Mark Carney may have an impressive resume and career, but he is the wrong man at the wrong time for Canada.
Carney is currently running to become leader of the Liberal Party and, by extension, the prime minister of Canada – in part by saying his global experience makes him the man to face down U.S. President Donald Trump.
Prior to entering the Liberal leadership race, Carney was chairman of the board for Brookfield Asset Management company, a director for several large American corporations and bodies, and an advisor on climate change to the United Nations. Of course, he has also served as Governor of the Bank of England and of the Bank of Canada.
What matters though isn’t his resume or credentials but what kind of policies Carney would bring in if he were PM – and this is where he fails.
Canada doesn’t need to elect another environmental zealot who will handcuff our economy.
One of Carney’s pet projects was the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. The goal of the organization is to “support the transition to a net-zero economy” within the financial and asset management sectors.
This is the type of thinking that leads to large global banks like HSBC refusing to finance oil and gas projects which, like it or not, we’re going to need for some time. HSBC was of course a member of Carney’s pet project, but thankfully most of the major Canadian and American banks recently said they were quitting the alliance.
Stephen Guilbeault, currently Justin Trudeau’s environment minister and now a backer of Carney, said in an interview this week that Carney would speed up Canada adopting this type of banking that will squeeze out the oil and gas sector.
Carney has been an opponent of Canadian pipelines like Northern Gateway and Energy East, both of which were killed by the Trudeau government, though he had no problem taking his multi-million dollar paycheque from Brookfield Asset Management even as they bought pipelines in other countries.
Canada is facing the double blow of Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods and his attempt to restructure the American economy and global trading order.
To weather these coming changes we need to diversify, deregulate and unleash Canada’s full potential, which means leaning heavily on the natural resources we have. This will mean more pipelines, more exploration, building export terminals for liquified natural gas, expanding mining operations, building refineries here.
Can the man who has spent the last several years advocating for a net-zero economy and moving away from fossil fuels really be believed to take on those tasks?
Carney’s supporters will say his background in economics still makes him a better pick than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. In an interview with the Globe and Mailpublished in March 2021, Carney was warning that the COVID pandemic and the government response to it would result in deflation.
At the same time, Poilievre was warning that overspending and too much stimulus from the government would lead to inflation, which is exactly what happened with inflation really taking off a few months later. That’s a major mistake by Carney on an issue that he’s supposedly an expert on.
While he was part of a good team in 2008-09 steering Canada through the economic crash, he was just one part of that team. All the main decisions were made by Stephen Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty.
Carney wasn’t part of the government, he wasn’t an elected official, he was a bureaucrat.
His record at the Bank of England was mixed as well with complaints of him meddling in politics over Brexit when he was supposed to be neutral. He also faced criticism for printing too much money in the wake of Brexit and sending mixed signals on interest rates.
One Labour MP famously gave Carney the nickname of “the unreliable boyfriend” in 2014 and it stuck.
Carney may have an impressive resume but he has the wrong policies for what Canada needs now. We don’t need another leader tied to net-zero, no-growth policies that will keep our resources in the ground and stop infrastructure like pipelines to tidewater being built.
To deal with Donald Trump, we should ask what would Mark Carney do and then do the opposite.