Listening to Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and frontrunner to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal party leader, can be a dizzying experience. His mind brims with slogans — often sugary, often illogical — which he fires off like a tennis ball machine.
Take, for instance, his plea to a BBC audience a few years ago: “Ask not what the climate is doing to your country, but what your country can do for the climate.” Within minutes, the same audience was told “value can serve values,” “make your money matter,” “moral sentiments can rebalance market sentiments,” and finally, “private finance can bend the arc of history towards climate justice.”
All very well. But what does it mean? Put simply, Carney believes curbing fossil fuel use — and consuming more ethically in general — will also make us richer. Indeed, the transition to Net Zero with its eye-watering costs will transform “an existential risk into one of the greatest commercial opportunities of our time.” There are, it seems, very few trade-offs to consider in Carney’s vision for a fairer, greener, healthier world.
Had a lesser man — perhaps glassy-eyed and draped in double denim — offered this to a room full of intelligent people, it would likely be dismissed as the kumbaya ramblings of a naive idealist. But as a product of Harvard and Oxford, and having served as the governor of both the central banks of Canada and England, when Carney speaks, the world listens, often nodding along.
And herein lies the danger of Carney: his credentials do a lot of heavy lifting, lending credibility to a man who is regularly blown around by the ideological winds of the moment. Consider his response to Brexit, the defining event of his much-vaunted tenure as Bank of England governor. The Remain camp warned of economic Armageddon. Carney fell for it — parroting alarmist statistics and even exceeding his apolitical brief to warn of instant financial shocks from a no-deal scenario.
It is perhaps unfair to dismiss Carney’s glum response to Brexit as simply the groupthink of his cosmopolitan dinner party milieu. Central bankers are guarantors of stability and therefore rightly averse to major upsets; his utterances notwithstanding, Carney responded competently to Brexit, printing money and cutting interest rates to absorb the shock. But caught up in the noise, he fell prey to hysteria with the same unshakable confidence he now applies to his sweeping, top-down solutions for climate change.
He exudes moral certitude in a way that will be familiar to Canadians living under the smothering reign of Justin Trudeau. While Carney is more serious — he doesn’t stride the world stage in “fun socks” — he is hardly a fresh start. While he presents himself as a man from humble Alberta, he is cut from the same Davos cloth as Trudeau, even if its colours are less garish.
At heart, Carney is convinced he is on the side of the angels, one of the sensibles steering the world away from a cliff-edge — one that only he and a select few are able to see with perfect clarity. He made no bones about this in his Reith lecture on the BBC. “I sat in the UN general assembly with presidents, prime ministers, business leaders and other dignitaries — people like me who were there because they were committed to addressing climate change; committed to creating higher paying and sustainable jobs in all of our countries,” he cooed.
“And to be honest we entered the room feeling pretty good about ourselves: we weren’t the deniers, we were armed with pragmatic solutions to what we knew was the world’s biggest challenge.”
Fortunately for Carney and his fellow dignitaries, bucket-loads of sanctimony do not carry a carbon footprint (the private jets buzzing in and out of Davos are another matter). What is more alarming about his remarks is his certainty when he said “we knew” climate change was the world’s biggest challenge. Not “we assess” or “one of the biggest,” but the biggest. In their eyes, climate change is without doubt the world’s most pressing concern. This is an article of faith teetering on monomania.
In reality, the biggest challenge depends on where one is sitting. South Koreans are likely more on edge about the threat of a thermonuclear exchange sparked by their northern neighbour. China and India, by far the largest carbon dioxide emitters, are naturally more focused on powering their industries and billions of citizens with affordable energy — something most green alternatives cannot yet provide.
Even Carney appears to have different priorities when managing the wealth of his private clients. In a tense exchange during a 2021 parliamentary committee, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre challenged Carney’s seeming hypocrisy in supporting a veto on Canada’s Northern Gateway Pipelines while his firm “invested billions of dollars in both Brazil and the UAE to buy pipelines”.
Should Carney be crowned Liberal leader — a closed-door coronation that will only deepen his unfamiliarity with the democratic arena — he will have to face the electorate. His “do as I say, not as I do” approach to business may not sit well with a Canada that prides itself on fair play. And with energy prices still high, voters are unlikely to have patience for the hair-shirt climate policies he has spent the past decade promoting.
Carney will also need to convince the country he is the best man to take on Donald Trump, who has openly threatened to absorb Canada into the U.S. If Canada’s leading globalist finds himself across from Trump in trade negotiations, it may resemble Georges Clemenceau’s predicament at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; wedged between the moralizing Woodrow Wilson and the shrewd operator Lloyd George, Clemenceau quipped: “I find myself between Jesus Christ on one side and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other.”
National Post
Michael Murphy is a journalist based in London. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and presented the documentary ‘Ireland is full! Anti-immigration backlash in Ireland’. You can follow him on X: @michaelmurph_y.