe we have to reduce greenhouse gases to fight global warming and climate change.

They talk about young people but abandon them to a future where the planet itself is in peril. At least in Great Britain, the Conservatives had to have been elected to scrap climate policies. Here, they just have to say “Boo,” and the Liberals do it for them.

Even if the NDP has abandoned its Layton-era goal of forming government, it may still be able to play its older role: Trying, against all odds, to keep the Liberals from becoming the Conservatives. It’s going to be a tough battle.

More from Tom Mulcair:

• Standing up for Canada doesn’t just mean staring down a bully, it means finding new trade partners
• The government’s back-to-work order was Carney’s first major blunder
• Opportunity knocks for the NDP; will they answer?