Raymond J. de Souza: Will Carney chart a new course for Indigenous Canadians?

Could it be just a year ago that Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister?

Mark Carney won the leadership on an accelerated schedule and began dismantling the Trudeau policy agenda even more quickly. The new prime minister boasted about the cancellation of the consumer carbon tax with the old prime minister sitting in the front row. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

It was as if the Liberal party had, vis-à-vis Trudeau, adopted Katy Perry’s Roar as its theme song for 2025: “You held me down, but I got up/ Get ready ’cause I’ve had enough/ … ‘Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar.”

The champion, after breaking up with Trudeau, roared to its fourth consecutive election victory. Trudeau was invited to the throne speech and, trying to keep the old flame flickering, greeted King Charles III in the Senate chamber wearing garish sneakers. The King and Carney instead wore their prominent Order of Canada medallions.

Canada’s sovereign announced plans to put Trudeau’s agenda in the rear-view mirror. Out went the capital gains tax increase, in came a middle-class tax cut. No talk of “phasing out” the oilsands, but instead a promise to build, build, build, which in Canada means natural resource infrastructure.

The government was soon smiling on the very LNG projects about which Trudeau said there was “no business case.” It signed — in Alberta! — an agreement to agree at some point to build a pipeline. As an added bonus, Trudeau’s designated mascot for environmental extremism, Steven Guilbeault, resigned from cabinet. Don’t let that door hit you either.

Trudeau’s economic and environmental policies have been cast aside, so much so that the Conservative opposition has understandably accused Carney of stealing its policies. A key question for 2026 will be whether Trudeau’s Indigenous policy will be next to go.

Trudeau’s premiership began with the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report in 2015. He embraced even its most extravagant claims, fuelled as he was by two powerful factors — conventional liberal self-loathing for Canada’s history and his guilt over his father’s assimilationist views.

Trudeau never believed that Canada was truly a “genocidal” nation, but he did feel guilty that his father’s long premiership looked the other way on residential schools. As Chris Selley noted in these pages, “If Canada committed genocide, and if it were ever to be litigated, former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s never-ending-adulation post-retirement tour would surely grind to a halt: If the guy who was minister of Indian Affairs during a key period in the residential school system’s history and was co-author of the infamous, assimilationist ‘white paper’ isn’t in trouble, then who?”

Carney’s paternal legacy on the question is altogether different. He was born in the Northwest Territories because his father had made great sacrifices to educate Indigenous children in the remote north. He has not repeated the casual slanders-by-association that Trudeau and the TRC propagated.

Will Carney will chart a new course, better for Indigenous Canadians and better for Canada?

A promising sign came last month on the 10th anniversary of the TRC report. Carney issued a largely pro forma statement of support, but there were not the high-profile rituals of abasement and reproach favoured by his predecessor. Most interesting, in detailing the latest billions of federal monies poured into reconciliation projects, the statement began by noting the “doubling (of) the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program and building projects with greater Indigenous equity ownership.”

It’s a small thing, but highlighting investment and partnership, rather than expanded bureaucracy and dependency, is a welcome shift. Not a small thing was Carney’s decision to announce priority resource projects without engaging in years-long consultation with government-approved Indigenous leaders.

The Assembly of First Nations howled about that at its December meeting, but Carney knows that plenty of local Indigenous communities are eager for resource developments, while it remains in the bureaucratic interest of national Indigenous leadership to block them. Money generated by resource development goes directly to Indigenous entrepreneurs and workers and local bands; the spigot of TRC-driven settlements is controlled by an entrenched establishment whose self-interest depends upon a path of ongoing recrimination, not authentic reconciliation.

Carney’s decision not to give Indigenous officialdom a pre-emptive veto over Indigenous prosperity is a welcome break from 10 years of Trudeau stagnation. At this early stage, it is a possible indication of what may come; the test will be when actual resource proposals are advanced.

Carney was able to move as quickly as he did in casting aside the Trudeau-Guilbeault eco-agenda because of the Trump disruption. The B.C. courts have provided another disruption that will make it easier for him to adjust his predecessor’s course. Calling into question the property ownership of B.C. businesses and homeowners has already reset the political calculus, and not only on the West Coast.

The AFN’s foolish call last month for the “hate speech” criminalization of “denialism” regarding residential schools and unmarked graves is another example of being increasingly out of touch with ordinary Canadians of goodwill. Can it possibly be a crime to deny something that is not true, namely that mass graves of Indigenous children have been found in Canada? The protest against “denialism” is just evidence that, after 10 years, TRC-inspired claims are no longer the only opinions permitted in polite company.

Trudeau and the TRC were fabulous for Indigenous gatekeepers, who got to negotiate massive government transfers to their communities, even as their work set back the cause of genuine economic progress for Indigenous Canadians. Even more than the Trudeauvian policies he has already jettisoned, Carney should want to change that.

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