Same as the old boss

Do Liberal voters realize they were conned by their arch nemesis?

In a Freditorial essay from January 20th entitled Mark Carney: the Man who would be King, I asserted that Carney should be disqualified from being Canada's Prime Minister, because he is an anti oil and gas activist. Carney created the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a now crumbling push to defund oil and gas. He is married to a climate activist who works with satanic Trudeau puppet master Gerald Butts. He praised the Net Zero movement in his book, Value(s).

Oil and gas is by far Canada's largest export, despite Justin Trudeau's decade long effort to strangle the industry. Canada needs that revenue, especially as our governments refuse to restrain their profligate spending.

Preposterously, Canada’s big city, progressive voters gave Carney's Liberals a near majority on April 28th, despite Carney fielding the same feckless ministers and the same anti-prosperity policies as his lightweight predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Carney was elected by stoking voter panic about the supposed threat of the Orange Menace.

Millions of progressive voters in Canada’s big cities decided that Donald Trump making noises about annexing Canada required them to forget the dark decade of Liberal rule. Like incompetent parents, they chose to impose no consequences for the Liberals’ appalling mismanagement of this country.

While Justin was lecturing Canadians about peoplekind, boasting that budgets would balance themselves, greasing his corrupt friends and claiming there was no business case for exporting Canadian LNG, Canada's economic output failed to grow for a decade. Our GDP per capita plummeted against that of the USA. Justin made Canada poorer, because, like his dad Pierre, Justin neither understood nor cared about the economy.

Surely Dr Mark Carney, economist, Goldman Sachs alumnus and central banker, will turn all this around? Carney seems more serious and better credentialled than airhead actor Trudeau.

Unfortunately, as I predicted, Mark Carney is looking depressingly similar to his Zoolanderian predecessor.

(Image: Ben Wicks)

Carney's cabinet is drawn from the same economically illiterate clown car as Trudeau's. There has been no change to Trudeau anti-prosperity rules aimed at the oil and gas industry. Carney is not removing electric vehicle mandates despite plummeting demand and the embarrassing collapse of Trudeau’s $50 Billion of battery plant subsidies. Carney is not planning to dismantle the Quebec dairy cartel that forces Canadians to pay much more than Americans do for milk and cheese. More government -induced inflation.

Although Carney is not dumb enough to think budgets balance themselves, he wants to spend $130 Billion more than Trudeau did. Even more inflationary and without a budget, which is authoritarian. Typically, government spending is funded by taxes and by debt, which leads to more taxes. Taxes depend on economic growth, but Liberal policies are anti growth.

Justin Trudeau and Trudeau-Carney minister Steven Guilbeault wanted to delay or cancel as many oil and gas projects as possible and they succeeded, with around $700 Billion of private sector funded energy projects cancelled under their watch. Those forgone projects would have spun off hundreds of billions of tax revenue and thousands of jobs, at no cost to taxpayers. That would have funded a lot of schools and hospitals.

One of Trudeau’s toxic legacies was Social License, a terrible precedent neologism he cooked up with former Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley. Social license is the notion that, even when Canada creates the longest, most expensive approval process in the world, with many companies spending a decade and a billion dollars to get projects approved, any major project can be cancelled if enough opponents squawk.

Those unaware of Carney’s Net Zero climate activist background might assume that a process so arbitrary and dysfunctional will be overhauled by a Carney government, but Carney, like Trudeau, wants to make pipeline approvals as hard as possible. Although the federal government has jurisdiction over pipelines, Carney says that if any province objects, a project cannot proceed. This was exactly Trudeau’s approach, without Carney using the term social license.

Carney, like Trudeau, is unwilling to use federal authority to do the right thing and so claims he needs unanimous permission from every province and every First Nation. This is effectively a veto against pipelines and Carney knows it. So already we have BC NDP Premier Eby declaring he is against pipelines, an issue on which BC has no standing.

After ten Trudeau years of everyone, from premiers to unelected First Nations leaders to protestors belly flopping onto a hearing table in Montreal, being able to stop major developments that are under federal jurisdiction, this seems normal.

It is not normal. This is banana republic stuff.

I worked for two decades in capital markets, with institutional money managers as my clients. Nobody will invest in this country under these conditions, unless bribed to do so with expensive, uneconomic, taxpayer funded subsidies, like the Liberals’ battery plant fiasco.

Since Trudeau’s strangulation of Canadian oil and gas, Canada’s leading export, is to continue under Carney, who is going to fund all that new Carney spending?

Canadian taxpayers, obviously. Carney wants to reimpose a carbon tax, but on companies, to dodge the political blowback of the unpopular consumer carbon tax he urged Trudeau to implement. Corporate carbon taxes will be passed on to consumers, raising energy costs for Canadians at a time of rampant inflation.

Thanks to Carney's policies, be prepared to enjoy less disposable income, less employment, more debt to repay, higher taxes and higher prices, until we can elect a fiscally competent government in Ottawa. God knows when that might be possible.

By the way, where is the dreaded Trump threat now? As he bloviates about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal and switches tariffs on and off like a light switch at a tween slumber party, it seems pretty obvious that the supposed sovereignty crisis that caused so many Canadians to develop amnesia about Liberal incompetence and corruption, was mostly bluster. Trump confirmed this when he bragged to Carney about getting Carney elected.

If you know anyone who voted Liberal on April 28th, be sure to thank them for getting conned into accelerating Canada’s declining prosperity, by the hated Donald Trump, who is laughing at them.