By Tom Parkin
March 5th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Carney’s “opening to the right” hits limits as past supporters refuse to go along.
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So you support or oppose air strikes on Iran by US and Israel?
When on Tuesday he finally did speak to reporters during his latest global swing, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s E.
Only a month before, on January 30, as U.S. president Donald Trump threatened to invade Greenland, Carney told the Davos elite Canada would follow a “principled and pragmatic” foreign policy that upheld rule of law.
Rule of law tossed out like expired milk
His leadership in the world would be “principled in our commitment to… the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter,” Carney pledged to the assembly of politicians and wealthy.
And within days of the Davos united front of European states, Canada and others, Trump backed down on his Greenland threat. Carney’s approval numbers soared.
But then on Saturday February 28, Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched rocket attacks assassinating the political leadership of Iran. They also killed over 100 schoolgirls. It led to a spiral of escalation.
That same day Carney’s commitment to rule of law was tossed out like expired milk.
Carney, in India, said Canada “supports the United States” in its attack on Iran. But on this move in his opening to the right, his base was not going to follow.
A survey by Angus Reid taken on Monday was released yesterday showing only 17 per cent of 2025 Liberal voters shared Carney’s support for US President Donald Trump’s war. Only 11 per cent of them believed Trump’s rocket attacks would make the world safer.
Is this military action making the world safer?
Carney’s opening to the right had been premised on being able to carry they left as he moved. But his support for Trump only resulted in stiffening the spine of NDP voters, just eight per cent of whom supported Trump’s missile attack, and was massively opposed by past Liberal voters.
Amid shock and resistance to his position, on Sunday Carney cancelled media availability, leaving foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand dealing with reporters to buy time for himself. A minister’s statement was posted then mysteriously deleted.
However Carney used the time he gained, when he did speak to the media on Tuesday, his statements continued to echo Trump talking points even as they sought to reposition away from him.
Carney clarification adds to foreign policy incoherence
When Carney finally spoke to media he didn’t withdraw his support for Trump’s attack, but now said it was made “with regret.” He argued his commitment to rule of law remained, but had been misunderstood: it extended to Canada’s own actions, but not to Canada’s statements about the actions of Trump.
He now called for more diplomacy, but repeated Trump’s talking points that diplomacy had failed, Trump’s justification for war.
This was not the Davos Man who proclaimed that honesty means “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.” And as with so much of what Donald Trump says, it was a lie that no one should believe, let alone repeat.
It was Trump who ended enforcement of law against Iran
Technically, Carney’s claim that diplomacy and rule of law had failed against Iran was correct. What he didn’t mention was Trump and Netanyahu created that failure.
Before Trump’s first term, rule of law had constrained Iran. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, put UN atomic agency inspectors on the ground in Iran monitoring for compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty.
In January 2016, inspectors from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran’s compliance, as they did in each of their quarterly “Verification and Monitoring” reports until 2018.
But the goal of MAGA and Netanyahu was not nonproliferation, it was regime change. The deal had to be killed to reopen that path.
Trump tore up the JCPOA deal in 2018. Enforcement of law against Iran was lifted. And after that there have been strong suspicions Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons development program. Yes, diplomacy failed. Trump and Netanyahu ensured it. Carney should not validate their false history.
Carney’s opening to the right has certainly put Pierre Poilievre off balance, leading to low polling support and MP defections. But this latest attempt to subvert the Conservative Party by adopting conservative policy — if that’s what it was, rather than plain stupidity — has run into resistance from those who elected him
Davos Carney argued, in the past, Canada gained mutual benefit with the United States by “living the lie” that rule of law was enforced evenly. But with Trump’s “rupture,” which completely rejected rule of law, that fiction had to stop.
Carney claimed “you cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
Davos Carney was right. Which is why on Iran he was completely wrong.
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What organization provided this data? It is not mentioned, or have I missed it?
Editor’s note: Angus Reid. We just didn’t have tome to pull together al the data.
I want to excerpt a fits the bill, piece of a very long commentary from the March 3 2026 New York Times. To me from a friend.
It finds familiar words from the south of us
“The Great Lie of War
March 3, 2026”
“By Ezra Klein
Produced by Jack McCordick”
“So I think it’s incredibly corrosive to democracy to have this kind of loop of conflict that is increasingly sidelining Congress and public opinion entirely. I also think there’s something even more dangerous, Ezra, which is: When are we going to know how bad it’s going to get with Trump?”
“What if the things that you fear are already happening? We already have a president who clearly came back into office wanting the military to be more directly responsive to him than it was in the first term, when the military leadership and even some of the Pentagon leadership stood up to him more and more. We have seen him purge the top of the military general officers. We have seen him address the general officers and say: Hey, American cities might be military training grounds.”
“Now we’ve seen him, within a matter of weeks, undertake multiple military actions. I’ll just give you a few.”
“We bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. We were blowing up boats in the Caribbean on totally false pretenses that it had something to do with drug trafficking in the United States — and potentially committed war crimes. We abducted the leader of Venezuela.”
We now just killed the supreme leader of Iran and are trying to topple that regime, or maybe we’re not. And at the same time, we see the Department of War telling Anthropic, an A.I. company, that they will be banned from any business of the government if the Pentagon can’t ignore their terms of service against mass surveillance of Americans. These are all things that have happened within three months.
“Where I’m going with this is: The ultimate guardrail in democracy is supposed to be the separation between the president and the military as an institution. If the military of an institution can just directly serve the interests of Donald Trump, with no public debate about what it’s doing, no congressional votes on what it’s doing: How many more countries are you going to bomb, and what is that military going to end up doing in the United States if he invokes the Insurrection Act?”
That’s not to impugn the military, that’s to impugn where Trump is taking this. So I think the darker scenarios: It’s not only process nerds saying we need to have authorizations for use of military force and we need briefings to Congress.
“No, it’s: Is the military an institution that just completely serves the whims of the president? Or is it an institution that is apolitical, that is equally responsive to Congress and the president? Those questions are going to matter a lot how the next two and three-quarters years of the Trump administration go?.
“Although I think it’s important to say: It’s not that Congress is being defied — Congress has abdicated.”
“Yes.”
“Mike Johnson is not out there complaining. He is supporting this. There are many ways in which Trump is a disruptive break with the past but also the escalation of not going to Congress for quite dangerous operations.”
Shared with you by a Times subscriber