Carney: The Man Who Would be King

Same progressive fixations as Trudeau, with more letters after his name

Mark Carney wants to be the leader of Canada’s plummeting Liberal Party, right now. This surprises Freditorial’s leading political analyst.

I thought Carney would wait until after his adopted Liberal party gets annihilated in an election that was to be forced on them too soon for the Liberals’ liking. Trudeau has bought Carney 11 weeks by shutting parliament down, just as the Orange Menace takes over in Washington. So generous of Trudeau. A move dripping with respect for Canadian voters.

If Carney had waited out this round, he could have hoped to ride nobly into the smoldering wreckage of the Liberal Party as the white knight, his surcoat unsullied by the ghastly Trudeau legacy and a fresh election loss.

I focus here on Carney because I cannot imagine Chrystia Freeland winning the Liberal leadership. She was overpromoted to Finance Minister by Trudeau precisely because she had no concerns about the Ottawa money furnace being cranked up to maximum deficit for four years, before Trudeau decided in December 2024 to demote her. She is justly tainted by having been the chief enabler of PM Zoolander’s calamitous collisions with economic reality. She was unqualified to be Finance Minister and is no more fit than Trudeau was to be Prime Minister.

Nor do I see youthful but low profile Karina Gould capturing the imagination of Liberals, who are not accustomed to losing and just want to win again, ASAP.

One of the early, prescient criticisms of Junior Trudeau was that he was just not ready to be Prime Minister. Trudeau, who has neither any background in finance nor, apparently, any interest, is a gormless lightweight who surfed a frothy wave of male model star power to high office.

Apparently, chicks dug Trudeau and men tolerated his progressive word salads, for the sake of keeping the peace, much as they’d do when asked to watch a Ryan Gosling movie. Many young Canadians voted for Trudeau mainly because he legalized weed and then were annoyed that he dropped a promise of electoral reform.

Unlike Trudeau, Mr. Carney is no lightweight, having worked at the Goldman Sachs investment bank before becoming Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England. He speaks in full sentences and should understand how economies work. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, Carney does not represent much change from Trudeau. He currently has two jobs. The paid one is with Brookfield, an asset manager. The other involves talking pension funds out of investing in oil and gas, as “United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance”. Ugh. Look at this graph to see how much oil and gas matters to the Canadian economy.

(graph: Investorsfriend.com)

Carney’s anti-hydrocarbon activism alone should disqualify him as Prime Minister. Oil and gas is, by far, Canada’s largest export, but Trudeau and his innumerate, activist henchmen worked hard for ten years to crush the industry. Such activism is especially destructive as Donald Trump prepares to dismantle the many anti-hydrocarbon policies of the expiring Sleepy Joe Biden regime in Washington DC.

I was very disappointed to hear Mark Carney tell carbon- fearing American TV personality Jon Stewart that most of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the production of hydrocarbons. This is not true, but is exactly the kind of thing politicians say when they plan to attack oil and gas companies, rather than offend voting individuals.

It is the consumption of hydrocarbons that produces most of Canada’s greenhouse gases, by a ratio of more than 2 to 1, not the production, but the Trudeau consumer carbon tax is wildly unpopular. Carney and other Liberal leadership candidates now clearly want instead to put the boots to energy producers by taxing them harder, so that the tax is passed on to the consumer, but becomes less visible to voters. Again, the Liberals want to put handcuffs on our leading industry and raise Canadians’ cost of living, just as our largest customer and competitor for investment to the South is unshackling his energy industry. All the sake of Canada’s less than 2% of global emissions.

This is underhanded, moronic and indefensible. The Liberal trifecta.

Keeping, rebranding or even expanding many of Trudeau’s masochistic energy policies, as Carney surely would, would make Canada even less competitive with the USA, by needlessly raising energy costs for businesses and consumers while Trump lowers them in America. This goes far beyond carbon taxes and includes Trudeau’s asymmetrical tanker bans, his byzantine, decade long pipeline approvals, his selective tolerance of protest in the name of “social license” and now his imposition of production caps. See the Freditorial essay about those legacy policies, at the link above that mentions activist henchmen.

Fortunately for Canada, where consumers are already paying a high price for Trudeau’s inflationary, anti- energy activism, some of the wheels on the climate hysteria bandwagon are starting to wobble, even among pressure groups with which Carney is already involved:

The Global Net Zero Financial Cartel, Falling Apart - ClimateRealism

After his time in the UK , some in Britain were not huge fans of Mr. Carney’s reign as Governor of the Bank of England and were motivated to write about it, on this link:

Mark Carney is not fit to be Canadian PM | The Spectator

Carney was involved in a partisan effort to stop Brexit, which effort failed. He used his platform at the Bank of England to promote climate hysteria. He regarded the Freedom Convoy as an insurrection, yet made supportive noises about the innumerate, hard left Occupy movement.

Either Carney actually believes all this stuff, or he is a shameless panderer. I suspect pandering, which is arguably worse, because, unlike the low wattage Trudeau, Carney should know better.

In short, Carney offers the same ultra progressive policies as Trudeau, presented in the same snappy suits, watches and loafers, but without Trudeau’s memorable fondness for blackface and ethnic costumes. One recalls Napoleon describing his slippery foreign minister, the Kissinger-like Talleyrand, as Shit in silk stockings. Carney has also been a vocal proponent of the ESG craze, which is now, also, mercifully fading.

Mark Carney is not somebody who should be leading Canada, which suffered more than enough under his clownish predecessor. Perceptive Calgary columnist Jen Gerson suggests that globetrotting Carney may not have the stomach to stick around if politics proves much harder than he thought, especially if he loses to Poilievre.

Canada’s Liberal Party richly deserves to be out of office for many years. In the mean time, it should choose a leader less willing to sacrifice Canada’s economy to quixotic, unaffordable causes. We just endured a decade of unaffordable, cause-based Liberal rule. Canada needs real change.