Carney Tricked Strategic Voters; some are starting to realize it

Pierre Poilievre was the real 2025 Election winner

A small but perceptive number of Canadians warned their fellow citizens in the spring: if you vote for Mark Carney, there will only be two winners: the capitalist class, and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

Most didn’t listen, and voted for the Liberals anyway. Now consequences are being felt. Carney is not only keeping many of the right-wing promises he made, such as gutting the carbon tax and capital gains tax, but he’s making rightward moves in DIRECT opposition to his election promises.

He promised to fight Trump with an “elbows up” mentality, only to let Trump dictate our domestic tax policy in a way that benefits American billionaires over Canadian workers. He ran on a budget that would cap public service spending at 2% increases, only to revise that to 15% CUTS after the votes had been locked in. And while Carney promised increased money for many “nation building” programs like Via Rail and the CBC—including a specific $150 million dollar increase pledge for the latter—he is now demanding they find major cuts that will hamper their ability to function and proliferate Canadian culture and connectivity.

The NDP said all of this would happen, although I think even many party officials are surprised by just how quickly Carney has shifted to the right, which includes alliances in Parliament with the Conservatives to pass the throne speech and ram through bill C-5 without full debate (silencing many Indigenous leaders in the consultative process).

Any way you slice it, Poilievre is the winner of the 2025 Canadian Federal Election, even if he lost his own seat. As I noted on March 8th for Ricochet (before Carney was even selected as Liberal leader), his victory would ultimately be a triumph for Poilievre because Carney’s platform was largely a copy of Pierre’s biggest hits:

Canadians are rightly frustrated with the status quo, but Carney is the status quo personified. He is offering a bargain to the 1 per cent in Canada: I can give you what Poilievre is promising, with less drama…Mark Carney didn’t come back to Canada to help the working class; he came back to crush it.

But Poilievre isn’t merely a winner because Carney copied his platform and outflanked him on the right (doing things like threatening abortion privacy in a way even Harper didn’t). Poilievre also wins because even he knew many of his moves would be unpopular. Cutting jobs and programs while giving big tax cuts to billionaires is never popular, even among right-of-centre voters, and he would have had to spend major political capital if he won to implement these policies.

And because Liberals wouldn’t support what Carney’s doing if a Conservative was doing the identical thing, he would have been confronted by bigger protests (as Harper was in prior to the 2015 election)

So this is the best of both worlds for him. He gets to sit back and watch Carney do his dirty work, which will only serve to anger Canadians and increase his chance at power, looking more moderate now in comparison to the increasingly right-wing Carney.

The CBC cuts really did seem to awaken some strategic voters and even a few Carney fans. But people need to remember this lesson when the next election comes. A vote for the Liberal Party is a vote for Pierre Poilievre and his toxic capitalist ideology.