The Liberal Party is now right-wing. I hate it.

Victory, at a cost I cannot accept.

Mark Carney stands at a podium with the logo for the Liberal Party of Canada. Mr. Carney is now the Prime Minister-designate. | Copyright © Liberal Party of Canada, licensed under fair dealing.

The members of the Liberal Party of Canada have decided: Mark Carney is their new leader, Canada’s new Prime Minister-designate, and will soon visit the Governor General to be sworn into the proper role of running the country.

The margin by which Mr. Carney won was absurdly large, taking 85.9% of the points in the first round of the ranked ballot. Frank Baylis received 3.0%, as many likely expected, while Karina Gould got 3.2%, far less than she expected.

The worst performance of the night was Chrystia Freeland, however, who only got 8.0% of the points. This result is so embarrassing for Ms. Freeland that I genuinely believe it may be the end of her political career.

In every single riding, Mark Carney handily won by similar margins to the national total, including the home ridings of all his opponents. Indisputably, Mr. Carney has an unshakeable mandate to lead the Liberal Party in whichever direction he desires. And yet it is his desired direction for the party which concerns me.

On my Liberal Leadership ballot, I ranked Mr. Carney second-last, because I had serious concerns about his political views. He has frequently made remarks decrying the very concept of government spending, and he regularly repeats a stupid refrain about how “we can’t redistribute what we don’t have.”

This motto frustrates me greatly; the entire point of redistribution is to take from the wealthy, and give to the poor. Mr. Carney cannot seriously expect me to look at obscenely wealthy families like the Rogers, or the Westons, or the Irvings, and tell me that they are incapable of giving more to take care of the working class.

And yet, this is exactly what Mark Carney expects me to believe. Mr. Carney is a wealthy investment banker, who worked for years in executive capacities at firms like Goldman Sachs and Brookfield Asset Management.

He believes that wealthy oligarchs are a gift to the world; they claim to create value, but in reality they are parasites bleeding workers for our value, so they can buy themselves newer and bigger yachts.

He will make vague platitudes about economic inequality, and then he will immediately insist that he won’t do anything about inequality. He makes boasts about his action to fight climate change, and then casts aspersions over a price on pollution.

Truthfully, there are only two explicit policies that Mr. Carney has shared with the public, and only one rumour about who his Chief of Staff will be.

On the former, in his victory speech he boasted, to cheers, that he will eliminate the consumer carbon tax, and that he will not increase the capital gains tax on those who make more than $250k per year.

Mr. Carney is an economist, and he knows damn well that the carbon tax is effective because it prices the externality of pollution into the market. His rambling that we should regulate corporations and not consumers is detached from the basic reality that these corporations produce their products for consumers.

And he knows that the increase in the capital gains inclusion rate from 50% to 66% would only apply to the bracket of capital gains income above $250k in a single year. None of you reading this column are wealthy enough to make $250k in capital gains in a single year.

I ranked Ms. Gould second on my ballot because in the two debates, she made it explicit that she wanted to stand for the many progressive Liberals who joined this party because of Trudeau’s leftward shift. She promised to defend the carbon tax, and I admired her commitment to basic principle.

The problem is that the Liberal Party has chosen, nearly unanimously, to abandon basic principle. Mark Carney promises that he will govern as a fiscal conservative, and that he will abandon core Liberal tent-pole policies, and the Liberal Party embraces this craven lust for power with open arms.

And now, it is reported that Mr. Carney has chosen Liberal MP Marco Mendicino as his new Chief of Staff.

Marco Mendicino, who was booted from Trudeau’s cabinet for his incompetence handling serial killer Paul Bernardo, who despite being a lawyer attacked The Hague for prosecuting war criminals, and who retweeted a domestic terrorist known for his calls for racial violence.

Yes, that Marco Mendicino, in Mr. Carney’s opinion, is worthy to be his Chief of Staff as Prime Minister.

I hate this. With every bone in my body, I fucking hate this! I want to elect politicians who will do good things! If Carney’s top priorities are doing shitty things that hurt people, then I don’t want to vote for him!

But that is ultimately the depressing part, isn’t it? People do want to vote for Mark Carney. Perhaps I as an individual may not like him, but Canadians do like him, because he promises that they can continue to be selfish, to ignore those in need.

I have realized, to my dismay, that I am a progressive living in a deeply conservative country. While we may embrace the trappings of social progressivism, distinguishing ourselves from America with gay marriage and abortion rights, the truth is that we’re also cheapskates who would sell our own children for another boutique tax credit.

Conservatism is winning in Canada. While the Liberals may defeat the Conservatives in the next election, it appears they will do so by becoming Conservatives, to an extent. The NDP have utterly cratered, unable to capitalize on the lack of progressive competition.

It is a terrible time to be a progressive voter in Canada. I fear for how right-wing the Liberals will become, now that they feel they no longer need to compete with the NDP.

Things are bad. But now, they’re about to get worse.