Today's News: Carney and his majority know how to play this game

Cartoon by Greg Parry, The Tyee

I don't have a lengthy post tonight, but I saw some very good clips today about Carney and his new majority government so I thought I would share them.

First, Carney and Poilievre were jousting in the House on Wednesday and I think Carney unhorsed him.

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Next, Carney and the Cabinet are moving rapidly to take control of Parliamentary committees, so legislation won't get delayed endlessly anymore.

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One thing we will need to watch -- as Leni Spooner discussed in the post I excerpted last night, we will see increasingly unhinged Carney-bashing now from MapleMAGA and fellow travellers around the world.

...A minority government can be waited out. A majority has to be actively discredited. That is why the pressure won’t ease now that the threshold has been crossed. It will intensify.
Poilievre’s “backroom deals” framing in the hours after the results came in is the early domestic signal of what that looks like. Floor crossings are a legitimate subject of democratic debate — and a routine feature of Westminster parliamentary democracy. But framing them as betrayal rather than as the exercise of individual parliamentary conscience that Westminster tradition has always recognized is something different. By-elections are direct democratic contests. Framing both as illegitimate is the same playbook as the content farms, applied at the level of official opposition rhetoric. The goal is identical: generate enough confusion about the legitimacy of the result that the government spends its political capital defending its right to govern rather than governing.
....the fabricated Carney — hostile, illegitimate, anti-American — is going to get louder, not quieter, precisely because the real Carney now has the parliamentary ground to stand on.
...Mark Carney is not the person the content farms have been describing. He is careful, consistent, and on the public record. The Davos transcript is available from the World Economic Forum, or here from Between the Lines Canada coverage. The bridge conversation is in mainstream news coverage. The gap between the documented record and the fabricated version is wide and measurable. He now leads a majority government. That changes what Canada can do at the table — every table. It does not change what the pressure campaign will attempt....

Former MP David Graham is more specific about what to expect:

...[when] the three new MPs are sworn in...the motion to restructure committees is tabled, and until it is dealt with, the House of Commons will all but cease to function as opposition-controlled committees continue to assert their majorities while they still have them, and opposition parties performatively fight tooth and nail in the chamber to prevent that from changing. In an instant, legislation will come to a grinding halt. Committees will become completely dysfunctional until their restructuring is complete.
In order to end the impasse, the government will be obligated to bring in closure, forcing an end to the debate and bringing about a vote on the motion which, from a practical standpoint, is inevitable in the circumstances.
In that moment, the opposition will begin screaming bloody murder. They will claim that the Mark Carney government, which crossed the line into a majority through last night’s by-elections, bringing them to a majority endorsed by a majority of Canadians in polls, is somehow illegitimate. They will claim that the government is abusing its new-found power, and is somehow anti-democratic. They will accuse the government of stifling debate.
With it all, Pierre Poilievre will get what he actually wants: an end to any form of accountability. Facing a majority, he can exercise his one skill — to oppose with impunity. There will be no need to negotiate, no requirement for Conservative members to suddenly find themselves facing technical problems while trying to vote from behind the curtains to prevent an unintended election. His team will no longer have a reason to compromise on legislation or find a way to make committees work.
He will get what he craves most: a toxic Parliamentary work environment where all collaboration and compromise can come to an unceremonious end. And, with it, the prospect of three years of unhinged badgering of the government in an attempt to break their honeymoon.
To get to this point, Poilievre has chased four members of his own caucus out through his obstinance. Chris d’Entremont, Michael Ma, Matt Jeneroux, and Marilyn Gladu all abandoned the Conservatives for the Liberals between November and April, joined by Lori Idlout who crossed from the NDP in the same period. Without them, this majority would not yet exist.
When Marilyn Gladu and Lori Idlout both cross the floor to join the same Liberal caucus, you know the government is on to something. At the Liberal convention in Montreal, nobody pretended that what is happening in the United States is normal, or that things will ever go back to the way they were. It has given partisans on all sides a serious degree of pause, an opening to become serious.
There is a palpable sense that the country is bigger than any one political party, that the moment we are living requires a certain gravitas that the normal cut and thrust of our politics does not offer.
In normal times politics often degrades into a team sport rather than a values proposition. The Conservatives in particular make the whole game of politics about the unity of their team — their tribe, even — take precedence over any deeply philosophical purpose beyond helping that team.
This time, it is different. In the face of unprecedented foreign threats, Canada has itself become the team. Members of Parliament and Canadians in general with diverse backgrounds and values are coming together with a unity of purpose.
For the Conservatives who still back Poilievre, the American threat is not visible. It is not viscerally understood in the way it is through the rest of Canada. They cannot see it, because the MAGA movement remains integral to the Conservative team; it is precisely who they want to help.
As they continue to see our national politics as little more than a domestic team sport, where winning is their only objective and that at any cost, they will do everything in their power to make Parliament dysfunctional. They will try to paint the Liberal government as illegitimate and undemocratic, and do everything possible to prove it.
The now-majority Liberal government will have the power to act decisively in these unprecedented times, but the spirit of unity that is driving the country forward will be under constant attack. There will be little in the way of the much-needed constructive debate that would be offered by an opposition that is offering an alternative rather than an obstruction. The unhinged toxicity that we experienced from the Conservatives through the Trudeau years will be back with a vengeance, but this time the stakes are higher
While Carney’s majority government can get down to the serious and difficult work required, Poilievre’s team sees running Canada as little more than a game....

So expect to see even more of this kind of trivial stuff, and we'll have to respond:

I am so fucking sick of useless conservatives doing nothing but trashing the other side. Carney advised AGAINST Brexit and they didn't listen, but he stayed to help with the fallout. I'm sick of their lies.

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— anita72.bsky.social (@anita72.bsky.social) April 15, 2026 at 9:11 PM

Why can't they pivot away from the rage-farming, and this "perennial loser" strategy? BECAUSE.THAT'S.WHO.THEY.ARE. Sour, miserable, pathological liars with nebulous morals, who will say ANYTHING that they think will buy them a vote. It's embarrassing and pathetic. #cdnpoli

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— Audric Moses 🇨🇦 (@audricmoses.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 8:26 PM

Dale Smith always pushes back so well:

If this lying doofus bothered to read the StatsCan report, the lowest point of those exports was because auto plants were on extended shutdown to retool production lines. They have since restarted and exports are back up.

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— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 8:31 AM

But here's something Poilievre really needs to understand better - Canadians know our politics are NOT just a domestic team sport, not anymore.

Alberta political commentator Deirdre Mitchell-MacLean writes:

...If Conservative voters were feeling betrayed by the floor crossings, they didn’t show up to say so at the ballot boxes. If anything, the drop in support for the Conservatives, combined with the increased support for the Liberals, suggest that fewer Conservatives are unhappy with the Liberal Prime Minister or the way things have been going than Mr. Poilievre.
These numbers are not just “lower”, they’re absolutely discrediting to every complaint Mr. Poilievre is trying to sell.

We know from not-so-distant experience that voters will show up and be counted when they are displeased.
As someone in my circles pointed out, the increased support for the Liberals shows the opposite of Mr. Poilievre is claiming. If Canadians felt that the Liberals were acting in bad faith by welcoming conservative MPs into the Liberal fold, they would have denied the Liberals the three seats. Or at least put up a fight....

Carney knows what he is doing, in Canada and around the world:

Of course he is🇨🇦❤️💪.

- #Francesk🇨🇦

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And here is Carney using Pride Tape on his hockey stick:

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If Poilievre and his remaining caucus still does think of Canadian politics as just another domestic team sport, they also need to remember that Carney knows how to play team sports pretty well.