The Weekly Wrap: Poilievre deserves more credit than he’s getting for the coalition he’s built

This outcome wasn’t unpredictable. It reflects a set of policy choices rooted in Carney’s technocratic instincts. His government’s responses are overwhelmingly top-down and state-centric. They may be conceptually satisfying, but they face obvious implementation challenges. Carney has effectively traded speed for sophistication. Progressive thinkers such as Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Matt Yglesias, and Marc Dunkelman (a forthcoming guest on Hub Dialogues) have warned that left-of-centre politicians are especially prone to this trap. They become intoxicated by complicated policy designs rather than focusing on basic implementability. They prize policy elegance over speed and execution. The result is precisely what we are seeing so far from the Carney government: high expectations colliding with low delivery. There are alternatives. The most effective lies in a deregulation agenda that removes government impediments to housing construction or a slow and cumbersome permitting process in order to free up private investment. The housing file is a good (or bad) example. The market’s inability to produce sufficient supply to meet demand isn’t a market failure. It’s a government failure that stems primarily from restrictive zoning rules and high taxes and development challenges. The logical solution is to address the government failure. The technocratic solution is to layer another state intervention on top of it. Carney’s preference for centralization and control isn’t only slowing down progress but also misallocating scarce political capital. Every month consumed by bureaucratic design and another round of consultations is a month in which Canada falls further behind on housing, infrastructure, and economic output. The risk for him is that the public begins to sense the gap between his lofty rhetoric and underwhelming results. Nothing undermines political confidence faster. The irony is that Carney himself diagnosed the problem during the campaign. He insisted that Canada needed to move at unprecedented speed. He was right. But speed requires simplification. It requires empowering provinces, municipalities, businesses, and communities to solve problems rather than waiting on Ottawa to perfect them. It requires faith in the capacity of markets and civil society to deliver results that a bureaucracy cannot. If the prime minister doesn’t adjust course, his government risks being remembered not for bold breakthroughs but for frustrated ambition. The lesson is as old as governing itself: technocracy may look attractive on paper, but in practice it tends to stall out. Canada doesn’t need more blueprints. It needs action. The world of William F. Buckley is gone forever Recent months have seen the publication of major biographies of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank Meyer—two men who disproportionately shaped modern conservatism. Their stories, which I’ll be discussing with Buckley’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus on an upcoming episode of Hub Dialogues, remind us of how much intellectual and political life has changed in the decades since they first rose to prominence. Buckley and Meyer mattered not only because of their formidable talents but also because of the world in which they operated. The mid-20th century was an era of concentration in the worlds of media, information, and politics. Authority was more centralized, channels of debate were narrower, and those who commanded them could exercise enormous influence. Buckley’s National Review became the premier venue for conservative ideas, and Meyer’s notion of “fusionism”—the marriage of libertarian economics and traditionalist values—set the movement’s intellectual framework. The result was that these towering figures could shape the boundaries of the conservative coalition with real force. Buckley’s decisive disavowal of the John Birch Society in the 1960s and his rejection of Ayn Rand and her acolytes carried real weight. In a fragmented environment, splinter groups might have carried on unscathed. But in that concentrated world, Buckley’s imprimatur was decisive. That world no longer exists. The concentration that enabled Buckley and Meyer’s authority has given way to fragmentation. The media, intellectual life, and politics have been democratized, which has opened new voices and platforms but also diffused authority. No one today can plausibly claim to speak for “the movement” the way that Buckley and Meyer once did. We’ve seen this dynamic play out in Canada. The rise of independent journalism has been a net positive in bringing fresh and diverse perspectives into public life. But it’s also striking to discover right-wing Substacks and YouTube channels that may seem fringe yet command larger audiences and greater influence than I do. The splintering of audiences and authority means that intellectual life is more open, but also more diffuse and harder to cohere. This trend is even more pronounced in the United States. Consider National Review’s famous “Against Trump” issue during the 2016 Republican primaries. In Buckley’s era, such a statement would have carried enormous weight. In the fragmented world of online media and politics, it landed with a thud. Trump still won decisively. When we say there won’t be another Buckley or Meyer, it’s not just that no one else will match their intellect, charisma, or presence. It’s that there cannot be another one. The concentrated world that elevated them has given way to something looser, more decentralized, and less hierarchical. The upside is more voices and greater democratization. The downside is that no one can play the role of defining and disciplining a movement. Whether the trade-offs prove worth it will ultimately be left to future historians.