“I see the effectiveness of – the term they would use is ‘flooding the zone,’ of doing multiple things at the same time,” Mark Carney said in an interview last year, talking about U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA muse, Steve Bannon.
This week, Carney showed just how much he’s learned from the Trump White House.
On Monday, the Canada Energy Regulator locked in artificially low tolls on the Trans Mountain oil pipeline. It’s a permanent subsidy for oil sands producers, which are mostly owned by U.S. investors.
On Tuesday, Carney met the global CEOs of Shell and Petronas in Vancouver, to celebrate their decision to double the size of the LNG Canada terminal and expand the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
On Wednesday, the Ksi Lisims LNG project trumpeted its latest deal, a tentative supply agreement with UK gas utility Centrica. This means the American-owned terminal now has customers for 75 per cent of its capacity, largely thanks to Carney.
On Thursday the PM flew to Fort McMurray to declare Alberta’s West Coast oil pipeline a “Project of National Interest,” setting in motion a rubber-stamp approval and billions in taxpayer funding.
All this after introducing Bill C-39, the latest fast-track law designed to speed up fossil fuel projects, sideline Indigenous opposition and weaken workers’ rights.
It’s enough to make your head spin – and that’s the point. Carney is using the shock and disorientation of Trump’s second term to ram through changes that will reverberate for decades.
Ironically, the greatest beneficiaries are the same Wall Street billionaires who are funding Trump’s political movement, and enacting U.S. policy around the world.
But the Trump era won’t last forever. November’s midterm elections could leave the corrupt 80-year-old oligarch severely weakened. As Trump’s ability to threaten Canada shrinks, so does Carney’s window to ram through his agenda unopposed.
One day soon, Canadians may wake up and ask ourselves: what did we give up in those years? Who got richer, and who got poorer? And can any of these changes be reversed?
We’ll keep working to slow down Carney’s fanatical push for fossil fuel expansion. But for this week, give the man some credit. He can flood the zone with the best of them.
