Whose mandate?

Carney's Mandate Letter Falls Short on Inequality

This article was originally published May 23, 2025, on Substack

Prime Minister Mark Carney's first mandate letter to his cabinet reads like a document for boardrooms rather than food banks. While the letter acknowledges Canada faces "unprecedented challenges," it fundamentally misdiagnoses the core crisis facing ordinary Canadians: deepening inequality that has left millions struggling to afford basic necessities while corporate profits soar. This crisis predates any crisis related to the 'Trump Tariffs'.

The Missing Diagnosis: Inequality as Crisis

The mandate letter extensively discusses productivity, infrastructure, and global competitiveness, but barely acknowledges the defining issue of our time: the growing chasm between the wealthy and everyone else. Canada's challenges aren't primarily about being competitive enough for global markets, but about ensuring the wealth our economy generates reaches working families.

Consider what's absent from Carney's "generational challenge" framing. There's no mention that CEO compensation has grown exponentially while wages have stagnated. There's no acknowledgement that housing has become a financialised commodity rather than a human right. There is no recognition that our healthcare and social services are crumbling, not because of productivity problems but because of deliberate underfunding. At the same time, tax cuts flow to corporations and the wealthy.

The letter's focus on "weak productivity" as a root cause exemplifies this misdiagnosis. Canada's problem isn't that workers aren't productive enough; it's that the gains from increased productivity have been captured almost entirely by Canadian and foreign corporations, rather than being shared with labour. Workers are more productive than ever, but their share of the economic pie continues to shrink.

The Corporate Solutions Trap

Carney's seven priorities reveal an approach that sees private sector partnership as the solution to public challenges. This reflects a fundamental ideological blind spot that progressive critics have long identified: the assumption that what is good for business automatically translates into what is good for working people.

Take housing, presented as priority four. The mandate speaks of "unleashing the power of public-private cooperation" and "catalysing a modern housing industry." This language suggests more of the same market-based approaches that created the housing crisis in the first place. Why are we looking to private developers to solve a crisis they helped create through speculation and commodification?

Similarly, the emphasis on attracting "the best talent in the world" while reducing overall immigration rates reveals a troubling two-tier approach. This priority suggests Canada should welcome wealthy immigrants and skilled professionals while restricting opportunities for working-class migrants and refugees, precisely the kind of policy that exacerbates inequality by serving capital's need for cheap labour while restricting worker solidarity.

Further, this skilled immigration strategy represents a form of modern economic colonialism that extracts human capital from the Global South. When Canada recruits doctors, engineers, teachers, and skilled tradespeople from countries like Nigeria, India, or the Philippines, it effectively imports professionals whose education and training were paid for by much poorer nations. These countries invested scarce public resources in universities, medical schools, and technical training programs to develop their human capital, only to see their most skilled workers migrate to wealthy countries like Canada.

The Infrastructure Mirage

The letter's promise to "build an enormous amount of new infrastructure at speeds not seen in generations" sounds ambitious, but infrastructure for whom? The focus on diversifying trading relationships and becoming an "energy superpower" suggests infrastructure designed primarily to serve export markets and corporate interests rather than communities.

Real infrastructure investment that addresses inequality would prioritise public transit that connects working family neighbourhoods, social housing that removes profit from the equation, and green energy systems owned by communities rather than corporations. The mandate letter's infrastructure vision appears designed to facilitate capital flows rather than improve daily life for ordinary Canadians.

The Productivity Obsession

Perhaps most revealing is the letter's emphasis on government productivity through AI deployment and its focus on "results over spending." This technocratic language conceals austerity politics masquerading as innovation rhetoric. The problem with Canadian governance isn't inefficiency - it's inadequate funding for public services caused by decades of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. When the letter promises to spend "less on government operations," it promises less public capacity to address inequality at the moment when more robust public intervention is needed.

The emphasis on AI is particularly concerning. While technology can improve service delivery, the focus on AI as a solution to government "productivity" problems suggests an approach that prioritises automation over employment and efficiency over equity.

What's Missing: Power and Redistribution

The most glaring omission from Carney's mandate is any serious discussion of redistributing power and wealth. The letter treats inequality as a byproduct of other problems rather than recognising it as the central organising challenge of our time.

A progressive approach would centre policies like wealth taxes, stronger collective bargaining rights, public ownership of key industries, and robust social programs as rights rather than safety nets. Instead, the mandate offers market-friendly tweaks to a system that fundamentally concentrates power and wealth upward.

The letter's promise to work "in true partnership" with various stakeholders sounds collaborative, but readers should recognise this as false equivalency. Labour, business, and civil society don't have equal power in our current system - pretending they do while avoiding structural reforms maintains power imbalances.

The Climate Contradiction

While the letter mentions fighting climate change, it simultaneously promises to make Canada an "energy superpower in both clean and conventional energies." This contradiction reveals the fundamental tension in liberal approaches that try to address the climate crisis without challenging the growth-dependent capitalist system driving environmental destruction.

Meaningful climate action requires reducing overall resource consumption and energy use in wealthy nations like Canada, not simply adding renewable capacity while maintaining fossil fuel production. The "energy superpower" framing suggests Canada plans to export its way out of climate responsibility rather than leading the transformation to a sustainable economy.

Continuity Disguised as Change

Ultimately, Carney's mandate letter represents continuity with the neoliberal policy framework that created Canada's inequality crisis, dressed up in the language of transformation and renewal. This is a throwback to the Liberal budgets of the 1990s, which ‘solved’ the Federal deficit by shifting the burden to the provinces. While the rhetoric acknowledges serious challenges, the solutions remain firmly within the bounds of market-friendly approaches that have consistently failed to deliver broadly shared prosperity.

This mandate highlights the limitations of electoral politics when not accompanied by sustained social movements that demand structural change. Real solutions to inequality require challenging concentrated wealth and power, not partnering with it. They need robust public institutions and services, not AI-driven efficiency. They require treating housing, healthcare, and education as rights, not commodities.

Canadians facing the daily reality of unaffordable housing, precarious employment, and strained public services deserve better than another government that mistakes corporate competitiveness for social progress. The mandate letter's failure to address inequality meaningfully suggests that this government, like its predecessors, will leave the fundamental structures driving division and hardship intact, while offering modest reforms around the margins.

The crisis isn't that Canada isn't competitive enough - it's that too many Canadians can no longer compete for basic dignity in an economy rigged against them.