A quarrel among the wolves

Aug. 8, 2025

The working class must be ever vigilant of the machinations of the political class. Mark Carney positioned himself as Canada’s response to Trump, but his actions show him to be pro-business and anti-worker.

Workers need to be wary this season. The ground is cluttered with politicians who claim to be our friends. These claims are almost always lies, whether they are uttered in Ottawa or DC, or in any other capital where poisonous populism is celebrated by autocrats. Looking at you, Orban, Putin and Modi!

We need to learn how to see through these false populisms to the ruthless ruling class interest they mask. And we need to develop a broad international workers’ movement to resist the current global counter-revolution against the gains workers won in the past century. Fake populism is not going to help.

“You can always tell when a ruling class politician is lying,” an old friend once told me. “Their lips are moving.”

While some business-as-usual  politicians occasionally tell the truth, it is usually an accident. The much-ballyhooed conflict between Mark Carney and Donald Trump over tariffs, and Trump’s public musing about taking over Canada, led to a lot of huffing and puffing about how Canada needed Carney to win the last election because he would be able to deal with Trump more effectively than the Conservative “I wanna be Donald” candidate, Pierre Poilievre. You know the drill- “elbows up” and all that.

So far, as this column is being written in early August, the allegedly tough guy banker has not done so well in his face off with Trump. On July 31, the White House issued a press release announcing that tariffs on all goods sold into the US from Canada (with the exception of those covered by the previously negotiated USMCA) would rise to 35 per cent. As has become “normal” in Trump’s tariff tantrums, the rationale for this increase seemed to shift daily. The White House release cited the minimal amounts of fentanyl coming across the border as a reason for the punitive tariffs, while in a “Truth Social” posting the Orange Julius Ceasar attributed the tariff hike to Carney’s public musings about recognizing a Palestinian state. No need to memorize these rapidly shifting rationalizations. By tomorrow, Trump will have new reasons.

It is easy enough to see through Trump’s claims to be on the side of working people, and his glow in the dark, monstrously irrational speeches and policy reversals by social media help with the unmasking. Even so, with the help of massive donations from the billionaires he considers his peers, the Orange One has successfully persuaded a slim majority of Americans who voted in the last election that he’s their guy.

But already, after a half year of Trump 2.0, it is clear whose guy he really is. Consider this: not only will Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill raise taxes on most Americans to subsidize tax giveaways to the richest elite individuals and corporations, but the Trump family and their inner circles have already realized over $300 million in trading fees on their shambolic meme coin, $Trump.

One of the meme coin’s many advantages for Trump is that it allows anyone who wants to buy influence at the White House to use $Trump coins as a way of delivering bribes in secret, with no accountability. Deals will be made, regulations gutted, a more or less independent civil service  destroyed, and vital social safety net programs will disappear. Truly, the best government money can buy!

The midterm elections next year will reveal whether the growing public disillusionment with Donald’s long litany of unkept promises has gone far enough to cost Trump and his MAGA accomplices their tenuous grip on electoral power. As this column is being written, Republicans in Texas and elsewhere are plotting a gerrymandering assault on existing electoral boundaries designed to make Republican wins more likely, and American streets have been full of spirited No-Kings protests.

In the meantime, Canadian workers are being urged to put our trust in Mark Carney as our champion against Trump’s vulgar imperialism and bullying. This despite the fact that Carney has followed the time-honored Liberal tradition of campaigning to the left and governing to the right.

While our new PM is not as repulsive a character as Trump, admittedly a low bar, there is very little reason to imagine he will take any policy position that seriously endangers the world of high finance and predatory banking that has been his career home.

Like our last PM, Carney likes to utter pseudo progressive poses and gestures to distract us from his years of ongoing service to the interests of the ruling class. The fight between Trump and Carney is not a principled fight between an American thug and a Canadian patriot. It is, at best, a quarrel among wolves about the best way to kill the sheep.

And Carney has a long record of profiting from the slaughter of sheep. Take, for just two examples, his years at the vampiric Goldman Sachs and his role (just before coming home to be crowned as the new Liberal leader) at Brookfield Asset Management, a firm that has been described as a union buster and champion tax avoider.

A recent article in The Walrus notes that:

“…between 2021 and 2024, when Carney was there, Brookfield made $23.3 billion (US). Since Canada’s corporate tax rate is around 26 percent, the company should have paid $6.1 billion (US) in taxes. But using a variety of loopholes, including offshore tax havens, the company paid only about $2 billion (US), meaning that Canada lost out on nearly $4.1 billion (US) in revenue. (Brookfield Asset Management, under Carney’s chairmanship, made $1 billion [US] in profit and paid nothing.” Evidently “elbows up” doesn’t mean any inconvenient meddling with corporate profits.

In the end, neither Trump nor Carney can live up to their cheap populist rhetoric. They are not here for us; they are here for themselves and the elite circles in which they move. We need to be clear headed about this fundamental truth and shape our tactics with it in mind.

This is not to say that workers shouldn’t engage in electoral politics, only that we should not imagine we’ll get full justice along that path. That said, the impending leadership campaigns within the NDP will provide a platform for more actively pro worker candidates like Yves Engler, the left firebrand who has already declared his interest in the leadership, to bring their programs to the public. We should all pay attention to the leadership race in the NDP, and work as we can to restore some of the party’s tattered social democratic commitment.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver. He is a widely published free lance writer who covered health policy and labour beats for the Tyee on line for a dozen years.

[Top photo: Prime Minister Mark Carney (left) and President Donald Trump (right). Credit: Mark Carney/ Joyce N. Boghosian / X/ Wikimedia Commons]