Can you believe anything Mark Carney claims about his career?
It’s a serious question, because he didn’t tell one lie on Tuesday night as the Liberals were holding their leadership debate, he told two serious lies.
The latest nose stretcher from Carney is that he helped Paul Martin balance the budget.
“It was my privilege to work with Paul Martin when he balanced the books and kept the books balanced,” Carney said during Tuesday’s debate.
Here’s the problem with that statement: Mark Carney, according to his own resume on his LinkedIn profile, never worked with Paul Martin while he was balancing the books as Jean Chretien’s finance minister.
Martin introduced his first budget to take Canada back to balance on Feb. 27, 1995, and over the next several years did the hard work so that it was balanced in 1998. The plan was to make changes to Canada’s economy and government spending to bring about the first balanced budget in nearly 30 years.
But Mark Carney wasn’t working for the federal government at that time, he was still working for Goldman Sachs, the major Wall Street firm. Or according to some reports, he was a student at Oxford University.
Did he ever work with Paul Martin when the former PM was finance minister to help balance the budget?
No, not at all.
Carney’s public resume states he left Goldman Sachs to take a position as Deputy Governor at the Bank of Canada in 2003. In 2004 he took a new position as senior associate deputy minister of finance, but by that point Paul Martin was prime minister, and the budget had long been balanced.
Yet, there is Carney talking about his role in working with Paul Martin in balancing the budget. A few weeks ago, a friend claimed Carney was guilty of the political equivalent of what in the military is called “stolen valour.”
Stolen valour is the act of claiming ownership of deeds or actions that you have no right to lay claim to.
Carney is being viscously and openly mocked online with memes showing him in other jobs and positions he has never held. Claims that Carney invented the lightbulb, was the Fifth Beatle, wrote the Magna Carta and built the Great Wall of China.
All of this comes days after Carney was called out for stating he had no involvement in the decision to move the headquarters of Brookfield Asset Management from Toronto to New York City. Carney was chair of the board for Brookfield when they voted unanimously for the move last October and then he signed a letter encouraging shareholders asking them to support the deal in December 2024.
Now, he and his team are trying to claim that because the decision taken by the board last fall was formalized in January, that he had nothing to do with it. That simply isn’t believable given how involved Carney was in the decision.
“Mark Carney needs to come out of hiding and answer questions for the lies that he’s told to Canadians,” Conservative MP Michael Barrett said Friday.
Carney has refused to clearly answer questions about both of these lies with his campaign dodging and weaving.
All of this on top of Carney also claiming he saved Canada’s economy during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Sure, he played a role as part of a team with then-prime minister Stephen Harper and his finance minister Jim Flaherty.
The truth is, though, that Carney’s part of that grand effort would have been dwarfed by the fiscal, budgetary and political actions and decisions taken by Harper and Flaherty.
Carney is making claims about having done things he hasn’t or exaggerating his role, while also denying moving the Brookfield HQ when we clearly have the proof. The man who is about to win the Liberal leadership race and become our next prime minister, but he’s also showing he has a problem with the truth.