Mark Carney thinks he can say one thing in English, another in French and get away with it.
Or perhaps, Carney just has trouble being clear about what he means, because on several topics, not just pipelines, what Carney has said and what he means are a bit different.
Compare what he said recently in Kelowna, B.C. to his comments in a French interview with CBC.
“Something that my government is going to do is to use all of the powers of the federal government, including the emergency powers of the federal government, to accelerate the major projects that we need in order to build this economy and take on the Americans,” Carney said.
He made those comments just after talking about the need to expand energy infrastructure. That would make it sound like he would use federal powers to build a pipeline from the west to the east wouldn’t it?
“Never in Quebec,” Carney said during an interview with CBC’s Patrice Roy.
Roy had asked Carney if he would ever “impose a pipeline on Quebec” which led to a series of exchanges.
“I would never impose,” Carney said.
“Never?” asked Roy.
“Never,” said Carney.
When Roy pointed to his emergency powers comments from Kelowna, Carney found a way to slide out of it.
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“If I were prime minister, my government would use our emergency powers to accelerate projects that are in the national interest,” Carney said but then went on to say provinces would always have a veto.
Which means Quebec would have a veto over any pipeline, no one else. How is that different from the Trudeau government position that helped kill Energy East?
It also goes against Carney’s claim that if he is prime minister, there will be one national economy, not 13. He should have said we will have two economies, one for nine of the provinces and three territories and then Quebec.
This isn’t the only time Carney is being too cute with how he explains himself.
“So my government will balance the spending budget within the first three years,” Carney said a week ago.
That claim had many scratching their heads because he’s also promising a middle-class tax cut, to dramatically increase defence spending while also keeping new social programs the Trudeau government has introduced like dental care. Balancing the budget in three years would be difficult while maintaining current spending and increasing elsewhere.
That’s because Carney doesn’t plan on balancing the budget in three years, he plans on changing our accounting rules.
As Carney’s team confirmed to The Globe and Mail, the plan is to split the federal budget in two – an operating budget and a capital budget. He would balance the operating budget while running deficits in the capital budget.
He knew what he said would be interpreted one way by Canadians just hearing the headline of balanced budget, he let the idea float anyway even though it wasn’t exactly truthful.
On the carbon tax, Carney has said that he would scrap the consumer carbon tax, calling it divisive. It’s not wrong, or bad policy, which is what most Canadians think about it, it’s just divisive, meaning it could cost him votes.
What Carney would do after scrapping the carbon tax would increase prices for consumers though. He wants to increase the industrial carbon tax, which will make prices go up, and then he would impose a carbon tariff on imports from countries that don’t meet his vision of a good climate plan – think the United States, China and Mexico, our three biggest trading partners.
This too would make the price of goods go up.
Carney is making a lot of promises, many of them aren’t very clear. We have to wonder if that is because he’s not a politician, or if he is trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes.
I’d suggest it’s the latter and voters should remember the old maxim of buyer beware.