Terence Corcoran: Carney flies to the moon on U.S. rockets |
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Terence Corcoran: Carney flies to the moon on U.S. rockets
The new Liberal pragmatism is this: Anything is possible, regardless of principle
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Now that Mark Carney’s Liberals have pragmatically manipulated their way into a House of Commons majority, Canadians are on the edge of their political seats wondering how the government will now run the country. Unfortunately, the latest guide to the future direction of the new Carney majority, the prime minister’s Saturday night speech at the Liberals’ national convention, does not provide much fresh insight or detail.
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As a few thousand Liberal loyalists cheered loudly after every sentence and gave flag-waving standing ovations every few minutes, the overall speech became nothing more than a political rehash of previously announced policies and worn-out slogans surrounded by Carney’s dominant theme: Building Canada Strong in the midst of a rupture in the old world order courtesy of U.S. President Donald Trump.
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The message veered a little off-track, particularly when it came to repositioning Canada as a go-it-alone nation turning away from the United States. Carney portrayed Canada as a barrelling force of independence as the U.S.-dominated old order crumbles. “We are reviving the spirit that built Canada,” he said. “My friends, we used to explore in this country … We used to build in this country. Now we are building big, building fast, building bold again.”
And then, without skipping a beat, Carney moved on to a big, bold claim: “We used to take risks in this country — and now we’re going to the moon!”
That generated an 18-second flag-waving standing ovation to celebrate the new Carney Liberal government’s Artemis moonshot. “Just the other day, speaking from Integrity deep in space, Canada’s astronaut Jeremy Hansen (more applause) advised us that, as a country, we have to be willing to take risks … and, in his words, ultimately know that we are going to persist and we will win.”
There is no doubt that Ottawa’s space programs had a role in NASA’s Artemis mission. But here is Carney, who has been aggressively distancing Canada from America for more than a year and throughout his speech, suddenly jumping aboard a U.S. rocket to the moon, as if somehow Canada had sent the high-risk space capsule into the sky. Carney did not even acknowledge NASA’s role. The prime minister claims to be ready to end Canada’s long-standing association with the United States — while simultaneously and triumphantly riding America’s rockets to the moon and ultimately Mars.
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That’s not the only U.S. rocket Canada has boarded. Carney has repeatedly emphasized that he is a “pragmatist,” pursuing a political and philosophical concept that has its origins in the United States.
When he delivered his Liberal leadership speech in March of 2025, Carney declared: “I am a pragmatist above all, so when I see that something’s not working, I will change it.” In his convention talk last Saturday, he reiterated his confidence in applied Canadian pragmatism. “The founding insight of our country is that unity does not require uniformity … but a series of choices made imperfectly across generations, decisions that have become moral convictions.”
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The role of pragmatism was a little more nuanced in Carney’s famed Davos speech, the title of which was “Principled and pragmatic: Canada’s path.” Exactly how one blends principles with pragmatism is unclear, a problem that has dogged pragmatism since it emerged as a prime philosophical movement in the U.S. more than 150 years ago.
Pragmatism took hold of U.S. policy in the 1930s under president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proceeded to overthrow existing core market principles that had driven the U.S. economy and government policy in the past. The dominant theme of the FDR era and later years was that liberalism had caused the Great Depression and needed to be replaced. As one academic describes the shift, “The overarching philosophy of political pragmatism that informed the New Deal … finds its inspiration in Machiavelli.”
We don’t want to dig into that rabbit hole, even though anti-liberal pragmatism dominated U.S. policy-making for decades after FDR until variations of principled liberalism returned in the 1970s. After four decades of American economic revival under liberal principles, a move back to pragmatism has dominated economic thinking, with the 2008 financial crisis serving as justification.
Carney’s deep belief in pragmatism is exposed in his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, where he spends 500 pages dismissing the liberal concept of “value” as a core economic principle that needs to be replaced by the plural “values” that can be defined arbitrarily under wavering unprincipled pragmatism — an approach echoed by others on the left who proclaim “the dangers of ideology and the virtues of pragmatism.”
Carney’s willingness to waver beyond principles was on display in his convention speech on Saturday as he glossed over the Liberal willingness to accept opposition members to his caucus. “MPs have switched sides to join our team,” he said. The fact that they might not be true Liberals is unimportant since they pragmatically gave the Liberals a majority. When Liberal MPs leave their seats, an election must be held. When Conservative or NDP members leave their elected positions to join the Liberals, no need for an election to give voters in those ridings a chance to vote in a byelection. That’s pragmatism.
Looking through the long list of Carney economic policies in place and still to come, the new Liberal principle is this: Anything is possible, regardless of principle.
• Email: tcorcoran@postmedia.com
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