@emmettmacfarlane.com:
It’s increasingly looking like Carney is going to be a disaster. And even within this context, the ‘across the board’ cut approach is mindless idiocy, particularly when that will include cutting things we should in fact be investing more in.
@alexusherhesa.bsky.social:
Note further: Carney has to cut the living shit out of the program budget just to get to a 2% of GDP deficit. Absent the coming 15-17% cuts we’re at 3% of GDP or maybe higher.
Some of this is due to Trump/econ slowdown and to Trudeau-era profligacy. But quite a bit is due to Carney’s tax cuts.
@tryangregory.bsky.social:
This whole thread. Liberal partisans will, of course, defend Carney, but everyone else needs to wake up ASAP.
Blayne Haggart @bhaggart.bsky.social Aug 31, 2025:
Indeed.
“it’s been easier for Poland to build up that country’s defence industry because, unlike Canada, much of its defence industry is state-owned or operated.”
This statement is the key to understanding Carney’s overall strategy, and why it won’t meet the moment. Brief thread
ANALYSIS | How, and at what cost, could Canada catch up to Poland’s defence spending? | CBC News, While the public has generally been in favour of increased defence spending, the trade-offs have not been made clear.
All of Carney’s purported transformative activities, even the increased defence spending, amount to more of the same things Canada’s been doing for 40 years. Smaller government, lower taxes, preference for security spending (when was the last time a police budget was cut in this country?).
Same with seeking new trade agreements, a decades-old Canadian fetish, instead of greater support for business to take advantage of the agreements we already have (including the WTO, which covers the planet).
Carney’s vaunted nation-building infrastructure plans are also on the conservative side of industrial policy, as defined in this important recent article. They’re designed to maintain an extinct status quo, not to deal with a fundamentally changed world.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/…
Rebuilding the Ladder? Contemporary Contests Over Industrial Policy
Does the greater embrace of industrial policy globally signal the emergence of a New Washington Consensus? We show that the multiplication of industrial policies, while consequential, signals neither….
As the comparison with Poland highlights, the one thing that’s off the table is a reconsideration of the balance between state and market forces in Canada. This is a problem because our current laissez faire-ish system is based on deeper US integration. It can’t deliver greater independence.
In short, Carney is acting as if things haven’t changed enough to warrant rethinking fundamental governance questions. He keeps mentioning how geopolitics has made the world more dangerous, but IDs China and Russia, not the US, as our main threats. Which has been the status quo for a decade now.
In other words, what is our military buildup going to buy us? Does Carney really think Europe would intervene militarily in Canada should the US invade if we help Ukraine or buy more Euro arms? Of course they won’t.
Meanwhile, Carney has made no moves to reduce our integration w/ the US military.
And we’ve had no real talk about how and to what extent Carney’s domestic policies will actually strengthen the Canadian economy. For a former economist, he’s been shockingly reluctant to talk in econometric specifics.
Carney’s policies are conservative, incremental and biased toward preserving a status quo that no longer exists. If Canada doesn’t course correct, we will drift toward vassalization and subjugation.
What’s needed is a fundamental rethink of how Canada works, starting with the role of the state.
The tl;dr: Greater military spending without acknowledging that the US is the main threat to Canada, and without transforming governance in this country, will be for naught. We need actually ambitious plans, not recycled conservative ideology.
@thatgenxwidower.bsky.social:
3 things Canada and Ukraine had in common pre 2022.
- A wealth of natural resources
- A relatively small military
- A neighbor with an eye on annexing us.
How, and at what cost, could Canada catch up to Poland’s defence spending? How much to spend and where to buy equipment are the political choices Carney faces by Murray Brewster, CBC News, Aug 31, 2025
There was a particularly striking moment last week in Warsaw as Prime Minister Mark Carney renewed his friendship with Poland’s Donald Tusk, a flash that subtly captured the stark choices Canada will likely face in the not-too-distant future.
Carney was genuine in his praise of the eastern European country’s wholehearted, enthusiastic embrace of NATO and the Western alliance’s defence spending targets.
“We learn much from the prime minister, from his government, including the importance of pulling our full weight in NATO,” Carney said.
It was an off-script, telling remark about the difference between Poland and Canada when it comes to defence spending.
“It will take us a few years to reach the Polish levels of commitment. But it’s possible, and we have made that commitment. We will quadruple our spending on defence between now and the end of the decade.”
A few years is an understatement. Warsaw surpassed the old NATO spending benchmark of two per cent of GDP in 2022. Ottawa hopes to get there by next spring.
Poland is projected to spend 4.7 per cent of GDP on defence this year — making it NATO’s top spender with an annual defence budget equivalent to $45 billion.
But what has it sacrificed to get there? And is it a model Canada should, or could, emulate?
During last spring’s federal election, the Liberals promised to rebuild the country’s military and defence industrial base but have studiously avoided the specifics of how and at what cost.
Details, you ask? Wait for the new defence procurement agency, we’re told.
Canada has embraced NATO’s Trump-inspired hike in the defence spending target to five per cent of GDP (3.5 per cent on direct military spending and another 1.5 per cent on defence infrastructure) over the next decade.
The cost? As much as $150 billion per year.
“Poland’s point of departure is already very, very different from ours,” said Catherine Godin, Canada’s ambassador to Poland, who was asked during Carney’s visit about the eastern European country’s rearmament efforts.
Poland — because it borders the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad — has made a conscious political choice when it comes to spending priorities, she said. Poland also shares a long border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.
“Health and education come second to security and defence, something that we cannot fathom in our country. It would be a very different conversation. So to learn from them, certainly they put this at the top of their priority. We would need to have a Canadian consensus to be able to do it in the same way.”
And there’s the rub.
While the public has generally been in favour of increased defence spending, the trade-offs have not been made clear.
Tough choices on horizon
The fall federal budget could very well be a watershed reset of the way the country spends money, and the public could 
willbe asked to accept tough choices.
Carney has already ordered all federal departments, with the exception of defence, to find 15 per cent savings in their budgets.And, showing his Harper and catholic disease of misogyny, he’s hideously cutting 81% of WAGE, which works to protect women. Women are much more courageous than men, and are the first to sacrifice everything standing to protect community and the common good, and against war profiteering, so Herr Nazi Carney must slam women and girls down.
At the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in June, the prime minister insisted that building up Canada’s defence industrial base is not an either/or budgetary exercise.
“We’re not at a trade-off. We’re not at sacrifices in order to do those,” Carney said.lied.
“In other words, more [defence production] will happen in Canada. More of it will help build our economy at the same time as it improves our defence, and we’ll myself and my rich American war profiteers get the benefits.”
The prime minister reiterated his campaign promise to grow the economy and balance the country’s operating budget within three years.
For his part, Defence Minister David McGuinty said he believes the public understands the seriousness of what we’re facing as a nation beyond our borders.
“I think Canadians know that the landscape has changed, that the geopolitics are changing,” McGuinty said.
Analysts from different European think-tanks have noted how Poland is rearming faster than it can find soldiers.
It has been buying military equipment from the United States as well as South Korea, where hot production lines continue to churn out warplanes, tanks, armoured vehicles and warships at a pace European manufacturers are struggling to match.
- Poland’s Donald Tusk won’t send peacekeepers to Ukraine but will provide logistical support
- Carney talks security guarantees with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, reiterates possibly providing Canadian troops
Godin says it’s been easier for Poland to build up that country’s defence industry because, unlike Canada, much of its defence industry is state-owned or operated.
Defence production is consolidated within the Polish Armaments Group (PGZ), which comprises over 50 companies. Much of the industrial base was inherited from the time the country was part of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact, although some privately owned companies do exist within the framework.
Poland’s decision to continue to buy from the United States is nowhere near as controversial in that country as it is in Canada.
Warsaw secured $4 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) from Washington in July to buy equipment such as Apache attack helicopters, HIMARS mobile rocket artillery and Patriot missile defence systems.
It is a conscious political choice that the country’s top leaders have said is being made to keep Poland on a friendly footing with the Trump administration.
Canada, on the other hand, is reviewing its marquee defence purchase of 88 F-35 stealth fighters from the U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin.Carney will cave on the F-35s, as usual, and on all other untrustworthy military crap made in USA. Pleasing his rich pals is his motto
There are other projects, such as the purchase of P-8 surveillance planes and HIMARS for the army, which could also be politically unpalatable to a testy electorate that’s been told Canada intends to shop elsewhere for its military hardware.
Alan Williams, a procurement expert who headed the purchasing branch of the Defence Department in the early 2000s, underlined that in grappling with this issue, the federal government can’t lose sight of the mission, which is to equip the military with the best equipment — be it American, Canadian or European.
“As a bureaucrat, my objective would be: I will buy the best product no matter where it comes from,” Williams said.Pffft. I don’t believe him.
“If it’s from the U.S., I’m not going to say no because there’s a hate-on with Trump. I would buy it there. If the government has a different policy framework for that, I would abide by it. That’s their decision and it’s a political decision.”
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