So Was Carney the Lesser Evil to Vote For?

The architect of Project 2025 — the far-right blueprint underpinning many of the attacks U.S. President Donald Trump has launched on American democracy and human rights — didn’t end up speaking to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet Thursday, as originally planned.

Kevin Roberts, president of the hyper-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, cancelled on Carney.

“Regrettably, Dr. Roberts’s office indicated that he can no longer join us to present today,” a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed Thursday morning.

It’s a hair-raising development — not only that Carney’s office extended the invitation in the first place, but that in the face of furious outcry, the Liberals weren’t the ones who chose to halt the plans.

Some of those infuriated voices came from within their own party.

“To put it politely.”

Another sitting Liberal MP called it “an utter disgrace.”

“It’s a betrayal of Liberal voters, undermines the core theme of our campaign, and is an utter disgrace for a self-respecting democracy facing the rise of fascism next door,” the Liberal MP said in a direct message conversation.

“This man is a key architect of Donald Trump’s assault on the U.S. Constitution and it’s completely inappropriate that he be invited to address the federal Cabinet.”

The MPs spoke to The Tyee anonymously so they could speak freely without fear of repercussions.

Former Trudeau adviser calls the move ‘mind-boggling’

Roberts was one of several guest speakers set to address Carney and his ministers as they gathered for two days of meetings in the Greater Toronto Area this week.

Despite his cancellation, Carney’s office confirmed the government intends to keep in touch with Roberts — a man who just last year claimed the United States is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

“Our team will continue further engagement and discussions with him and other leading U.S. policy figures soon, regarding Canada’s economic and security relationship with the United States,” Carney’s spokesperson said.

Supriya Dwivedi, who worked as a senior adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, found the decision mystifying.

“It’s honestly mind-boggling why any Liberal government would invite a key figure involved in the horror show that is Project 2025,” Dwivedi told The Tyee over text.

“The Carney government has not made clear what kind of particular insight or expertise this person would have had into active trade negotiations and Trump’s mindset within them, but what is clear is that Project 2025 seeks to erode basic norms of democracy, limit women’s access to reproductive health (including contraception), and to roll back rights for the LBGTQ+ community.”

Indeed, it’s unclear how this continued engagement or hearing Roberts’s “perspectives” would benefit the Canadian government, and Carney’s PMO didn’t immediately respond to followup questions requesting that clarification.

Carney’s deputy chief of staff, Braeden Caley, took a stab at providing additional context on social media.

“Dr. Roberts was invited to speak about the American conservative movement & his perspectives on the CAN-US relationship,” Caley wrote on X.

“To advance the relationship, Canada will continue to engage with leading U.S. policy figures of all persuasions on the rapidly transforming political landscape.”

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne also told reporters that the goal was to hear from a diversity of perspectives.

“Listen, we invite different guests to come to our events,” he said.

“We wanted to hear a different perspective.”

Carney government acts first, thinks later: Liberal staffer

The danger Roberts’s ideology poses to U.S. democracy and human rights has become chillingly clear.

With each executive order and autocratic action Trump rips from Project 2025’s pages, he jolts the dystopian plan to life, shaping a monstrous reality.

Less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, Politico found 37 aspects of Project 2025 had already been implemented through executive orders.

This included banning transgender people from the military, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and Paris climate accords, restricting funding that helps abortion access, cutting foreign aid, detaining migrants with the help of local and state law enforcement, and much more.

While the argument from Carney’s camp seems to be that it would be useful to gain some insight into the kind of thinking that drives this cruel decision-making, that understanding might be difficult to glean from someone who is still very actively engaged in an ideological crusade.

Just two days ago, Roberts posted on social media that Americans “must meet the long campaign being waged against the family with an equally long offensive campaign to restore it.”

“Our leaders have opposed the latest and most outrageous policies of the left while slowly conceding the philosophical ground on which those policies were built,” he said in an accompanying video.

“The family’s decline is not a law of nature, nor is it an unstoppable force. It’s the product of human choices, and human choices can change. Indeed, if we hope to restore the family and save our republic, they must change.”

There’s no reason to assume Roberts would set aside this crusade when he speaks to Carney and his ministers. They can’t trust anything he tells them — nor can they assume his words aren’t carefully chosen to plant some kind of nefarious seed in the minds of the Canadian government.

Maybe they hope to outthink him.

But according to one current Liberal staffer, Carney’s government doesn’t seem to be doing much thinking at all.

“The way the Carney government seems to operate to me is ‘Act first, think later,’” said the staffer, who spoke to The Tyee anonymously because they feared career repercussions for speaking to media.

“The communication to staff is poor, and we often have to rely on news to find out what is going on — which leaves us unprepared to respond to questions from constituents. The only way to get answers from higher-ups is to phrase it as ‘What can I tell constituents?’”

If they’re going to keep flirting with the architects of America’s democratic decline, Carney’s government will have to get better at explaining itself — not only to the Canadian public, but also to members of its own team.

Rachel Gilmore is an award-winning journalist with extensive experience reporting on federal politics, human rights, disinformation and extremism.