OTTAWA — Conservatives went back on the attack against Liberal leadership frontrunner Mark Carney on Thursday, releasing a short digital ad saying Carney “sold out Canada” by overseeing the move of Canadian investment house Brookfield’s head office to New York while the company’s chair.
The ad not-so-subtly implies that Carney hasn’t been upfront with Canadians about his business dealings, closing with the caption “SNEAKY” in all-caps, overtop a snippet of Carney smiling impishly during a recent appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Conservatives aren’t the only ones questioning Carney’s sincerity, after he told reporters Tuesday evening that the “formal decision of the board” to expatriate the head office was made after he left the board in mid-January to run for Liberal leader — a claim contradicted by a leaked Dec. 1 letter Carney himself wrote to Bloomfield shareholders.
This wasn’t the first dubious claim that Carney’s made about his work history. It wasn’t even the only eyebrow-raising statement he made that very night.
Here’s a running tally of the most iffy claims he’s made in his young political career.
He helped Paul Martin ‘balance the books’… years after he balanced the budget
Earlier Tuesday evening, during the English-language leaders debate, Carney played up his economic bonafides by pointing to his tenure at the department of finance under Liberal deficit hawk Paul Martin.
“It was my privilege to work with Paul Martin when he balanced the books — and kept the books balanced,” said Carney.
The only problem is that Carney started out at Finance in 2004, according to his LinkedIn page, almost a decade after Martin’s ship-righting 1995 budget and well after Martin finished balancing the books in 1998.
Martin, by then prime minister, did deliver two balanced budgets during Carney’s three years at finance but the heavy lifting of fixing Canada’s finances had already been done. A spokesperson for Carney said that he was referring to his time at finance when Martin was prime minister and “kept on balancing the books.”
Carney also declined to correct fellow leadership candidate Karina Gould when she said he was a “really excellent deputy minister of finance.” This was a rung up from his actual position as a senior associate deputy minister.
Communications pro Hannah Thibedeau, who had a front-row seat to Carney’s fact-stretching as the debate’s moderator, said that honesty truly is the best policy for public figures.
”I always tell my clients that rule number one of communications is don’t lie,” said Thibedeau.
”The truth is going to come out eventually, lying only worsens the blow.”
He prevented… and fixed a Canadian financial crisis
During his soft campaign launch on The Daily Show, Carney joked with host Jon Stewart that Canada’s cautious regulatory culture helped it avoid a U.S.-style banking crisis in the late 2000s.
“We didn’t let our banks do things that they didn’t understand just because all the other banks were doing them,” quipped Carney, referring to the role that complex financial products like subprime mortgages played in the U.S. meltdown.
Yet this hasn’t stopped Carney from taking credit for Canada’s response to the global financial crisis, which was largely a matter of injecting fiscal stimulus in the economy to keep contagion at bay.
“As Governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis, Mark guided Canada through one of the most turbulent economic periods in modern history,” reads Carney’s LinkedIn bio, crediting him with “protecting jobs and helping ensure that Canada came out stronger.”
He saved ‘two economies’
Canada isn’t the only national economy Carney credits himself for fixing.
“I have helped manage multiple crises and saved two economies,” Carney boasted at his Jan. 16 campaign launch in Edmonton, a nod to his seven-year stint as the head of the Bank of England, between 2013 and 2020.
Yet if Carney did save Britain’s economy, that would be news to the Brits.
Britain’s economy went from bad to worse during Carney’s time at the helm and has only nosedived from there.
The economic climate across the pond hasn’t just been grim over the past decade-and-a-half, it’s been historically bad.
“The period between 2010 and 2024 has been economically remarkable,” read a recent report from London’s Institute of Fiscal Studies.
“For most of the period, interest rates were at their lowest level in history (but) (e)arnings grew at their slowest rate in, probably, more than 200 years.”
“At the heart of it all was a period of abysmal growth in productivity, and with it, living standards.”
He pushed for Brookfield’s move to New York… but had nothing to do with the ‘formal decision’
This week brought arguably Carney’s first big controversy of the leadership campaign.
When pressed on Brookfield headquarters’ move from Toronto to New York on Tuesday, Carney chose not to give the simple, albeit awkward, explanation.
He instead tried to distance himself from the move, telling reporters he had no “connection with Brookfield” and hanging his hat on the words “formal decision.”
The Conservative war room was, of course, quick to put up documentation showing that, not only did Carney back the move to New York, he personally lobbied company shareholders to green-light the change of scenery.
“The most common feedback we hear from investors encourages us to position (Brookfield Asset Management) for inclusion in some of the most widely followed global large cap stock indices, including in the U.S.,” Carney wrote in a Dec. 1 letter to shareholders.
Of course, it makes all the business sense in the world for an asset management company set up shop in close proximity to Wall Street, a point that Carney supporter Jonathan Wilkinson was quick to make when doing damage control on Wednesday.
“Anybody who knows anything about business knows that boards have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders,” Wilkinson told reporters in Ottawa.
“At the end of the day, (Carney’s) job as chairman of the board was to act in the best interests of shareholders.”
National Post
[email protected]
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.