Mark Carney is trying to market globalism as a ‘Canadian value.’ Will it work?

A campaign to appeal to national sentiment is a strange gambit for Liberals – committed as they are to the replacement of the nation with globalist policies.

The storm over Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs over the Canadian border crisis has been baked into a vote-winning meme by Canada’s Liberal Party. Yet with an election only weeks away on April 28, can a sentimental appeal to a vanished Canada secure a win for Mark Carney?

Trump’s tariffs were expected to hit Canada on Wednesday’s “Liberation Day,” refueling a furor over Canadian sovereignty which has led some to say this is “shaping up to be the trade war election.”

Responding to the tariffs, which ultimately never came to fruition in the way the Liberals were warning, a meme war broke out with Carney responding to harsh reality with a feelgood slogan.

Elbows up, Canada. pic.twitter.com/0gJ2opnPjZ

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) March 22, 2025

“Elbows up!” is the new Current Thing in Canada, a media craze designed to stir nationalist indignation in elderly voters who may even remember the 1950s origin of the phrase.

The elbows refer to those of Gordie Howe – a 1950s hockey legend from Saskatchewan – a conservative province – and from a time when Canada was populated by Canadians.

It bears all the hallmarks of an “astroturf” campaign – intended to look authentic, but in reality a manufactured mass belief for marketing purposes.

“Elbows up” seeks to inspire a fighting mood against the threat – or promise – of tariffs on Canadian trade with the U.S.

Carney will ‘cave’

It is a classic example of the manipulation of popular feeling into political allegiance. How will the feelings of aging voters affect the imposition of tariffs? Not at all. Nor will the Canadian Prime Minister be able to stop them.

Prepare for the Carney ‘cave’ on trade with the USA

Ian Bremmer is the boss of Gerry Butts and Mark Carneys wife’s at Eurasia Group. He just told US decision makers that:

“I expect Ottawa will quietly fold shortly after the vote….”

Ian, sitting daily with Carneys inner… https://t.co/PVQIeUzuFQ

— David Knight Legg (@KnightLegg) March 27, 2025

Silence over ‘devastating’ Chinese tariffs caused by Trudeau

Why? Carney has no alternative. He has already “caved” – to China – over the same issue. “Devastating” Chinese tariffs took effect over a week ago in Canada, as Global News reported:

Canadian agricultural producers are warning of devastating impacts from new Chinese tariffs that began Thursday (March 20th), which they say will compound the economic strain from the U.S. trade war.

The tariffs are severe, and will have a dramatic impact – as China is Canada’s second-largest trading partner behind the United States.

“China has imposed a 100 per cent levy on Canadian canola oil and meal, as well as peas, plus a 25 per cent duty on seafood and pork,” the outlet reported.

These tariffs cannot be corrected by hockey memes, and are a response to tariffs placed on Chinese goods by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Liberal Party – seeking election over outrage on tariffs – has created a tariff crisis, whose costs will be borne by the people who vote for them.

There are no “elbows up” against China. In fact, their tariffs have been greeted with silence from Carney, who has said U.S.-Canada relations are at an end.

Corruption, drug cartels in Canada

Anger at Donald Trump obscures the serious problems which prompted his suggestion that Canada could be absorbed into the United States. “Elbows Up” is a cool way of making Canadians look past the fact that the crisis they inhabit has been created by the Liberals and their globalist agenda.

On February 1, Trump issued an executive order “Imposing duties to address the flow of illicit drugs across our northern border.”

Terry Glavin, writing in January for Canada’s National Post, dismissed Trump’s earlier claims of a crisis over Canadian “border security and drug trafficking” as a “pretext” for his “…declared objective of exerting ‘economic force’ to annex Canada as the 51st American state.”

Yet this too appears to be a fantasy inspired by national sentiment – which simply ignores reality.

As LifeSiteNews reported, Canada’s second bank has laundered over 18 trillion dollars in the U.S. and Canada for Mexican and Chinese drug cartels. The world’s largest fentanyl factory was discovered in Vancouver in February.

Canada a ‘failed state’?

The serious issue of corruption by Chinese Triads combines with a picture of impotent Canadian law and border enforcement to suggest that Canada may be, as Glavin warned, “approaching failed-state status.” When the memes wear off, this is the reality faced by Canadian voters.

Canadians have complained since 2017 that life is too expensive to have a family.

Now “a generation” cannot afford a home, and many struggle to pay for groceries. Help is at hand, however.

Their Liberal government supports Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) – killing the elderly, poor and ill as healthcare – whilst promoting radical “gender” ideology to help sterilize children.

Will Carney come to the rescue?

Carney is a committed “Net Zero” fanatic, and is the kind of “Catholic” who fervently supports abortion.

His moral integrity is demonstrated further by the fact that his $25 billion “green” investment fund was located in Bermuda to dodge Canadian taxes.

As the Canadian Catholic Register cautions, “[Carney] is a well-connected globalist with deep ties to institutions such as the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Bank for International Settlements, and the Financial Stability Board.”

Globalist ‘Canadian’ values

National identity is a strange appeal to make on behalf of a party which appears to be working hard to replace Canadians with immigrants, and which is now lead by a globalist technocrat.

It is the values of globalism, of course, which are presented to voters as “Canadian values”: open borders, LGBTQ “rights,” “gender” surgery and hormones for children, and the Net Zero deindustrialization program strongly supported by the Liberal leader Mark Carney.

How long can this appeal to save the nation of Canada from foreign influence convince Canadians to vote for more of the same? The Liberal Party has led Canada into crisis, presiding over corruption so severe that its police, judicial and border authorities are deemed incapable of being trusted by the USA.

This is not a charge made solely by the Trump administration, but also under Biden – with Antony Blinken pressing the matter of the insecurity of the Canadian border as far back as 2022. In the coming weeks, the real issues which have consigned Canada to a fond memory may well shrink the Liberal lead reported by the polls.

What do the polls say?

With some headlines trumpeting an “eight point lead” for the Liberals, others show a narrower advantage for the globalist Carney – and one leading firm has them tied with the Conservatives.

Abacus Data’s March 30 poll had both parties neck and neck at 39%. Abacus, who describe themselves as “Canada’s most sought-after, influential, and impactful polling firm,” “…were one of the most accurate pollsters conducting research during the 2021 Canadian election.”

A second poll shows a narrower lead, and a clear bonus for Carney for simply not being Justin Trudeau.

338 Canada showed a four point lead for the Liberals on March 31, and its graph clearly illustrates that their lead relies on disaffected NDP voters – and the collapse of the Bloc Quebecois vote.

Reality enters the chat

With the issues at home now overtaking Trump and his tariffs, the cost of living and those allied to mass migration such as housing are returning to the forefront of voters’ minds. The issue of reality – and who is the real Mark Carney – may well overtake the fake nationalism of “Elbows up.”

A campaign to appeal to national sentiment is a strange gambit for Liberals – committed as they are to the replacement of the nation with globalist policies – and of its people through mass immigration. Carney has been powerless to halt Chinese tariffs. He is powerless to halt those of Donald Trump.

If Canadians can see beyond cringe hockey memes these two issues are clearly a reaction to the actions and inaction of a Liberal-led Canada. This is the reason that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning on the harm done to Canadians by the “lost Liberal decade.” If Canadians can be persuaded by the argument presented by reality, it seems unlikely they will vote for another – whatever the polls may say.

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The Liberals torched their own agenda just to cling to power

2025 Federal Election

The Last Of Us: Canada’s Chaos Election

Published on May 2, 2025

Bruce Dowbiggin

Show me good loser and I’ll show you a loser— Leo Durocher

There’s an expression that goes, you’re not allowed to die until all the people in your life have disappointed you. That trenchant observation is particularly relevant to those who woke up on April 29 to discover that their neighbours and friends in Canada have opted to give the federal Liberals (under new leader Mark Carney) another four years to continue Canada’s descent into irrelevance.

These are the same Liberals sans Carney who were polling in the low 20s six months earlier. Their cabinet members were quitting in droves. In the finest Wag The Dog tradition, a sure victory for Canada’s Conservatives was then transformed into a humiliating defeat that saw the Tories leader Pierre Poilievre lose the seat he’d represented for 20 years. The debate in the chattering classes now is how much was Poilievre’s fault?

In a minor vindication the Liberals were seemingly denied a majority by three seats (169-144) . How they balance that equation to advance their pet projects on trade, climate, gender, free speech, native rights and Donald Trump was unknowable Which is why the Grits have turned to dumpster diving MPs like Elizabeth May and keffiyeh-clad NDP to achieve a workable majority..

Suffice to say that neophyte Carney, without any support system within the Liberals, is being highly influenced by the Justin Trudeau faculty lounge left behind after the disgraced three-term PM slunk off into the night.

It’s not all beer and skittles. No sooner had the Liberal pixie dust settled than Carney was hit with Bloc leader Yves-Francois Blanchet announced unequivocally that energy pipelines were still a no-go in electrified Quebec. Alberta premier Danielle Smith lowered the requirement for a separation referendum from 600 K signatures to around 170 K— a very doable mark in pissed-off Alberta.

Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe outlined his demands on Carney if his province is not to join Alberta. And former British PM Tony Blair, who’d worked with Carney in the UK, announced that Carney’s pet project Net Zero was a loser for nations. Finally RBC revealed it was moving beyond diversity toward “inclusion” by removing “unconscious bias” among its upper ranks.

Such is the backwash from April 28. If you listened to the state-supported media on election night you might think that Trump had picked on poor, innocent friend next door Canada. His outrageous 51st state jest did send the Canadian political apparatus into panic. A Liberal party that proclaimed Canada a postmodern state with no real traditions (lowerering flags to half mast for six months to promote their Rez School genocide hustle) suddenly adopted the flag-waving ultra-patriotic visage of expatriate comedian Mike Myers.

Instead the commentariat was spitballing about how to make the House of Commons function more smoothly or if Carney should depart for Europe immediately or in a month to meet his true constituents in the EU commentariat. China? Wassat’? Urban crime? I can’t hear you. Canada as fentanyl capital of the West? Not interested.

Astonishingly, many people who should know better bought it. It was Boomers waking from a long nap to impose their cozy values one final time on the nation they’d created via Trudeau. Comfy ridings like Oakville, Burlington, North Vancouver, Ottawa Centre and Charlottetown mailed it in for another four years. Academic hotbeds like Western (London), Laurier (Kitchener), Waterloo, UNB (Fredericton), U Calgary (Confederation) Alberta (Strathcona) and UBC (Vancouver) also kept the radical dream alive.

Meanwhile shrieks of “Panic!” over Trump decimated the Bloc (22 seats) and the NDP (7 seats) with their support transferred to a banker-led party that had been poison to them only six months earlier. You could not have written a more supportive script for a party who had neglected the essentials in traditional Canada while pursuing radical policies to please the globalists of the West.

Speaking of time capsules, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a more retro scene than the one produced by the legacy TV networks. With their emphasis on the horse-race story the tone, the panels, the hosts could have easily been teleported from 1990s. While many were interested in the micro of government finance, most listeners were expecting maybe a word or two on the collapsed state exposed by Trump’s aggressive negotiating.

As we’ve mentioned often before, Canada’s allies are appalled by the takeover of the country by malign actors, drugs traffickers, money launderers, real-estate manipulators and Chinese subterfuge. Trump’s generic reference to the border was a catch-all for the corruption swallowing the election process and the finance of the country.

That avoidance was echoed by pollsters who spent the night talking about how the final figures reflected their findings. Except for those that didn’t— Conservatives vote tally over 41 percent and Liberals well under 200 seats. What was avoided was the cumulative effect of highly inflated Liberal polling during the campaign, the “why-bother?” narrative they sold to voters appalled by the Liberals manipulation of the process to switch leaders and hold a micro-campaign of 36 days.

While Donald Trump has announced he’ll work with Carney on tariffs, it’s still highly likely that this was the final Canadian election fought by the old rules where the have-nots (Atlantic Canada) the haves-but-outraged (Quebec) and the indolent (Ontario) control the math for making government. The money pump (Alberta, Saskatchewan) will seek to attract eastern BC and southern Manitoba to their crew. In the worst case Carney may be the nation’s final PM of ten provinces plus territories.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

2025 Federal Election

The Liberals torched their own agenda just to cling to power

Published on May 2, 2025

Todayville

This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Pat Murphy

The Liberals just proved they’ll do anything to win, including gutting key Trudeau-era policies

With the general election safely in the rear-view mirror, here are some observations.

The Liberal will to power

To me, the most surreal moment came during Mark Carney’s speech on the night he won the Liberal leadership. Raucous cheers ensued when he
declared the abolition of the consumer carbon tax and the retreat from the increase in capital gains inclusion rates. If you knew nothing about Canadian politics, you’d think this jubilation was in response to the assertion of long-cherished Liberal policies and principles.

But, of course, it was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the policies being jettisoned were Liberal in origin and had been hitherto fiercely defended. If you criticized the carbon tax, you were labelled a climate change “denier.” And if you were opposed to the capital gains changes, you were indifferent to increased inequality, the spread of child poverty and various other social ills.

This ability to shamelessly execute dramatic policy flips is indicative of the Liberals’ intense passion for power. And however cynical it may be, it’s one of the keys to their status as Canada’s “natural governing party.”

Thus we have Mark Carney presenting as someone who “just got here,” a tactic designed to disassociate himself from the previous Liberal government. It was immaterial that he was an adviser to that same government, has stocked his team with its alumni and was an early advocate of carbon taxes. Instead of the enthusiastic net-zero hawk, he ran as the sober, economics-savvy technocrat whose banking and private sector experience is tailor-made for the current trade-war turbulence.

Does this mean that Carney has abandoned the ideological agenda of his unpopular Liberal predecessor? Not necessarily—and probably not at all.
Still, it worked politically. Will to power isn’t something to be sneezed at.

Conservative blues

There’s no sugar-coating the fact that it’s been a deeply disappointing election for the Conservatives. After being the “inevitable” government-in-waiting just four months ago, the combination of Justin Trudeau’s departure and Donald Trump’s trade war totally upended the electoral landscape. And to add insult to injury, their leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat. That said, not everything is doom and gloom.

Compared to the actual results from the previous (2021) election, the Conservatives gained 25 seats. Or if you prefer adjusting the 2021 results to
reflect the new electoral boundaries, the seat gain comes to 18. Either way, the direction is non-trivially positive.

The popular vote share of 41.4 per cent is similarly impressive. Looking over the past 60 years, the Conservative median vote was in the 35 to 36 per cent range. You might call that their natural base. Only Brian Mulroney’s fragile coalition ever brought them north of 40 per cent.

And as Poilievre has been criticized for simply playing to the base, it’s fair to ask whether 41 per cent or thereabouts is the party’s new base. If it is, the
Conservative future is potentially promising.

Mind you, Poilievre might not be around to personally reap the rewards.

The NDP debacle

It was the worst of times for the NDP. Their support collapsed, dropping to its lowest ever level in terms of vote share, and they lost official party status. In the process, they shed over 70 per cent of their caucus and were wiped out in voter rich Ontario. Some of this misfortune may be attributed to their propping up the Trudeau government, thus tending to blur the difference between the two parties. So when Trump’s trade war hit, it was easy for NDP voters to flee to Carney’s perceived safe pair of hands.

To the extent that’s true, there’s a historical echo. Between 1972 and 1974, the NDP supported Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal minority in return for various policy concessions. Then the Liberals pulled the plug, winning a majority in the ensuing election while the NDP lost almost half of their seats. It was that will to power again!

This underlines the dilemma confronting parties like the NDP. Do they want to ruthlessly compete for power? Or are they content with shaping public debate, gradually making once-radical ideas seem mainstream and pushing the boundaries of what society sees as politically acceptable?

It’s a very real—and honourable—trade-off choice.

The pollsters

In a post-election interview, poll aggregator Philippe J. Fournier was generally satisfied with his model’s performance. And if you take margins of error into account, he was justified in doing so.

Nonetheless, his final projection had the Liberals at 186 seats and the Conservatives at 124. The respective actuals were 169 and 144. And he
significantly underestimated the Conservatives in Ontario while overestimating the Liberals in Alberta.

Vindication is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.

The views, opinions, and positions expressed by our columnists and contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of our publication.

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.