Carney’s Liberals Are Governing like Conservatives—Just More Politely

For all of my adult life, I’ve been a Liberal believing in the defence of rights, the constraining of power, an equitable society, and an independent foreign policy. It’s been a narrative that many Canadians have strongly believed and supported.

Since 1982, the Charter gave us a core liberal centre that wasn’t really about party; it was about courts that could check governments, refugee protection as something we owed people, reconciliation as a shared obligation, gender equality, tackling poverty international law, building an activist role to counter Realpolitik.

These weren’t just policies. They were identity. That story is being rewritten.

The language hasn’t changed. Ministers still invoke the Charter, the “rules-based order,” Canada’s role as a constructive middle power. But watch what’s actually happening, and a different picture emerges: human rights moving steadily from the centre of public policy toward its edges, increasingly; poverty and homelessness being ignored.

Take asylum. Canada once had a system based on independent hearings, a reluctance to turn people away. What we’re building now is something different: pre-screening that cuts off claims before they reach the Immigration and Refugee Board, paper-only departmental reviews, a one-year time bar that can block a full hearing regardless of how someone’s situation has changed. The people affected aren’t abstractions. They’re students, workers, people whose circumstances evolved and who face real harm if sent back.

Meanwhile, the promised end to using provincial jails for immigration detention turned out to mean opening a “temporary” facility inside a federal prison in Quebec. United Nations experts have called on Canada to abolish immigration detention. We relocated it instead.

The Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States still stands, even as the assumption underlying it that the American system offers meaningful access to protection becomes harder to defend by the week. The agreement persists because it works as a filter. That’s the point.

This is what “system integrity” looks like when it replaces protection as the goal.

Similar logic runs through domestic spending. Budget cuts to Indigenous services look modest on paper, but over time, against inflation, they compound into real gaps—in housing, clean water, basic services. When treaty obligations and constitutional commitments already exist, choosing not to fund them isn’t neutral. It’s a political decision to treat reconciliation as discretionary.

In corrections, “streamlining” is the frame—but prisons were already struggling to provide rehabilitation, education, and culturally appropriate programming. Indigenous and Black Canadians are still overrepresented inside. Rights don’t mean much if institutions can’t uphold them.

On climate, Canada once had architecture, carbon pricing, emissions caps, clean electricity targets. Much of it has been weakened or dropped. The government now openly acknowledges it will miss its 2030 and 2035 targets, even as it promotes new liquefied natural gas projects and expanded oil and gas production. At the same time, defence spending has become a centrepiece of economic policy. Tens of billions to hit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2 percent target. A defence industrial strategy that positions arms production as a jobs driver.

None of that is necessarily wrong. The problem is the trajectory: more fossil fuels, more defence production, weaker climate commitments, tighter borders, trimmed social programs. These things reinforce each other. The more the political economy depends on them, the easier it becomes to treat rights and climate obligations as handicaps.

Abroad, the gap between rhetoric and action keeps widening. When the US sanctioned International Criminal Court officials (including a Canadian judge) for their work on investigations in Afghanistan and Palestine, Canada’s response was muted concern. No sustained defence of the institution it had long championed. When queried on the criminal behaviour of big powers, the response of Global Affairs is that it’s up to them to decide the legality. The signal was clear: even committed states step back from international law when it becomes inconvenient.

Diplomacy and international development are being downgraded at the very time that aiding in collaborative networks to seek peace and support democracy is crucial.

• What I Learned at the Liberal Convention as Carney Clinches His Majority
• Carneymania Sweeps the Country. Yes, Even Quebec and Alberta
• Carney Thinks He Can Make Government Work Again. Good Luck with That

The Liberal convention in Montreal confirmed the direction. Delegates were asked to endorse a platform centred on security, defence, and major projects, and to reject a resolution on election reform.

The political map is reshaping: a governing party pulled toward corporate and security priorities; an opposition rooted in populist conservatism; a weakened New Democratic Party struggling to matter.

Small-l liberals—people who still think of the Charter as a living thing, who care about refugee protection, Indigenous justice, gender equality, international law—are running out of political space.

Their values haven’t disappeared. The party that used to carry them is just moving on.

Originally published as “Forget the Rhetoric, Watch What They Do: Canada’s Liberals Move Right” by Lloyd Axworthy (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.