Mark Carney is celebrated abroad – while consolidating power at home

The Canadian prime minister’s reckoning with Trumpism in Davos clashes with his attacks on environmental, Indigenous and labour rights

The Canadian prime minister is a hero around the world for his Davos speech that reckoned with a reconfiguration of power in the shadow of Donald Trump.

But at home, Mark Carney is mirroring the US president by radically centralizing power within his office and cabinet and taking a hatchet to dozens of laws protecting environmental, Indigenous and labour rights, all in order to enact his economic agenda.

His global sale of Canadian land and resources comes just weeks after another major Canadian export – wildfire smoke – decimated First Nations communities in northern Ontario, leading to mass evacuations and warning the world of the impact of a fossil fuel economy.

The Building Canada Strong Act, Bill C-39, is a 250-page piece of omnibus legislation introduced on 21 September by the transport minister and House leader, Steven MacKinnon.

The new bill expands his previous legislation that created an expansive fast-tracking designation for “projects of national interest” to “regions of national interest”, which could exempt vast areas of Canada from labour and Indigenous rights, and environmental protections.

Geographic regions can be given this sweeping new designation by federal ministers, diminishing the sovereignty of parliament and bypassing local elected officials and affected citizens in these special economic zones.

Arms-length environmental review boards are also being done away with. Decision-making for new pipelines, nuclear facilities, highways and other major infrastructure has been shifted to the very bodies charged with promoting these sectors. The Canada Energy Regulator now directly assesses energy projects, while the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission directly approves nuclear/uranium projects.

Cabinet approval has also been removed entirely for most pipelines under the amended framework, now strictly reserved for pipeline projects requiring more than 300km of new right of way. Even if a significant pipeline is proposed, if it hews close to existing corridors, it is now exempt from federal cabinet oversight.

This is what Carney believes it takes to make good on his oft-repeated promise that Canada “has what the world wants”.

As Narwhal magazine reported, these changes follow lobbying by the oil and gas industry in the form of a literal wishlist of demands to speed up project reviews for fossil fuel projects. A public pressure campaign by the CEOs or executive chairs of 14 companies was released last March, calling on the prime minister to undo the former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s modest climate policies.

It is not only environmental protections that are impeding the economy Carney hopes will stabilize Canada’s GDP. The new bill also explicitly adds the power to end a legal strike in the Canada Labour Code.

For Indigenous peoples, the rollback is just as massive. They have fought for decades to constitutionally enshrine their rights to consultation on development affecting their lands.

But with fast-tracked projects and a new guarantee to industry of a one-year timeline for decisions, communities must determine all cumulative impacts in the early stages of assessment, virtually wiping out their opportunity to influence the project direction, given the time-consuming nature and costly nature of impact assessment.

What is the former central banker’s vision for Canada? To what image of nationalism is Carney hewing?

Carney’s approach has been called a “carve-out” system of legal exceptionalism. These aren’t the sensational executive orders of Trump’s bombastic political style, but more sophisticated and sly swipes at our existing framework of law.

It is no coincidence that this omnibus legislation came down following the major Canada Investment Summit that Carney held in Toronto in September. It replaced what many feared was the worst rollback in rights Canadians had ever seen – Bill C-5 - with something even worse.

The leaked pitch book for the Investment Summit showed 167 projects being sold to the highest bidder among the 200+ private equity and sovereign wealth funds reps who attended. The projects include AI datacentres, publicly owned airports, defence manufacturing, and dozens of energy and mining projects.

Carney has claimed the summit raised over $500bn in new foreign investment commitments to Canada. But how will he accommodate the needs of capital to make these projects viable? The Building Canada Strong Act is the most crucial way, through regulatory concessions. But it’s part of a buffet of public wealth on the table.

Only one day after the summit, Carney introduced the Productivity Mega Deduction, allowing businesses to deduct the cost of a much broader range of assets right away, including pipelines, mining property, aircrafts and bridges. The effective tax rate went from 13% to 6.4% – the lowest of any major economy, including the US.

Carney also promised to distribute C$280bn in federal subsidies to industry by way of tax write-offs and shifting risk from capital to taxpayers via cheap credit and loans from the Canada Growth Fund, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, and Export Development Canada.

To survive Trump’s trade war, the doors of Canada have been flung open to a giant sale of resources to industrial projects that would not be viable without the public backstop of financing and corporate license to plunder.

Though Carney is popular, Canadians are waking up to this elitist agenda. Rather than rescuing Canada, it is endangering the survival of our country and people.

Shiri Pasternak is an associate professor in criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and a member of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism research team, a collaboration between critical scholars and Indigenous land defenders across North America