COOPER: Carney has only shown the voters his warm and reassuring face

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyerFor most Canadians, the COVID pandemic, with its divisive lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures and business failures was a nightmare best forgotten and hopefully never repeated in our lifetime. For Mark Carney it was a dry run for the sacrifices to be made on behalf of his climate crusade.In the April, 2022 preface to his book, Value(s), Carney applied rose coloured glasses to the national tragedy. According to him the theme of the pandemic was that “we have acted not as independent individuals but as an interdependent community, living values of solidarity, fairness, responsibility and compassion.”In a creepy leap of logic he went on to claim that the “muscles” of “civic virtue and public spirit” exercised during the pandemic have primed the public for the war on climate change.“The experience of COVID has reinforced the public’s desire for sustainability.”.If Carney’s book offered Canadians who share his values a velvet glove, it was troublingly silent on the iron fist he presented to those who didn’t go along with him a mere two months before.You won’t find the phrases “Emergencies Act” or “Freedom Convoy” in Value(s). Yet when the Ottawa police force failed to use the powers available to them to clear the truckers from the nation’s capital, Carney was a loud advocate for the bank account freezes and the other draconian measures the Trudeau government imposed on the protestors.Nearly two years later the Federal Court concluded the emergency declaration was unreasonable and an unjustifiable infringement of Charter rights, a fact that Carney ought to answer for..In an endorsement of Carney’s Liberal leadership bid, Trudeau’s former Justice Minister, David Lametti gushed: “Mark has been a good friend of mine for over 30 years. I have had the benefit of his counsel, his intellect, his humour and his charm, and most of all his friendship; I am the better for it.”Indeed, during the height of the trucker crisis, Lametti was relying on his good friend’s counsel. In a February 2, 2022 text message to then-Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino, Lametti scolded his cabinet colleague: “You need to get the police to move. And the CAF if necessary. Too many people are being seriously adversely affected by what is an occupation. I am getting out as soon as I can.”Although Carney had no official role with the federal government at the time, and Catherine McKenna had recently resigned from Parliament, Lametti was clearly communicating with the two Liberal insiders. “People are looking to us/you for leadership. And not stupid people. People like Carney, Cath, my team,” he explained to Mendicino..There’s no mention of Carney in the report of the Public Order Emergency Commission, but it seems the Prime Minister who now employs Mendicino as his Chief of Staff loomed over the cabinet deliberations like some irate vice principal.Five days after Lametti’s text, Carney went public with an incendiary op/ed in the Globe and Mail that included some outright misinformation, and proposed the flagrant Charter violations that would be successfully challenged in Federal Court. He began thus: “In our capital city, many people have been terrorized for more than a week. Women fleeing abuse have been harassed. Many elderly have been too afraid to venture outside their homes for groceries. Families have been deprived of sleep for days on end by the constant barrage of 100 decibel noise.”He went on to claim “This is sedition,” and proposed a remedy: “Drawing the line means choking off the money that financed this occupation.”Moreover, foreign bogeymen, rather than the kinds of decent Canadians Carney would laud in his book two months later, were the source of the nation’s troubles: “By now anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition. Foreign funders of an insurrection interfered in our domestic affairs from the start.”It’s unclear if Carney knew this last claim was false. But Lametti, Mendicino, and other members of the Liberal government must have known. Indeed, the government had been told that was the case in briefings delivered by CSIS Director David Vigneault to the Cabinet Committee on Safety, Security and Emergencies on February 3 and 6. Specifically, “CSIS assessed there was no indication of foreign state interference occurring in the course of the protests. CSIS did not assess that any foreign states supported the protests through funding; that foreign states deployed covert or overt disinformation techniques; or that any foreign state actors attempted to enter into Canada to support the protests.”The foreign interference canard was critical to the emergency declaration for two reasons. First, it helped drum up public outrage and create an “other” on which to blame the chaos in the capital. More important, it bolstered the claim that the truckers were a threat to the federal government’s ability to preserve the nation’s sovereignty, which was a necessary precondition to the emergency declaration.A week after Carney’s pitch, the Trudeau government took his advice, declared a national emergency, and implemented the draconian financial measures he advocated for.The fact that the measures turned out to be illegal and were sold to the public based on a falsehood give the entire affair more than a faint whiff of the kind of “ends justify the means” reasoning of authoritarians.Up to this point, Carney, who has surrounded himself with former Trudeau cabinet ministers, including his now Chief of Staff Mendicino, and key advisors Katie Telford and Gerry Butts, has managed to successfully present himself as a fresh-faced outsider with impeccable judgment despite no track record as an elected official.In the shortest campaign legally permissible he might be able to keep that narrative going before Canadians have a chance to blink and ask questions.Those who are concerned about what unusual levers Carney might be willing to pull to stave off the climate apocalypse he is certain will happen without the kinds of fundamental societal changes he calls for in Value(s) ought to be asking tougher questions about how he handled his last moral crusade. Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.

COOPER: Carney has only shown the voters his warm and reassuring face

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