In The Weekly Wrap, Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.
There’s a big gap between Carney’s ambition and his government’s action
Parliament returns next week under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose first weeks in office have been marked by a great deal of rhetorical ambition. He’s spoken passionately about a hinge moment in Canadian history and the need for the country to be big and bold. The language is lofty, but so far policy details haven’t caught up.
We’ve heard about modest tax relief, some regulatory streamlining, and vague commitments to remove interprovincial trade barriers. The government’s early fiscal signals point toward more deficit spending and debt accumulation—a policy approach more consistent with the status quo than the kind of historic change the prime minister purports to represent.
Even the recent ministerial mandate letters are thin on specifics and high on platitudes. The seven priorities that he’s set out for the cabinet read more like generalized aspirations or uncatchy slogans than a substantive policy agenda. No one is against “bringing down costs for Canadians and helping them get ahead.” But no one also knows what it means.
If Carney aspires to be a transformational prime minister, he’ll need to put forward a policy agenda that reflects the scale of his own rhetoric. That means hard choices. It means tradeoffs. And it means facing down entrenched interests—from within the bureaucracy, from among the provinces, and even from within his own party.
Tuesday’s Speech from the Throne is the government’s first big opportunity to close the gap between ambition and action. Canadians will be watching not just for vision but for some concrete details. They’ve heard the prime minister speak about change. Now they want to know what it actually entails.
Carney frequently criticized Pierre Poilievre’s slogans during the election campaign. But in the month or so since it ended, his own government has essentially been defined by slogans. The success of his prime ministership—the extent to which he proves to be transformational—will ultimately depend on how he translates these slogans into substance.
Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives for a cabinet swearing in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, May 13, 2025. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
Want to grow the economy? Don’t forget about services
The Conservative Party’s announcement of a Leader’s Economic Growth Council is a promising step in the evolution of its economic policy agenda. It signals a seriousness of purpose about Canada’s underwhelming economic trajectory and the need for broader policy thinking rooted in conservative principles.
The party’s policy platform was heavily focused on the need to get back to building and making things—including homes, energy infrastructure, and manufactured goods. Resource development in particular loomed large in how the Conservatives thought and talked about Canada’s economy.
These instincts are broadly right. After a decade of policy reflected in Prime Minister Trudeau’s false dichotomy between resources and resourcefulness, it’s encouraging to see the Conservatives talk with confidence about the goods-producing side of the economy, including developing the country’s natural resources endownments.
But in the rush to correct one imbalance, they shouldn’t create another. Canada remains, like all advanced economies, predominantly a services-based economy. Nearly 80 percent of Canadians work in the service sector. Yet the party’s message and ideas during the campaign seemed to underestimate this key part of our economic mix.
This isn’t just a Conservative blind spot. One is increasingly finding this tendency in a lot of economic and political commentary. It’s almost as if we collectively overindexed for the world of bytes for a decade or more, and now we risk doing the same in favour of the world of atoms.
Popular books such as Trade Wars Are Class Wars, which rightly highlight global trade imbalances, underplay the significance of the service sector in Canada, the U.S., and other so-called “deficit countries.” Yet in a digital and ideas-based economy, services—including finance, education, law, health care, entertainment, and tech—matter more than ever.
If Pierre Poilievre wants to eventually be a growth-oriented prime minister, his party’s economic agenda must incorporate a plan to unleash service-sector productivity and innovation. That means, among other things, boosting investment in science and technology and creating the conditions for knowledge-based entrepreneurship.
By marrying a renewed focus on the physical economy with an ambitious vision for the service economy (including where atoms and bytes interact, such as using AI technology in oil and gas development), the Conservatives can put forward a comprehensive growth agenda. Its new Leader’s Economic Growth Council is a good place to start.
Antisemitic violence is an attack on liberalism itself
The disturbing rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in recent months has rightly shocked many Canadians. This week’s politically motivated killing of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington is a tragic expression of its consequences. But beyond the immediate acts of hatred and intimidation lies a deeper intellectual challenge—one that exposes the limits of our pluralism and the fragility of our liberalism.
At the core of much anti-Zionist rhetoric is a set of ideas fundamentally illiberal and tribal. They reject the Enlightenment’s universalism in favour of identity essentialism. They deny Jewish self-determination on the basis of collective grievance. They elevate lived experience over reason and morality. And increasingly, they seek to use the protections of liberal democracy—speech, protest, academic freedom—to undermine the liberal order itself.
This isn’t just a social crisis. It’s a philosophical one. Liberal societies are built on tolerance, yes—but also on limits. And we’re now confronting a painful but vital question: what do we do when individuals or groups invoke liberal pluralism to promote ideas that are hostile to liberal pluralism itself?
It’s an uncomfortable conversation, but one we must have. The liberal state cannot be neutral between Enlightenment values and their negation. It cannot protect both those who believe in human dignity and those who deny it. There is no stable pluralism without a moral core—or what Cardus’s Ray Pennings calls “principled pluralism.”
That means confronting antisemitism and anti-Zionism not only as acts of bigotry, but as assaults on the foundations of our political order. Liberalism must defend itself—or it won’t survive.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well…
