By Dan McTeague

One common narrative of this election has been “The Boomers vs. Everyone Else.” Poll after poll after poll has shown Mark Carney and his band of Trudeau Liberals with big leads among Boomers — Canadians over the age of 60, or so — with younger age groups favouring Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, sometimes by quite a lot.

Now, I am on record as being somewhat skeptical of the polls. They just don’t track with my experience on the ground, either door knocking for candidates or talking to people in my life. Maybe I’m wrong, but for me they just don’t pass the smell test.

That said, as a card-carrying Boomer myself, I am well aware that a great many members of my generation have been talked into supporting Carney. Some because they’re simply deluded and selfish, and have no concern for the future — an unfortunate characteristic of the ‘Me Generation,’ whose catchphrase was “Live in the Now!,” at least until our hair turned grey and we traded in our groovy sunglasses for bifocals, at which point we switched it to “Live in the Past!”

Deficits? Rising crime? A soaring cost of living, underlined by elevated food and energy prices? Their attitude is, ‘Who cares? I’ve got my investments and my retirement account! I’ve got my condo in Florida and the value of my house has exploded! I’ve got nothing to worry about!’

Or, as Lisa Raitt put it on CBC the other night, many Boomers “really don’t have a problem with the spending that is coming from a Liberal government. In fact, they embrace it. They enjoy it. And… I find it very frustrating because I look at the younger demographic who are really concerned about it because they’re the ones that are going to be stuck with the bill.”

But other Boomers are tempted by Carney because they’re legitimately confused about the best approach to this strange moment. Six months ago it seemed to them like a good idea to give the Conservatives a shot to get our country back on track. But then Donald Trump started in on his 51st state nonsense, and suddenly the mainstream media was crowing that the best way to punch Trump in the nose was to vote Liberal. Even when Trump himself has tacitly endorsed Carney, and the only nose endangered by a fourth Liberal term is ours, as we cut it off to spite our face.

This second group of Boomers has been convinced that a vote for Carney is a vote for change, that he’s not an ideologue like Trudeau, that he’s a businessman and a “safe pair of hands,” whom we can trust to turn the country around. That is, more-or-less, the CBC-approved narrative, but in no way does it match the facts on the ground.

Remember, Carney was a member of the Trudeau inner circle for years, which makes his continual deflection about the Liberals’ terrible record — “I just got here!” — totally disingenuous. His fingerprints are all over the Liberals’ policies, especially those related to energy. Remember that he was the king of carbon taxation, until its unpopularity led him to distance himself from the policy, zeroing out (not repealing) the Consumer Carbon tax, while doubling down on the Industrial Carbon Tax and remaining firmly committed to the so-called Clean Fuel Standards.

He’s stuck with the Trudeau government’s Electric Vehicle mandate, which requires that all new cars purchased in Canada be EVs beginning in 2035, despite the fact that EVs are more expensive than gas-and-diesel driven vehicles, and that the federal program subsidizing buying them has run out of money. And that doesn’t even touch on the fact that they don’t work well in cold climates like ours, that they will strain our electrical grid, and that there is no actual environmental benefit to switching to EVs. (Meanwhile, Poilievre has wisely pledged to end the EV mandate.)

And a good long look at Carney’s actual career should clear up the question of whether he’s less of an ideologue than Trudeau. In fact, he was always a hardcore environmentalist first and a banker second. Don’t forget that he founded the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero (GFANZ,) an organization whose goal is to force his Net-Zero ideology on an unsuspecting world by pressuring banks and other financial institutions not to lend to or invest in oil and gas companies or projects, whether or not those projects would generate revenue and benefit their shareholders. Carney himself described GFANZ as being “relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on the transition to net-zero.”

Now GFANZ has fallen a long way over the past few months, as major banks in both the U.S. and Canada dropped out of it over accusations that its activities constituted collusion. But even so, Carney’s obsession with ridding the world of hydrocarbon energy doesn’t bode well for a country like ours whose economy is so heavily reliant on oil and gas.

While Carney himself was personally raking in millions of dollars at Brookfield and elsewhere, the Carney-advised Liberals were running our national finances into the ground, leaving us second-to-last for real GDP growth in the OECD since they came to power. We’ve gone from fifth place on the quality of life index, in 2014, tied with Denmark and Finland, to twenty-ninth today! Mark Carney owns that.

This is exactly the kind of person you don’t want running your country. And that is something that Boomers of all stripes should recognize. Carney-supported policies have made life harder and more expensive in the present moment, and if he’s elected, Carney-enacted policies will make life harder and more expensive, not just in the distant future, but in the near and medium term as well, and not just for your children and grandchildren, but for you and your investments as well.

Keep that in mind when you go to the polls.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

 Dan McTeague

Well, you’ve got to hand it to Mark Carney. Though he’s only just entered politics — after years of flirting with the idea, while serving on Team Trudeau behind-the-scenes — and despite the fact that he hasn’t been elected to anything yet, he’s become well versed in the ancient political art of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Like many men seeking high office before him, Carney is happy to say to whoever happens to be in front of him whatever he thinks they want to hear, even if it contradicts what he said to someone else the day before.

Of course, that isn’t so easy to pull off these days. Nowadays pretty much everything a politician says in public is going to pop up on the internet within hours. Which is why it’s been so easy to keep tabs on Carney’s policy flip-flopping.

For just the latest example, last week in Calgary Carney opened his pitch to a sceptical province by saying, “You don’t need to tell me what Alberta is like. I’m from Alberta!” He proclaimed that “Canada has a tremendous opportunity to be the world’s leading energy superpower,” and that “we must invest in our natural strengths and ensure our economic sovereignty!” He promised to “identify projects of national interest,” and fast-track them, while acknowledging that “any major energy project that comes from this great province is going to pass the boundaries of other provinces.”

The implication was that voting for a Carney-led Liberal government would mean a major course correction from the ‘Lost Decade” of Liberal governance, that oil and gas from Alberta should be harnessed to power Canada to prosperity, with pipeline projects (maybe a revived Energy East) spanning every province (presumably over the objections of the government of Quebec, these being projects in the “national interest” and all), and the construction of terminals — of the type for which Trudeau previously said there was no “business case” — enabling us to get Canadian Natural Gas onto tankers bound for Europe and Asia. What else could he have meant by ‘global energy superpower,’ ‘self-sufficiency,’ and the promise to invest in Alberta’s energy infrastructure?

But then Carney found himself being interviewed in Montreal, and his approach was quite different. After his interviewer poked some fun at Carney’s tendency to crib policy proposals from the Conservatives — “do you find Mr. Poilievre has good ideas?” — Carney was asked about his “energy superpower” comments, and he hedged, saying that Canada should work to develop its own resources “if there is social acceptability.” Asked about pipelines specifically, Carney said “We must choose a few projects, a few big projects. Not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines, we’ll see.”

Now, if you think that all of this sounds strangely familiar, you’re not crazy. Carney has been doing this dance since he first stepped out from behind the curtain, saying one thing out west and another back east.

Speaking in B.C. in February he aped a Donald Trump line by saying he wanted Canada to “build, baby, build,” and promised to use “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,” clarifying to CBC that those major projects included pipelines. But then, in a French-language interview, he was asked if he planned to force Quebec to accept a pipeline, and he answered, “I would never impose [a pipeline] on Quebec.”

These examples should be enough to demonstrate that Mark Carney is a Con Man. But who, exactly, is his mark? Is he telling the truth in Quebec, where he’s looking to syphon off support from the Bloc Québécois? Or is he telling the truth in Alberta, where he’d love to snatch a few more urban ridings from the Conservatives?

The answer is that, actually, we’re all his mark. Carney doesn’t really care about Quebec’s sovereignty, or any contentious constitutional question like that. And he certainly has no desire to build pipelines and LNG terminals in order to turn Canada into a global energy superpower. A glance at his long career, as both a public and private sector Net-Zero activist, pressuring both individual corporations and national governments to adopt his environmentalist ideology, will tell you as much.

Once you accept that, you start to notice Carney’s sleight-of-hand on questions of energy and affordability. He’s taking credit for “Axing the Carbon Tax,” when in reality he merely zeroed out part of it, while doubling down on the other half. He’s set it up so that he can bring the Consumer Carbon Tax back whenever he likes, without a vote. Meanwhile, our economy will be slowly strangled by the Industrial Carbon Tax, and our everyday lives will get more expensive as businesses pass the cost down to us.

He remains committed to Bill C-69, the “No More Pipelines Act,” which the Supreme Court said overstepped the federal government’s constitutional authority, which itself shows that his mealy-mouthed talking points on pipelines and energy infrastructure don’t amount to a real commitment to anything. And he still supports the Trudeau government’s emissions caps, which target our Natural Resource Sector, the beating heart of Canada’s economy.

And of course he does, because long ago Mark Carney pledged allegiance to the destructive Net-Zero ideology, and it is that, more than anything else, which is the groundwork for how he will actually govern.

So, whatever you do, don’t buy the con. Mark Carney has spent an entire career, before the start of this campaign, telling us exactly who he is. Don’t let him pull the wool over your eyes now.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

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