Business
Mark Carney’s Misleading Actions and Non-Disclosure Should Disqualify Him as Canada’s Next Truly “Elected” Prime Minister – Jim Warren
From EnergyNow.Ca
By Jim Warren
If Mark Carney simply told the truth, he wouldn’t have to remember if what he says in Quebec matches what he says in Western Canada.
When speaking in Kelowna on February 12, Mark Carney left the impression he’d been converted from environmental zealot to missionary for an Energy East pipeline.
Carney said he would “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.”
Five days later Carney told CBC those emergency powers wouldn’t apply to Quebec. The government of Quebec would have veto power over any pipeline to the east coast. To clear up any possible confusion he repeated his pipeline veto pledge to Quebec at the French debate for the Liberal Leadership.
Apparently tough measures like the “peace, order and good government” clause in the Constitution and the Emergencies Act can be used by Liberals to arrest and seize the bank accounts of truckers who honk horns and cause traffic jams in Ottawa. But they can’t be used to build pipelines across Quebec even if it will reduce the impact of US tariffs on Canada’s economy. Like any good Liberal, Carney knows the interests of Maritimers and the West are of little consequence when his party needs to boost its support in Quebec.
Ironically, the second national poll in the past few months shows a majority of Quebecers support the construction of an East/West pipeline through their province. It is the Central Canadian political elite based in the major cities of Ontario and Quebec and excessively zealous environmental activists who oppose pipelines. And the Liberals are, of course, the party which represents that environmentally sanctimonious elite.
You read it here first.
On January 28, EnergyNow ran a column with the headline: Trump’s Wake-up Call to Canada, Politicians & Activists… The column outlined how the “peace, order and good government’” clause in the Constitution and/or the Emergencies Act could be employed to override regulatory barriers and court injunctions to ensure new pipelines to tidewater are built. The column says the first step in that process will be booting the Liberals from office. That condition still applies, given that Carney’s one-time mention of using “emergency powers” in support of a West to East pipeline turned out to be just one more Liberal lie to Western Canada.
Pierre Poilievre has aptly pegged Mark Carney as a hypocrite whose corporate interests and behavior are in substantial conflict with his environmental virtue signaling. At a House of Commons committee hearing in 2021, Poilievre spanked Carney for supporting the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline, while Brookfield Asset Management, the company he chaired, had bought pipelines in Brazil and the United Arab Emirates.
Poilievre admonished Carney, “You make billions of dollars off foreign pipelines and you shut them down here at home, putting our people out of work.”
More recently Carney misled Canadians about the role he played in moving Brookfield’s head office from Canada to the US. Carney claimed he had absolutely nothing to do with the move despite the fact he was company chairman at the time.
No less egregious is the fact Carney has used a loophole in federal legislation to avoid the financial disclosure rules for cabinet ministers including the prime minister. The disclosure rules help Parliament determine when ministers are involved in conflicts of interest. Carney will soon be crowned prime minister by the Liberals and will technically be exempt from the rule.
Carney is technically exempt because he’s never been elected as an MP. He will be able to avoid making his financial disclosure until 60 days after he is appointed prime minster. This means there is a good chance Carney’s financial information won’t be available well into the run up to a possible spring election.
Poilievre rang the alarm regarding the loophole and plans to introduce legislation as soon as Parliament reopens to fix the problem. He pointed out that there was nothing preventing Carney from being transparent and voluntarily providing the necessary information to Canadians prior to the Liberal leadership vote.
Poilevre was being too kind. A lack of integrity is what’s holding Carney back.
Carney is on record as a firm believer in carbon taxes. In the book he published in 2023 he wrote, “Meaningful carbon prices are the cornerstone of any effective [environmental] policy framework.”
Now, in support of his campaign to become prime minister, Carney promises to get rid of Canada’s unpopular carbon tax. The claim is clearly deceptive. He intends to replace the current tax on consumers with an upstream tax on oil producers and industry. Carney must think Canadians are too dumb to realize the increased upstream tax burden will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for virtually everything they purchase.
When Carney is pressed to explain his carbon tax 2.0, he mumbles his way through an incomprehensible word salad worthy of Kamala Harris.
Also like Harris, Carney avoids campaign events where non-supporters might show up or media appearances and interviews where he might be asked a tough question. His appearance on US late night talk shows hosted by uber-liberals like Jon Stewart are unlikely to generate hard ball questions—the hosts are ignorant about Canadian politics and wouldn’t have a clue about what to ask.
I think Carney knows how bad the Kamala campaign tactics look. He was clearly taken aback by an incident at a campaign event in Regina. A member of the Liberal party who was somehow identified as a closet Conservative was accosted by two security agents and police who ejected him from the meeting. The guy had done nothing untoward—he hadn’t so much as raised his voice. It seems Mark Carney is very precious and must be protected from the public– including Liberal party members who are potentially dangerous because they supported another party in the past.
Where Carney really stands on environmental issues
Mark Carney didn’t just drink the climate alarmist Kool-Aid, he helped make it and wants to serve it to you.
“He’s the father of net-zero on a global basis,” according to Catherine Swift, President of the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada.
Carney has been a steadfast supporter of the environmental dogma underlying the Liberal assault on the fortunes of the oil and gas industries including the legislation preventing new pipelines. For years now, he’s been working on the inside of international organizations dedicated to climate change mitigation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction.
In December 2019, he was appointed as the very first UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.
Prior to, during and after his time at the UN Carney has found time to hobnob with the billionaires and national leaders who presumably constitute the global elite. He’s been a regular at the annual World Economic Forum conferences in Davos, Switzerland.
As a member of the forum’s Foundation Board he is a duly qualified member of the modern day Illuminati. He associates with the international bankers who presume to know what’s best for the little people. His promotion of the radical green agenda dovetails nicely with the environmental virtue signaling of the world’s rich and powerful at Davos. They are dedicated to conquering global warming no matter what it costs the rest of us.
At the COP26 conference in 2021 Carney proudly proclaimed he was part of the same social movement as Greta Thunberg. Carney praised Thunberg as the “catalyst” who inspired the youth wing of the environmental movement. I haven’t heard if he’s gone off Greta and her wing of the movement now that she has announced her support for Hamas.
Don Braid recently wrote an insightful column in the Calgary Herald where he proposes that Carney is too deeply embedded in environmental activism and too publicly committed to climate change mitigation and the anti-oil agenda to run away from it when he becomes prime minister. Braid reports what Carney had to say about the environment and the need to abandon natural gas and petroleum in the 600 page door-stopper book he published in 2021, Value(s): Building a Better World for All.
In 2021, Carney was deluded enough to imagine the world’s virtuous emissions cutters would prevent the planet’s average temperature in 2050 from being any higher than 1.5O above what it was in the middle of the 19th century.
Not even serious climate change alarmists like Gwynne Dyer believe that’s remotely possible. The goals of climate zealots like Carney include fanciful, overly ambitious emissions reduction targets. They want change to happen too fast to be affordable for virtually everyone except the sorts of people who hang out at Davos.
In his book, Carney identifies what he believes should happen to the fossil fuel industries. His goals don’t bode well for the future of Canada’s petroleum and gas sectors and can’t help but harm the country’s economy.
Carney writes, “To meet the 1.5o C target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil)” will need to “stay in the ground, stranding these assets.”
Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s most infamous and politically dangerous environmental extremist backed Carney in the Liberal leadership contest. Guilbeault’s support is in recognition of Carney’s radical record on environmental issues including climate change mitigation.
Nothing to say about Liberal corruption
One of the most disturbing omissions from Carney’s political platform and media coverage of his campaign is any mention of plans for dealing with runaway Liberal cronyism and corruption.
He hasn’t promised to open the books and jail the crooks. He hasn’t promised to release the unredacted evidence of Green Slush Fund corruption. He hasn’t promised to release that evidence and turn it over to Parliament and the RCMP. He hasn’t announced plans for a thorough forensic accounting of Liberal backroom deals. And he hasn’t promised investigations into sweetheart contracts and looting in cases like the ArriveCAN scam.
He can’t do any of the above because it would implicate a number of Liberal insiders and he needed them to support him in the leadership contest. And how will he be able to work with the government caucus if he suggests he wants to get tough with the hogs at the trough? Given that he won’t release his financial information, it could be he doesn’t want to limit his own access to the gravy train.
In the final analysis, you’d have to say Mark Carney is a committed environmental zealot except when it interferes with his business interests or political ambitions.
He appears comfortable giving preference to the environmental extremism of the Davos set over the harm overly zealous climate change policies do to the livelihoods of ordinary Canadians and the country’s economy.
He appears comfortable with hypocrisy and misleading Canadians which clearly qualifies him to lead the Liberal party, but makes for a bad prime minister.
Business
Is Carney Falling Into The Same Fiscal Traps As Trudeau?
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Jay Goldberg
Rosy projections, chronic deficits, and opaque budgeting. If nothing changes, Carney’s credibility could collapse under the same weight.
Carney promised a fresh start. His budget makes it look like we’re still stuck with the same old Trudeau playbook
It turns out the Trudeau government really did look at Canada’s economy through rose-coloured glasses. Is the Carney government falling into the same pattern?
New research from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy shows that federal budgets during the Trudeau years “consistently overestimated [Canada’s] fiscal health” when it came to forecasting the state of the nation’s economy and finances over the long term.
In his research, policy analyst Conrad Eder finds that, when looking specifically at projections of where the economy would be four years out, Trudeau-era budgets tended to have forecast errors of four per cent of nominal GDP, or an average of $94.4 billion.
Because budgets were so much more optimistic about long-term growth, they consistently projected that government revenue would grow at a much faster pace. The Trudeau government then made spending commitments, assuming the money would be there. And when the forecasts did not keep up, deficits simply grew.
As Eder writes, “these dramatic discrepancies illustrate how the Trudeau government’s longer-term projections consistently underestimated the persistence of fiscal challenges and overestimated its ability to improve the budgetary balance.”
Eder concludes that politics came into play and influenced how the Trudeau government framed its forecasts. Rather than focusing on the long-term health of Canada’s finances, the Trudeau government was focused on politics. But presenting overly optimistic forecasts has long-term consequences.
“When official projections consistently deviate from actual outcomes, they obscure the scope of deficits, inhibit effective fiscal planning, and mislead policymakers and the public,” Eder writes.
“This disconnect between projected and actual fiscal outcomes undermines the reliability of long-term planning tools and erodes public confidence in the government’s fiscal management.”
The public’s confidence in the Trudeau government’s fiscal management was so low, in fact, that by the end of 2024 the Liberals were polling in the high teens, behind the NDP.
The key to the Liberal Party’s electoral survival became twofold: the “elbows up” rhetoric in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, and the choice of a new leader who seemed to have significant credibility and was disconnected from the fiscal blunders of the Trudeau years.
Mark Carney was recruited to run for the Liberal leadership as the antidote to Trudeau. His résumé as governor of the Bank of Canada during the Great Recession and his subsequent years leading the Bank of England seemed to offer Canadians the opposite of the fiscal inexperience of the Trudeau years.
These two factors together helped turn around the Liberals’ fortunes and secured the party a fourth straight mandate in April’s elections.
But now Carney has presented a budget of his own, and it too spills a lot of red ink.
This year’s deficit is projected to be a stunning $78.3 billion, and the federal deficit is expected to stay over $50 billion for at least the next four years.
The fiscal picture presented by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne was a bleak one.
What remains to be seen is whether the chronic politicking over long-term forecasts that plagued the Trudeau government will continue to be a feature of the Carney regime.
As bad as the deficit figures look now, one has to wonder, given Eder’s research, whether the state of Canada’s finances is even worse than Champagne’s budget lets on.
As Eder says, years of rose-coloured budgeting undermined public trust and misled both policymakers and voters. The question now is whether this approach to the federal budget continues under Carney at the helm.
Budget 2025 significantly revises the economic growth projections found in the 2024 fall economic statement for both 2025 and 2026. However, the forecasts for 2027, 2028 and 2029 were left largely unchanged.
If Eder is right, and the Liberals are overly optimistic when it comes to four-year forecasts, then the 2025 budget should worry Canadians. Why? Because the Carney government did not change the Trudeau government’s 2029 economic projections by even a fraction of a per cent.
In other words, despite the gloomy fiscal numbers found in Budget 2025, the Carney government may still be wearing the same rose-coloured budgeting glasses as the Trudeau government did, at least when it comes to long-range fiscal planning.
If the Carney government wants to have more credibility than the Trudeau government over the long term, it needs to be more transparent about how long-term economic projections are made and be clear about whether the Finance Department’s approach to forecasting has changed with the government. Otherwise, Carney’s fiscal credibility, despite his résumé, may meet the same fate as Trudeau’s.
Jay Goldberg is a fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Business
Carney government should privatize airports—then open airline industry to competition
From the Fraser Institute
By Alex Whalen and Jake Fuss
This holiday season, many Canadians will fly to spend time to with family and friends. But air travellers in Canada consistently report frustration with service, cost and choice. In its recent budget, the Carney government announced it will consider “options for the privatization of airports.” What does this mean for Canadians?
Up until the 1990s, the federal government served as both the owner and operator of Canada’s major airports. The Chrétien government partially privatized and transferred the operation of major airports to not-for-profit airport authorities, while the federal government remained the owner of the land. Since then, the federal government has effectively been the landlord for Canada’s airports, collecting rent each year from the not-for-profit operating authorities.
What would full privatization of airports look like?
If the government allows private for-profit businesses to own Canada’s major airports, their incentives would be to operate as efficiently as possible, serve customers and generate profits. Currently, there’s little incentive to compete as the operating authorities are largely unaccountable because they only report to government officials in a limited form, rather than reporting directly to shareholders as they would under privatization. Private for-profit airports exist in many other countries, and research has shown they are often less costly for passengers and more innovative.
Yet, privatization of airports should be only the first step in a broader package of reforms to improve air travel in Canada. The federal government should also open up competition by creating the conditions for new airports, new airlines and new investment. Currently, Canada restricts foreign ownership of Canadian airlines, while also restricting foreign airlines from flying within Canada. Consequently, Canadians are left with little choice when booking air travel. Opening up the industry by reversing these policies would force incumbent airlines to compete with a greater number of airlines, generating greater choice and likely lower costs for consumers.
Moreover, the federal government should reduce the taxes and fees on air travel that contribute to the cost of airline tickets. Indeed, according to our recent research, among peer countries, Canada has among the most expensive air travel taxes and fees. These costs get passed on to consumers, so it’s no surprise that Canada consistently ranks as a very expensive country for air travel.
If the Carney government actually privatizes Canada’s airports, this would be a good first step to introducing greater competition in an industry where it’s badly needed. But to truly deliver for Canadians, the government must go much further and overhaul the numerous policies, taxes and fees that limit competition and drive up costs.
-
National1 day agoCanada Needs an Alternative to Carney’s One Man Show
-
Alberta19 hours agoThis new Canada–Alberta pipeline agreement will cost you more than you think
-
Business1 day agoRecent price declines don’t solve Toronto’s housing affordability crisis
-
Daily Caller1 day agoTech Mogul Gives $6 Billion To 25 Million Kids To Boost Trump Investment Accounts
-
Energy18 hours agoUnceded is uncertain
-
Automotive19 hours agoPower Struggle: Governments start quietly backing away from EV mandates
-
Business1 day agoCanada’s future prosperity runs through the northwest coast
-
Business19 hours agoNew Chevy ad celebrates marriage, raising children
