Prime Minister Mark Carney recently invited Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a leading architect of Project 2025, to address his cabinet in a closed-door planning forum.
While Roberts cancelled the public visit after public outcry, the optics and intent deserve taking a closer look. Carney’s team says the goal was to better “understand Trump’s playbook.”
What is Project 2025 and why does it matter?
Project 2025 is a public, 900-page plan outlining radical policy shifts, including dismantling reproductive rights, stripping access to medications, limiting civil rights, and feeding authoritarianism and Christian nationalism in the U.S.
Many elements of Project 2025 have been fast-tracked under the Trump government.
Why we should care:
Project 2025 is designed to erode core freedoms, including access to reproductive, queer, and trans rights, and to put ideology over evidence and equity.
Inviting a figure like Roberts without clear justification and erasing the context of Project 2025’s aims demands transparency and public accountability.
Trade may be the excuse, but the parallels are bigger than that.
Carney’s office says the Roberts invitation was about understanding Trump’s trade strategy. But Project 2025 is not just a trade playbook.
Project 2025's pillars (gutting the civil service, tightening borders, eroding civil liberties) are already visible in Carney’s own agenda and his focus on trade.
Without scrutiny, “learning from Trump’s playbook” risks legitimizing a path that concentrates power, weakens public institutions, and fuels inequality.
When a single focus risks repeating harmful patterns:
Carney’s government is signaling an “austerity and investment” approach: major cuts to the public service alongside big bets on industry and infrastructure.
Bill C-2, framed as a border measure, would also expand surveillance powers in ways civil liberties groups warn could have wide-reaching effects.
On their own, these choices may not be Project 2025, but there are overlapping trends: shrinking public services, expanding surveillance, and prioritizing industry ahead of people.
The risk: Focusing only on trade and investment while neglecting public progams and rights, which would deepen inequality and weaken the systems Canadians depend on.
The alternative: investing in economic growth and robust social programs, that is what truly builds resilience and prosperity.
Trade talk can’t excuse legitimizing an authoritarian playbook.
Carney may frame Roberts’ presence as an effort to “understand Trump’s trade agenda.”
But legitimizing the architects of Project 2025, a blueprint for authoritarianism, while ignoring its attacks on rights is deeply concerning.
Here in Canada, silence already surrounds rollbacks: Alberta’s proposed school book ban targeting LGBTQ+ content, attacks on sex-ed and on gender-affirming care, Saskatchewan’s law requiring parental consent for name and pronoun changes, and provincial trans sports bans.
These policies echo the very culture-war tactics embedded in Project 2025.
The risk: when our leaders extend goodwill to Project 2025 voices without addressing rights erosion at home, they normalize the idea that trade and economic policy can be pursued separately from human rights and equality.
Our call: Canada must strengthen rights protections, not signal tolerance for those dismantling them, at home or abroad.