Mark Carney's dreamy summer of exuberance

Has anyone in Canada had a better month than Mark Carney? Just look at his Instagram feed: He’s hanging with Trump in the Oval Office, Zelensky at the Vatican, King Charles at Rideau Hall. Chilling with the Oilers. Rallying the premiers. Quaffing beers with Starmer at an Ottawa pub, then shaking hands with a succession of world leaders in Kananaskis (except Giorgia Meloni, who gets the Italian two-cheek kiss). It’s the alpha politician’s version of doin’ it for the ‘Gram, only this Insta-version is also the genuine Carney — the same guy I watched chatting up MPs from every party on the House floor when Parliament resumed, not merely at ease but actively enjoying himself, lacking only a martini, even when his 1.1 million Instagram followers can’t see him. This is the man who parliamentary journalists I’ve met in Ottawa describe as sincerely personable (so long as you’re wearing a suit and don’t say anything dumb). Unphased, unflappable, he’s spent the last month bouncing from mountaintop to mountaintop like his staff laid trampolines down on each summit.

Meanwhile, on that little parliamentary hilltop down below, the people on whom Carney’s vision depends are bustling. They have to haul the boss’s big ideas across the quicksand of bureaucratic process, in order to transform aspiration into tangible things, like homes and wind turbines. Time is of the essence. Momentum is fleeting. The legislative agenda their prime minister has devised resembles a symphony orchestra perched atop a battering ram. He’s pictured it down to the tiniest detail. But he’s sipping cappuccinos with Macron in the Rockies, leaving his MPs to play the score and smash it through Parliament.

Yes, I’m talking about Bill C-5.

Down here on the anthill, the mad scramble of offensive and counter-offensive has sent hundreds of politicians and thousands of staffers into a three-week frenzy. Last Friday afternoon, a day when MPs are usually flying home to their constituencies, the entire Bloc Québécois caucus remained huddled in their corner of the House in order to have the necessary numbers that allowed them to delay the super-motion that would send the Bill into hyper-speed. It worked! C-5 ground to a halt — until Monday. 

But the Liberals saw this coming and had their own procedural response prepared. A little trick called “closure.”

By Monday, the Bill was traveling at hyperspeed once more, and so was Parliament. There went Transportation Minister Chrystia Freeland, pumping down Wellington from West Block to the Senate in sneakers and a purple dress. She’s had to sell the bill — and rush — to the chamber of sober second thought. Once inside, she sat there all alone, tiny and formidable in the room where the King delivered the Throne Speech three weeks earlier, taking questions from 100 senators for over an hour.

“We’re in a moment of crisis,” Freeland told her audience. “We need to respond.”

The senators were not all convinced. “An expedited process like this, to get it through before our summer holiday season, just doesn't seem to align with the seriousness of this piece of legislation,” Sen. Paul Prosper told me shortly afterward. Prosper is a lawyer and a leader from the Mi’kmaw Nation; before he became a senator, he was the regional chief for Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The dearth of Indigenous consultation on Bill C-5, and the threat of allowing “nation-building” industrial projects to proceed without Indigenous consent, is a major sticking point for him. He’s not alone. The Assembly of First Nations, Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Chiefs of Ontario and other Indigenous groups have all objected to the way this bill is being raced into law.

But Indigenous leaders don’t get a vote on C-5. Senators do, but Prosper’s intention to try delaying the Bill’s passage through the Senate seems unlikely to succeed.

“Senators could technically stand in the way of this, but politically I don't think there's an appetite to do that,” another senator, Paula Simons, told me. “I think the mood of the Senate, in toto, is that this is a fresh government with a fresh agenda, that they have a popular mandate to do this, and that if this bill receives widespread support in the House, including from the official opposition, we're not going to hold it up unduly in the Senate.”

Back in West Block, down in the basement below the House, I watched the Transport Committee, in charge of ushering Bill C-5 to completion, psych themselves up for the week ahead. The committee has 10 members – five Liberals, four Conservatives, one Bloc Québécois. This is the group in charge of calling witnesses, debating and amending Bill C-5, a process that would normally take weeks or months, but will now be condensed into two days. Somewhere on a mountain peak, Carney was discussing physics with the German chancellor. Down here in the parliamentary dungeon, the committee members elected a vigorous Liberal MP named Peter Schiefke to chair their group; as he switched seats and took over the chair’s chair, he pulled a gold-tipped gavel out of his suit pocket — like his boss says, always come prepared.

The Bloc Québécois had introduced an amendment that would stretch out this committee’s hearings from two to 14 hours, forcing members to grill witnesses until midnight. That amendment was being debated two floors above us in the House at that same moment. The possibility of it passing meant the committee had to start calling its witnesses the second this meeting adjourned. The clerk, whose job it actually is to get hold of witnesses, began wincing as he imagined the timeline. He was about to get a list of more than 30 VIPs to call – cabinet ministers, Indigenous leaders, scientists, CEOs. Schiefke and the other MPs in the room, Liberal and Conservative alike, patted the unfortunate fellow on the back, cracking sympathetic jokes; they felt for him, though no one seemed too worried about the broader implications of the impossibility of his task. All except Xavier Barsalou-Duval, the young Bloc MP. He looked queasy. 

Luckily for the clerk, if not democracy, Conservatives wound up voting with Liberals against the Bloc’s amendment soon afterward. So, there would only be four hours of witness questioning over the next two days, after all — fewer witnesses to call, but also even less input, less criticism and less consideration. 

As they have from the beginning, all signs point to “King Carney” (as the NDP MP Heather McPherson likes to call him) getting Bill C-5 passed by Friday. The perfect end to his perfect month. 

A time of emergencies 

But amid the frenetic bustle of Carney’s shock-and-awe campaign, a big question hangs over the anthill. We are, in fact, living in a time of emergencies. Several are converging at once, all of them interconnected. Every ant on the hill agrees about this; what they disagree on is the nature of these emergencies and the best solution for them. Given this state of affairs, what is the best way to proceed? 

Alexandre Boulerice is another NDP MP with grave concerns about the unprecedented power Bill C-5 hands to Carney's cabinet in the name of accelerating hand-picked “major projects.” Boulerice articulated the dilemma when he told me: “Of course, if they want to speed up a project of a high-speed train, I will agree with that. But I have no guarantee that that kind of project — of renewable energy or public transit — will be put on that list.”

Indeed, there are no guarantees. But let’s suppose that the government of Canada wanted to get really serious about meeting its climate obligations. We would need to move a thousand times faster than democracy allows. The scale of the challenge — of just this one emergency — is beyond what even many climate advocates appreciate. It involves an overhaul, not just of laws and economic order, but of physical infrastructure that took over a century to build — power plants and energy grids, vehicles and houses, schools and railway lines. All of which cross multiple jurisdictions — provincial, Indigenous, municipal — and have a long track record of being halted by local interests. That’s as true for wind farms and green housing as it is for pipelines. 

So what if this — Bill C-5 — is what an emergency response actually looks like? 

One of the major projects Carney has floated is, in fact, a high-speed train connecting Windsor to Quebec. He’s also discussed building a national clean-energy grid. He’s mentioned the “Energy East Partnership,” which isn’t to be confused with a pipeline sending bitumen east from Alberta, but is rather an offshore wind project in Nova Scotia that would send clean electricity west. At the G7, Carney’s list of priorities didn’t mention oil or gas or “conventional energy,” but spoke instead of wildfires and “fortifying critical mineral supply chains.” That’s clean energy.

It’s true that Carney has also said he’s open to new pipelines under C-5 — but he’s leaving it to private companies to come forward with a business plan. That sounds a lot like calling someone’s bluff. Meanwhile, one of the Conservatives’ chief complaints about Bill C-5 is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough in deregulating Canada. They worry that it leaves environmental regulations in place and only allows a few of cabinet’s hand-selected projects to leap over them.  

When Carney does inevitably make some concessions to the oil patch, on carbon capture projects or whatever the heck he means by “decarbonized oil” — that’s just what it will be: concessions, perhaps bigger than many would like, but ultimately, no more than a king throwing crumbs from his train as it leaves the station. That, at least, is the view one imagines from Carney’s crystal palace in the sky. 

Up close, serious wrinkles come into focus. To begin with, there’s the question of what happens to all that power Carney is centralizing in the PMO after the crown changes heads. When and if Conservatives win a federal election, can there be any doubt what they would do with the powers of Bill C-5, which won’t expire for five years? 

In the much shorter term, First Nations are emphatically not on board with Carney’s grand vision. They’re on the fence at best. “Change and adaptation is nothing new to Indigenous people,” Sen. Prosper told me, “We recognize that. Indigenous people also recognize the need to improve processes, to expedite processes, to allow the prosperity of this country to advance. But let's not do that on the backs of Indigenous rights. … Let's stand behind domestic and international law.”

The legal question is front and centre here. Under section 35 of the Constitution, Indigenous groups have just as much power to stop “major projects” as the Conservatives. Only their power doesn’t show in Parliament — it shows up in court. Years later. Which investors are aware of. The Liberals have promised an Indigenous advisory panel for major projects, but as Sen. Prosper pointed out, even if that were sufficient, that promise isn’t written into the bill. Carney can do that, or not. So can whoever comes next.

False equivalency 

On Monday evening, while Carney was convincing Trump to sign a joint communiqué on the Middle East before the president left Kananaskis early, the House stayed late in session to vote on hastening Bill C-5.

One of the most impassioned speeches came from Heather McPherson, who was allotted 10 minutes near the long day’s end. “Canadians want big ambitious projects,” she said. “That’s not up for debate in the House this evening. In fact, I support the objectives of C-5.” The problem, McPherson said, was that by allowing cabinet to override key legal obligations on Indigenous consultation and environmental assessment, the government was sabotaging the very nation-building projects it wanted to speed up. “When you take away transparent processes and meaningful consultation, what happens? Projects don’t get built any faster. They end up in court. … I will not accept the false choice between economic ambition and democratic accountability. We can have both, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we must.”

Elizabeth May spoke next. For her, “reading [Bill C-5] and understanding it has been one of the most crushingly depressing experiences I’ve had since I was first elected to this place in 2011.” She pointed out the extraordinary powers it grants the prime minister and his cabinet, and the arbitrary nature of defining the national interest. In this bill, May protested, a project in the national interest is defined as “one that cabinet has decided is a national-interest project.” The five factors listed in the bill as criteria for being so designated (like “advance the interests of Indigenous peoples”) are explicitly labelled as suggestions. “If they were requirements before a project is listed in the national interest, I’d have an entirely different view of this Act,” she said. It was 10:45 p.m., and very few Canadians were listening. 

What about Carney? Did he take in any of the mess? Or did he only see results? At 11 p.m., the House adjourned to vote, and half an hour later the numbers were in: 304 in favour, 29 against. The motion to fast-track Bill C-5 carried by a landslide. What could be easier? Some minor amendments will be made this week, after which a similar final vote is all but assured on Friday night. 

For the prime minister, it’s the perfect end to a perfect June. 

But as his dreamy Alpha Spring gives way to summer, Carney may want to remember what he said to Poilievre in the election debate. Responding to Poilievre’s promise to ignore a Supreme Court ruling on life sentences for certain crimes, it was Carney who warned Canadians: “It’s not where it begins, but where it ends.”