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TOP STORY
With Mark Carney only days away from his swearing in as Canada’s 24th prime minister, British sources are warning that Canada has signed up for a leader with a checkered history at his last public sector job.
Carney was governor of the Bank of England between 2013 and 2020 — a period during which the U.K. experienced a notable decline in growth, living standards and productivity.
“While there are many explanations for that, the ‘rock star Governor’ clearly did nothing to improve the performance of the British economy,” reads a Monday critique of Carney published in The Telegraph. The column referred to Carney as a man with a “reverse Midas touch.”
Another article in the same paper referred to Carney as the “high priest of Project Fear” — a reference to Carney’s prominent role in the 2016 anti-Brexit campaign. However, it added that Carney seemed to have “charmed Canadians,” and “is now the figure most trusted by his countrymen to stand up to (U.S President Donald) Trump.”
The “Project Fear” moniker was first coined in 2018 by the pro-Brexit Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg. In interviews at the time, Rees-Mogg would also call Carney a “second-tier Canadian politician” who “got a job in the U.K.” after “having failed” at Canadian politics.
Carney was one of the most vocal critics of the push for the U.K. to leave the European Union, publicly warning that in a worse-case scenario, a departure from the trading bloc would impose a “real economic shock” on the British economy.
In 2023, Carney’s successor, Andrew Bailey, would admit that some of the Bank of England’s more “dire” Brexit predictions never came to pass. “If you go back to the period after the referendum, there were pretty dire predictions about the consequences of Brexit for the financial services world … and I think so far those effects have been smaller,” Bailey said in an interview.
The “Project Fear” label would also be wheeled out this week by the conservative U.K. magazine The Spectator, which drew parallels between Carney’s prophecies about Brexit, his warnings about climate change and his more recent warnings about the economic threat posed by Trump.
“Canadians should be aware that fear is possibly the most-used wrench in their new prime minister’s toolbox,” wrote columnist Jane Stannus.
Reactions from the British left, meanwhile, were mostly positive about the incoming Canadian leader.
The Guardian, the usual standard-bearer for British progressivism, called Carney a “boring guy” with “experience of financial crises.”
The progressive-minded U.K. outlet The New Statesman had praise for Carney’s record of “crisis management,” but doubted whether it was the right fit for a battle against Trump.
“Untangling the country’s fortunes from the U.S. would require a radical remaking of the economy. That is something that Mark Carney, a technocratic centrist, is unlikely to do,” it wrote.
In the middle of the Carney takes was The Independent, which wrote that while Carney’s most memorable British legacy was his failure to stop Brexit, “he now hopes to be the man who can step in and prevent populists from taking control in Canada.”
All the while, multiple foreign tabloids — including the New York Post and the U.K.’s Daily Mail — used Carney’s elevation to Liberal leader as an opportunity to republish 2013 images of the former central banker alongside convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
The images were taken at the U.K.’s Wilderness Festival before the emergence of sex trafficking allegations against Maxwell. A source close to Carney told the Toronto Sun that Maxwell “went to the same high school as Mr. Carney’s wife’s sister” and that the images are the result of a chance encounter.
IN OTHER NEWS
Prime minister-designate Mark Carney has begun to select his transition team. And although Carney has framed himself as an outsider, the transition team is very much composed of insiders.
- His chief of staff is Marco Mendicino, who served as minister of public safety during the events of Freedom Convoy. Mendicino would infamously claim that police had asked the Trudeau government to invoke the Emergencies Act in order to evict Freedom Convoy blockades. Subsequent probes would reveal that not a single police department or intelligence agency had actually done so.
- David Lametti, the Trudeau government’s former justice minister, has an unspecified role on the transition team. Lametti was the replacement for Jody Wilson-Raybould after she was pushed out of the Liberal Party after drawing attention to Trudeau’s role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
Ireland is excited about Carney. Although plenty of foreign leaders have been of Irish descent (U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, among others), Carney is the first to actually be an Irish citizen. “Irish citizen to become new Prime Minister of Canada,” declared one Irish outlet. Although, Carney has said he’s looking to renounce his Irish citizenship as soon as possible.
In a bit of poor timing, the House of Commons is set to receive a pay raise on the exact same day that the carbon tax will be going up. On April 1, MPs will all stand to receive at least $6,700 more per year, while the carbon tax will rise from about 17 cents per litre to 20 cents per litre. Naturally, Canadians do not like this. According to a Leger poll, 79 per cent of respondents do not like the April 1 pay raise.
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