Prime Minister Mark Carney is trying to fast-forward to a version of the late colonial period, minus the bad things happening part, Richard Poplak writes.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Richard Poplak is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg and Toronto. He writes the newsletter Ballast.
Empires die slow. They also die hard. History provides only garish examples – nowhere in the literature is a salve to be found. As with people, every empire dies in its own way. Regardless of how detailed the prognostications may be, the outcome adheres only to chaos theory. On this occasion, in our own era, the results are largely buffoonish, which likely comes as cold comfort to those cowering from the bombs. But every empire gets the death it deserves, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it one way or another.
What precedes death is violent senescence, and with it the beginnings of a vacuum. Nature abhors such phenomena, so the opening lasts for an infinitesimally small amount of time before something else fills it. Hardly surprising, but in empire’s outposts, no one mourns the passing of imperial diktat, regardless of how loose or benevolent the terms once were. As the giant teeters and totters, new aspirants enter the market, and bold nationalistic assertions are made. Former supplicants are suddenly full of indignant voice and hurt feelings. What was previously buried under strict politesse is now subject to righteous fury.
Which is exactly the point at which everyone starts speaking about pipelines.
Indeed, as Canada matches the revolution in the United States with a revolution of its own, the news comes at us fast. If it doesn’t concern the AI WILL KILL US ALL headlines, it’s about Carneyism – an emerging doctrine that reformulates Canada as an outpost of everyone’s empire. Need oil? We have it. Need potash? There’s loads. Desire LNG? Step right up.
Workers lay pipe during construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion on farmland, in Abbotsford, B.C., in May, 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The commodities entrepôt model has been tried before – most famously at the barrel of a gun during the colonial period – but it must be said that this time it feels fresh. That’s probably because it’s dressed up in an investment banker’s bespoke suit, and speaks fluent consultant-ese. But what Mark Carney, his backers and advisers are proposing is shockingly revanchist: the planet’s hewers of wood and drawers of water will… hew wood and draw water. In order to access new markets for all the stuff Canada will dig up, three things need to happen. First, a vast country needs to be criss-crossed with new infrastructure. Next, someone has to pay for it. Then, new markets need to be rendered tame by a reformulated customer service program.
In this, pipelines are both the Canadian id and ego – the spiritual ligature that binds the country. That it often feels like we have more proposed pipelines than actual pipelines nudges the idea of pipelines into conceptual territory – like Schrödinger’s cat, they both exist and don’t exist.
But their very suggestion tells the whole story – what we have must be shipped to those who want it, even though we can’t be sure they’ll need it when we’re ready to ship it.
In short, Canada is remodelling itself as the entirety of Africa during the colonial period. The risks, it should go without saying, are gargantuan. What will hold the whole mess together is, apparently, the pipelines.
Mr. Carney has fashioned himself into a global proxy for liberal disgust at authoritarians with bad manners, Richard Poplak writes. About authoritarians with good manners he has little to say, except maybe: Canada is open for business.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
“Infantry wins battles; logistics wins wars.” This quote is often attributed to the First World War American General John Pershing, and it goes double in a trade war.
The pipelines, real or spectral, are the logistics. They run east to west, north to south. They also run back in time. In this, it’s tempting to think of Mark Carney as heir to the sort of muscular liberalism of Jean Chrétien. And while both men could set their jaws and speak in steely tones, to acknowledge that they ruled over different eras is hardly worth the ink expended to say so. After all, leaders like Mr. Chrétien, and his rough contemporaries such as George W. Bush, Stephen Harper and Barack Obama, seemed to think of power as something you have.
Mr. Carney, along U.S. President Donald Trump and other men of the current moment, appear to believe that power is something you use.
It’s equally tempting to think of Trumpism as nothing more than a chaos factory, a grift mill that has enriched the presidential family and a few courtiers to the tune of billions of dollars – money that buys untold power and influence as the empire frays. But this would ignore the essential coherence that has pertained in the United States for the past 10 years. Mr. Trump (with some inadvertent help from the Biden administration) has turned the U.S. into a closed box – a working model of a Third World backwater, based on charging for access to the presidential palace, and to the U.S. economy along with it.
Carneyism is all but the inverse. By way of a very loose analogy, contemporary Canada resembles Africa during the early colonial period. The provinces – 10 closed-off, mutually hostile chiefdoms – rule over enormous, empty expanses of land, and trade with a single hegemon. This leaves the entire expanse wildly exposed to a single market, and bad things are bound to happen when the hegemon turns feral.
The Trans Mountain Westridge Marine Terminal, where crude oil from the expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline is loaded onto tankers, near a residential area in Burnaby, B.C., in June, 2024.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Mr. Carney is trying to fast-forward to a version of the late colonial period, minus the bad things happening part. He is actively courting overlords from abroad, who will buy into infrastructure projects that will then deliver them the commodities they think they need. In a sense, they become double owner. First of actual pieces of Canada, the big infrastructure projects and the land on which they are built. And second, they hold a mortgage on Canada’s future, which is to say, the irreplaceable commodities the country mines or drills, and sells on to them.
The benign way to describe this is that Canada is diversifying its market reach. And yet the whole caper rests on how reliable – code-word for “well-behaved” – Canada proves to be. Mr. Carney has fashioned himself into a global proxy for liberal disgust at authoritarians with bad manners. About authoritarians with good manners he has little to say, except maybe: Canada is open for business. His jovial meetings with Narendra Modi of India, which attempted to wipe out the bad blood that resulted from the assassination of a Sikh separatist leader on Canadian soil in 2023, is just another reminder that the customer is always right.
Gone are the days when the Canadian prime minister preaches human rights and environmental rhetoric. About this, Mr. Carney has said, “I’m a believer that, regardless of the relationship, it’s important to have a relationship so you can deliver messages directly, as opposed to preach from afar, and to limited effect.” (This is the rough equivalent of the consultancy giant McKinsey & Company running your marriage.) The journalist Oliver Bullough posits that Britain has become “the butler to the world” – an amoral fixer that helps Russian oligarchs privately school their children and hide their money in large country estates. By this logic, Canada is becoming the commodities broker of the world – what do you need, where do you need it, and how about you take a piece of the fund that pays for the pipeline that gets it to you?
Mr. Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith meet with Indigenous Chiefs and energy workers before announcing the next steps to accelerate a major infrastructure project in Fort McMurray. Canada may soon be a land marked by unspecified new infrastructure builds, but these projects will not take the country where the current government thinks they will, Richard Poplak writes.Todd Korol/Reuters
The Wall Street Journal put Carneyism in perspective: “Overhauling environmental reviews and accelerating approvals of oil pipelines and mines. Massive increases in military spending. Mending ties with China, India and Saudi Arabia.” The country, the newspaper noted, “is barreling forward with a rewiring of Canada’s economic, national-security and foreign policies that, in some cases, would once have been unthinkable and unpopular.”
It would seem that the Wall Street Journal, not exactly Mother Jones when it comes to foreign policy analysis, is cheered by these developments. But I may have detected a smidge of skepticism. Perhaps it’s because all of this seems so shockingly backward-looking. In response to Mr. Trump’s attempt to turn the United States into Zaire but with Super Intelligence, Canada is becoming almost a parody of itself: a dark wood in which beaver pelts are traded under the cover of maple trees.
The other thing no one in government seems to mention is that this is all a big bet. It’s a bet on current consumption patterns extending deep into the 21st-century, which has so far been notoriously wishy-washy in terms of predictability. In effect, Canada is future-proofing for the past. In a universe in which Saturday night hockey is no longer a national bonding ritual but just another offering on a gambling app, betting the country on India’s current desire for LNG seems to make sense. After all, the casino economy is now a cultural impulse.
But there are no guaranteed outcomes here. There are, however, guarantors.
That is to say, you. And me.
Is pouring money into the LNG market a wise move? As The Economist notes, after the Iran war volatility stabilizes (and maybe they’re missing something here), “LNG prices could fall below $6 per [unit], according to analysts. That is lower than the cost of lifting cargoes under most long-term contracts.” It’s not hard to see how the crash happens. The wise investor – and we’re all investors these days – should be nervous.
Protesters demonstrate against the Canada Investment Summit that Prime Minister Mark Carney hosted in Toronto, on Sept. 14.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
Even more nervous-making should be the giddiness over defence spending. “Extreme tail risk” sounds like something that concerns a squirrel on a busy thoroughfare, but no: it’s apparently banker-speak for the chance of military conflict arising from Mr. Trump’s tariff war and the chance of it turning kinetic. Will the MAGA faithful drive their armoured pick-ups into Windsor and take over Tim Hortons franchises? Will the Americans and the Russians make a play for the Arctic? The chances are not zero. But while plowing money into AI murder bots may be necessary to secure sovereignty – having big muscles doesn’t mean using them – it’s certainly interesting how it’s being bundled with other ancient industries that will provide very little long-term value.
Surely there are choices available other than turning Canada into a national version of the Swiss commodities broker, Glencore – hardly a global steward of happiness and sustainable growth? There are indeed. The clues are available in the recently tabled Bill C-39, which will help Canada’s new investors insulate themselves from organized labour and pesky employment issues. Instead of forcing the country to crawl back to the 18th century, perhaps starting to formulate a vision for the current moment would be a better use of the government’s time.
Canada may soon be a land marked by unspecified new infrastructure builds, but these projects will not take the country where the current government thinks they will. Instead, they will transport Canadians back into a cruel past, marked by unfairness and manic inequality, subject to commodities barons who will in the end prove no kinder than the dying empire to the south. After all, the customer is always right.
This is the time for tough choices. Despite the set jaw and steely tones, Carneyism is not that. It’s the easy way.
In short, it’s a troubled country’s Jungian dreamscape, scarred by pipelines.