Mark Carney Brings DOGE to Canada

The Man who campaigned against Donald Trump Mimics him Yet Again

Mark Carney was ultimately elected for one reason above all: He was entrusted to not do what Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Pierre Poilievre would do. That he would avoid the harsh austerity which would harm public services, the Canadians who need them, and the Canadians who deliver them. Many Canadians on election night were relieved more than anything: content that they defeated a maple-flavoured DOGE from flowing over the border

That relief was a mirage. DOGE—a right-wing program to reduce public services under the guise of efficiency—is coming to Canada, and because Mark Carney is objectively more competent than Trump and Musk, he’ll be more effective in instituting a right-leaning program of austerity.

As reported by The Globe and Mail earlier today, the cuts will be coming hard and fast across most of the federal government:

Federal cabinet ministers are being asked to find “ambitious” internal savings this summer ahead of the 2025 budget as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government must now sort out how it will pay for the billions of dollars in new spending that it recently announced.

In concrete terms, this means Carney is asking his cabinet to make staggering cuts of 15%. If that feels shocking, it is. Remember that during the election, many Carney supporters warned that if Poilievre was elected, it would entail the return of Stephen Harper’s brutal cuts and attacks on public services. Well as it turns out, these “Carney Cuts” would make Harper blush.

Economist Rob Gillezeau notes that what were seeing was inconceivable even when Poilievre was in cabinet last time under Harper. In fact, we would have to go back to the 1990s for such hack-and-slash austerity: “The proposed spending reductions are equivalent to the huge cuts in the Chretien-Martin era and an order of magnitude greater than the Harper era spending cuts.”

So it’s yet again clear that Canadians got duped despite clear (and proven correct) warnings from the NDP. They voted for Carney to stop Harper 2.0, and in effect got a man doing some things more right-wing than Harper ever did. But this has been the Carney calling card since before the election. He has made priorities clear: This is a man whose first move was cutting a capital gains tax increase which would have applied to only a few thousand Canadians that make an average of 1.4 million dollars a year on average. He’s also bent the knee to Trump, choosing to cut digital service taxes on American mega-corporations before protecting our public services.

Even still, Carney didn’t telegraph austerity this harsh. During the campaign he signaled a plan to stagnate the budget more or less, saying he would cap increases to 2%, which would entails small cuts after factoring inflation. But nowhere did he win a mandate for 15-32% cuts.

Carney’s DOGE will have the same broad objective as Trump and Musk’s: gut public services to funnel money to rich and to militaristic spending. This is why Trump demanded harsh cuts on key services like Medicaid while shoveling ungodly sums of money to ICE. And this is why Carney is demanding dangerous cuts while he spikes military spending to 5% of GDP

But Carney is no dummy: he’s not a fool like Trump and Musk, as such his efforts could be more devastating and long-lasting.

Canadians might look back on this moment 30 years from now and see this as our “Ronald Reagan Ruined Everything” moment.

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CLARIFICATION: New reporting has the government clarifying it’s mistake in how it communicated its cuts. in the original reporting, the cuts were laid out as (5%, 7.5%, 15%, totaling 32.5%).

But new reporting says: “Champagne informed ministers that they must find ways to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent starting in the 2026-27 fiscal year, followed by another 2.5 per cent in 2027-28 and 5 per cent in 2028-29”

Regardless, even at 15% the cuts would be quite a bit more harsh than Stephen Harper’s