Carney's American COO, Partisan Senate, and "Antifeminist Extremism" | Blendr Report EP171
An American Democratic operative just became the first-ever chief operating officer of Canada's most sensitive political office.
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The first-ever chief operating officer of the Prime Minister's Office is an American. Maia Johnson worked Democratic strategy on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, orbited Michael Bloomberg's now-dead firm Hawkfish, and came up from New York to volunteer on Mark Carney's leadership run before joining the PMO this year. This month Carney invented a C-suite title that had never existed and handed her the day-to-day machinery. That office touches intelligence, national security, and the Canada-US file. Nobody in Canada voted for her, and by design nobody could.
A government that won power promising to stand elbows-up against America turned around and installed an American operative in its engine room. The quiet message is that citizenship is now optional at the most sensitive desk in the country, provided you belong to the right network.
None of it lands the same way without understanding what the PMO became. Before Mulroney it was secretaries and paperwork, people who pushed files for the prime minister. Now it runs to dozens of unelected staffers who push policy and push elected officials around. Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould, leaned on by Trudeau’s office to bury a prosecution while Gerald Butts took the fall. That is the caliber of power we are now handing to people who never stood for anything on a ballot.
Carney also scrapped the nonpartisan senate selection process his predecessor spent a decade pretending to honour, appointed his own principal secretary Tom Pitfield, and poached conservative MP Richard Martell with a seat that pays until he turns 75. Martell held his riding with 34 percent last year, so the Liberals get a loyal senator and a by-election they could flip.
Meanwhile, in June a House committee tabled a report deciding the country’s real danger is men who question feminism. Five months of work, fourteen recommendations, and the spine of it is public awareness campaigns aimed at boys, new powers to police the internet, and more money to study the problem they have already decided exists. They spent a decade calling masculinity toxic, watched young men grow frustrated, and concluded the fix is to muzzle them and lecture them harder. Meanwhile the data on who is actually radicalizing points the other way, toward young women moving sharply left, but that finding does not fit the report so it does not appear.
An unelected foreigner in the engine room, a Senate stacked with loyalists, and a committee redefining dissent as extremism.
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