Perspectives: A Canadian Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy
The Perspectives Journal Podcast complements the journal and opinions content of Perspectives: A Canadian Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy, to bring out left-wing ideas and strategy in a new and ever-evolving format. The podcast features interviews with policy experts, to dig deeper into the progressive angles of the issues affecting working-class, ordinary Canadians.
Hosted by editor-in-chief, Clement Nocos, the Perspectives Journal Podcast aims to bring forward timely analysis on issues from the multiple crises of the economy, cost-of-living and the environment, to the labour movement, as well as the state of Canadian democracy. The wide reaching breadth of this show aims to help inform policymakers and the public about approaches to today’s pressing problems that are rooted in Ed Broadbent’s Principles for Canadian Social Democracy.
Perspectives Journal also produces and features shows hosted by the Broadbent Institute’s friends and affiliates, providing a progressive platform for limited and irregular conversations that are still necessary to enliven Canada’s political discourse. The Perspectives Journal Podcast is a proud members of the Harbinger Media Network, Canada’s progressive podcast community.
Activists Make History
Activists Make History with Peggy Nash is a new podcast series from Perspectives Journal that finds the political underdogs and asks how they got started, against the odds, to fight for progressive change. Policymakers, activists and experts from underrepresented communities and backgrounds, that are typically pushed to the margins of Canadian political life, are front and centre in conversation with Peggy Nash, who has been a union activist, a feminist advocate, and a Member of Parliament in Canada’s House of Commons for nearly a decade.
Reflecting on these experiences as a political outsider, and in conversation with other like-minded outsiders that take our struggles into the halls of power, Activists Make History aims to show how we can win a better world through elected office. Activists Make History is only made possible by the generous contribution of Unifor.
Perspectives: A Canadian Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy
Carney and the Calgary School with Mack Penner
In the the Summer 2025 issue of Perspectives Journal, University of Calgary post doc and Parkland Institute board member Mack Penner wrote ‘Carney and the Calgary School: or, Passive Revolution and Canada’s Social State in the Neoliberal Era,’ tracing the origins of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s economic thinking to the Calgary School. The Calgary School is described as an informal grouping of conservative academics that played an active and significant role in Canadian politics during the 1990s and 2000s, whose members centred around the University of Calgary. What united otherwise disparate neoliberal and neoconservative thinkers at the Calgary School was a skeptical orientation towards the intentional state.
Carney, a lifelong banker (in the financial investment sector, then the monetary central banking sector), thus stands quite appropriately as an heir to North American neoliberalism. But to secure his troubled inheritance with impressive stealth, he has become the new political face of an ideological orientation that shares his western-Canadian background, but none of his partisan identifications.
Strange and contradictory as it seems, Carney arguably represents the “common-sensification” of a conservative tradition identified with the Calgary School, a now multi-generational group of conservative intellectuals of which none would appreciate the association with a Liberal government. We chat with Mack Penner to better understand this connection between Carney and the Calgary School.
Notes and further reading:
- Mack Penner, ‘Carney and the Calgary School: or, Passive Revolution and Canada’s Social State in the Neoliberal Era,’ in Perspectives Journal, no. 4, Summer 2025.
- ActiveHistory.ca
- mackpenner.com
- Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Macmillan, 2023.
- Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Princeton University Press, 2025.
