OTTAWA — The Mark Carney campaign has walked back dubious comments made by the Liberal leadership candidate on Canada’s semiconductor industry.
During a campaign stop at a bar in Barrie late last week, Carney was caught on camera making remarks about the Canada-U.S. trade war,and how much Americans rely on Canadian-made products and raw materials.
“We’re the biggest supplier of electricity, biggest supplier of fertilizer, biggest supplier of aluminum, biggest supplier of semiconductors. We supply almost all their semiconductors,” Carney told the crowd in front of a long row of beer taps.
“Everybody in the White House is a tech-bro except for Trump — they all need semiconductors, and they all come from Canada. Maybe one day they won’t show up, we’ll see.”
Semiconductors serve as the backbone of modern technology, and Canada’s annual production is a mere fraction of what’s produced around the world.
Capable of conducting electricity only under certain conditions, solid-state electronics sparked a revolution in the late 1940s allowing manufacturers to replace bulky, hot and power-hungry vacuum tubes with tiny transistors, diodes and integrated circuits — eventually leading to today’s high-performance microprocessors and computer chips.
According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC,) Canada ranks 18th in the list of top semiconductor suppliers to the United States — with Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and India rounding out the top five.
Taiwan tops the world in integrated circuits exports, alongside other top producers South Korea, China, the Philippines, Israel and Singapore.
In a statement sent to the Toronto Sun by a campaign spokesperson, the Carney team claims he only meant to emphasize Canada’s role in the North American semiconductor supply chain.
“His remarks underscored the need for Canada to leverage its strengths in critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, and R&D (research and development) to further bolster North American semiconductor security and competitiveness,” the statement reads.
Carney’s quest to replace outgoing PM Justin Trudeau has been fraught with dubious claims and outright falsehoods.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper lashed out at Carney for taking credit for his role in Canada’s reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, saying the kudos being proclaimed by Carney actually belong to the late finance minister Jim Flaherty.
Carney was also scrutinized for saying he helped balance the 1998 budget with then-PM Paul Martin, despite the fact he was studying in Oxford at the time.
He also claims the decision by Brookfield Asset Management to divest their corporate headquarter from Canada to the United States was made after his January 2025 resignation from the board, despite the company announcing the move the previous October, and a December 2024 memo signed by Carney himself extolling the merits of the move.
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