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.
Parliament returns Monday against a backdrop of a deteriorating economy and considerable political uncertainty. The session will be defined by the inevitable clash between Prime Minister Mark Carney and newly re-elected Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. The New Democratic Party will be mostly focused inward on its own future.
If there are three questions to keep in mind as MPs file back into the Commons, they are these: (1) Is Mark Carney a Chrétien Liberal or a Trudeau Liberal? (2) Can Pierre Poilievre regain control of the political agenda with a risky bet on immigration? (3) And does the NDP have a future as a mainstream party?
1. Mark Carney: Chrétien Liberal or Trudeau Liberal?
The defining question for Prime Minister Carney as Parliament resumes is whether he’s a Chrétien Liberal or a Trudeau Liberal. His budget this fall will offer the first real answer.
Jean Chrétien was the quintessential pragmatist who at times campaigned to the Left but generally governed from the Right. His government’s 1995 cost-cutting budget is, of course, the best example. Justin Trudeau, by contrast, was a self-identified progressive who governed accordingly. His government doubled program spending and the national debt in over a decade.
Which model is Carney more likely to follow?
He’s promised to cut spending and balance the government’s so-called “operating budget” within three years. That would be a genuinely Chrétien-style move to bring revenues and outlays into a sustainable balance.
But is it realistic? Revenues are presumably softening in a slowing economy. Major spending items like defence, transfers to individuals, and transfers to provinces have been backed out of his government’s spending review. And now he needs to find as much as 40-60 percent in fiscal savings from the rest of the budget if the government has any chance of ultimately eliminating the deficit.
Where would these savings come from? Indigenous services? Cultural spending? Regional subsidies? The math is punishing, and the politics even more so.
It’s difficult to imagine Carney holding the line against the combined weight of interest groups and his own caucus when such cuts begin to bite. And then there’s his own promise to “invest” as much as 1 percent of GDP, which could add as much as $30 to 35 billion in new federal debt.
Which is why I predicted during the election campaign that, outside of the pandemic years, federal borrowing and spending under Carney could actually end up higher than under Trudeau. As we approach the fall sitting, that outcome looks increasingly likely.
Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives at West Block on Parliament Hill for a meeting of the federal cabinet, the day after a swearing-in ceremony, in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 14, 2025. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
That’s the heart of the Carney paradox. He campaigned as a pragmatist who diverged from his predecessor on the pace of public spending and the need to refocus federal policy on growth rather than redistribution. Yet many of his early steps—including new federal bureaucracies for housing and major projects—indicate greater ideological continuity than his rhetoric betrays.
It’s also self-evident that the centre of gravity of Carney’s caucus is far closer to Trudeau’s than Chrétien’s. Are Liberal MPs who championed Trudeau-era spending increases really now prepared to defend spending cuts? The answer is almost certainly no.
Carney promised a break from Trudeau. Yet unless something changes, his budgets may be remembered less as a rupture than as proof that the Liberal Party has tilted decisively toward the Trudeau wing over the Chrétien wing. Next month’s budget will be the first real glimpse of which kind of Liberal prime minister he intends to be.
2. Poilievre: Is immigration his next big bet—or his biggest risk?
Pierre Poilievre headed in 2025 with a considerable lead in the polls that really found its origins nearly two years earlier.
Beginning as soon as 2022, he was laying out the case that the Trudeau government’s pandemic spending was inflationary and would ultimately drive up prices across the economy, including, most notably, in the housing sector. At the time, his warnings were dismissed by the government as partisan crankery. By the eve of this year’s election, Poilievre’s arguments had become broadly accepted and popular with Canadian voters.
Had Donald Trump not been elected or launched the threat of tariffs or spoken of Canada as the 51st state, it’s highly probable in fact that Poilievre and the Conservatives would have won a majority government on the strength of his prescient and persuasive arguments about the government’s failures on the cost of living.
As Parliament returns next week, Poilievre is clearly in search of his next big bet: a policy issue that will enable him to reassert control of the political agenda. In recent weeks, he’s begun to stake that bet on immigration.
The question for him is: is immigration the issue on which he can indeed dominate the agenda, or is it a step too far?
