Mark Carney says he's more conservative than Doug Ford, here's the reality...

Whatever you think of Doug Ford, Mark Carney is no conservative.

Is Mark Carney really more conservative than Doug Ford? That’s the claim in a new piece from my colleague/cross-town rival Robert Benzie in the Toronto Star.

Mark Carney meets Doug Ford for the first time in March 2025.

Benzie was travelling for Ford this past week as Ontario’s premier did a swing through Texas. Ford was meeting with politicians and business executives making the case for Ontario and for Canada.

We need more of these kinds of missions and not just when there is a crisis. Talk to any of the people who have worked in diplomacy in the United States and many of them, if they are being honest, will tell you we got lazy long ago.

Canada doesn’t have enough staff from the federal side in enough offices in the United States. We don’t do enough trade missions, we don’t do enough relationship building and that didn’t just start with the advent of Trump.

It’s been going on a long time and has helped allow the attitudes of those around Trump, that Canada is a problem, to go unchecked.

But back to Benzie and his piece in The Star talking about Carney being more conservative than Ford. These comments came about because Ford’s team granted Benzie an interview to him and other travelling journalists and the premier just opened up about his first meeting with Carney.

“I’ll never forget when I met him the first time, the first words out of his mouth: ‘I’m more conservative than you.’ And I said: ‘well that sounds good.’”

Matched with Ford’s comments last week at a joint news conference where he asked if drinking from Carney’s water glass would turn him Liberal, Ford is in for a lot of ribbing.

Here’s that clip.

Vibes versus reality…

Is Mark Carney really more conservative than Doug Ford?

Let’s set aside claims that Ford is a Liberals in a blue tie for a moment and think about Carney. Is Mark Carney really a blue Liberal or running an old-school Progressive Conservative government?

If your guideline is what we saw out of Ottawa over the last century, then no. If you want to judge the PC claim by what we saw out of Queen’s Park, the Ontario government, over the last century - Mike Harris notwithstanding - then maybe but not really.

But don’t claim that Mark Carney is a conservative in the way that Stephen Harper or Brian Mulroney were. Sure, old journalists, pundits and the like who hated Mulroney when he was in office and thought he was a far-right facist now wax poetic about how he ran a middle of the road government.

It’s not what they said about him at the time.

Now, you are being fed the lie that Carney is a conservative of sorts.

What has he really built other than a bigger bureaucracy? We have a major projects office that is not moving major projects forward and a Build Canada Homes office that is doing everything but making sure homes are built.

For Carney and his team, it is all about vibes and not results.

He stands up to Trump, so many Canadians love him.

He isn’t Justin Trudeau, so he must be an improvement.

He talks to other world leaders, so he must be taken seriously.

On those fronts, Carney has no deal with Donald Trump and tariffs on Canada have only gone up since he took office. He may not be Trudeau in that he’s not an arrogant ass in meetings with premiers but are the policies all that different?

And as for talking to world leaders, he called for a pulling together of middle powers during his speech at Davos and so far, he has no takers.

Mark Carney presents well, he claimed he was good in a crisis, but so far we haven’t seen evidence of that.

Conservative in what way…

Mark Carney took over a federal government that promised to spend less than the Trudeau government.

“Day-to-day government spending, the government’s operating budget, has been growing by an unsustainable 9% every year,” Carney told the House of Commons in May of last year.

Yet, when it came time for his own government’s budget, spending didn’t actually go down as I pointed out at the time, it went up. Carney it seems likes to promise big things but not deliver.

Consider that Carney promised spending reductions in departments of 7.5% this year and 15% cumulative by year three, and instead, total spending went up by 7.2%. The budget document is still promising 15% savings across all departments over the next three years, even as total spending goes up.

As for Carney’s promise to reduce spending in coming years, but not this year, I’ve been listening to politicians say that for 25 years. It’s a nice way to put off hard decisions that voters may not like.

Beyond showing that he’s not a fiscal conservative, Carney is also keeping a number of Trudeau era policies that are foolish and will continue to hurt our economy.

The industrial carbon tax just went up on April 1, he is pushing ahead with stricter methane regulations on our oil and gas sector, he is determined to ensure that we have a decarbonized oil that none of our customers are asking for to compete against oil that wouldn’t meet Canadian environmental standards of ten years ago.

He may have delayed and slightly weakend Canada’s EV mandate, but he hasn’t gotten rid of it. And on gun control, he’s still putting all the emphasis on Trudeau’s failed gun “buyback” program that I wrote about here rather than going after criminals who continue to shoot up our streets.

Time to face reality…

If you like Mark Carney and think he’s doing a great job then knock yourself out, you clearly prefer vibes over reality. Don’t however claim that he’s doing a great job or that he’s running a conservative or PC government.

He’s running a high spending, left-leaning Liberal government that is overseeing a higher unemployment rate, high food inflation and a staggering economy.

That’s the reality.

I’ll deal with Doug Ford another time.