PETRO-CARNEY?: NDP blames Carney for privatizing Petro-Canada

Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney may be a lot of things, wearing many hats, but now the federal NDP is accusing him of being the man who privatized Petro-Canada.

In a Twitter (“X”) post, the federal party accused the former Governor of the banks of both Canada and England of being the financier “for billionaires that privatized and sold off Petro-Canada — driving up gas prices for generations of Canadians.”

That’s despite the fact Carney wasn’t appointed the head of the BOC until 2003, more than 12 years after one of Canada’s most notorious Crown corporations was privatized under Brian Mulroney in 1991.

In that regard, a little bit of a history lesson is in order. Petro-Canada was formed in 1975 after the Yom Kippur war that precipitated the first global oil crisis and embargo.

The company was seeded with $1.5 billion in strategic-up money and a 12% in the Syncrude oil sands joint venture, with a mandate to nationalize 51% of the Canadian energy sector —much to the derision of Calgary-based oil companies.

Petro-Canada’s distinctive downtown headquarters became known as ‘Red Square’ for the pinkish hue of granite that adorns its facade to this day.

When the Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark swept to power in 1979 they vowed to break up the company and dismantle it — a proposal that quickly became an election issue that helped bring down Clark’s minority government in 1980.

What replaced it will go down as one of the darkest periods in Alberta history. The elder Trudeau was re-elected on a wave of petro-fuelled nationalism and a promise to ‘liberate’ Canadian oil production from the hands of greedy foreign interests — and specifically Albertans — who constitutionally owned the resource.

By then Petro-Canada had become a symbol of Canadian nationalism in Ontario and Quebec suffering under the weight of skyrocketing world oil prices. It ultimately became the instrument through which Pierre Trudeau and his erstwhile energy minister Marc Lalonde implemented the infamous National Energy Program (NEP) which is despised in Alberta to this day.

It’s also part of the reason the Liberals have never managed to elect more than a handful of MPs west of Winnipeg in nearly half a century and opinion polls suggest they are unlikely to do so even under Carney's leadership.

Although he wasn’t responsible for privatizing Petro-Canada, Carney was indeed one of the driving forces behind the sale of Ottawa’s 18.6% stake in 2004 for $3.3 billion which was Canada’s largest ever equity offering at the time — and most profitable — while serving as senior associate deputy finance minister under Paul Martin.

“The transaction was completed without major glitches… to the maximum benefit of all those involved, and without controversy — a feat for a major deal involving the federal government,” the Financial Post said in 2005.

The company was eventually taken over by Calgary-based Suncor in 2009 for $43.3 billion, the largest private takeover in Canadian history, a year after he assumed the head of the Bank of Canada under Stephen Harper in 2008.

Carney then went on to become governor of the Bank of England in 2013, and became UN Special Envoy on climate change in 2020.

That’s why observers said it was puzzling that the NDP would choose to dig up his Petro-Can career given that everything he has done since bolsters their climate stance.

“Suddenly I’m a fan,” wrote one Twitter (“X”) user. “Can we get him to sell of the CBC and Post Office as well?”