As campaign launches go, Mark Carney’s entry into the lists could have been more professional.It did not look well on somebody who aspires as putative prime minister to represent all Canadians, that the people working on his behalf excluded journalists whose wages aren’t paid by the government. And whose bright idea was it to rip off a debt collection agency’s logo for the campaign theme? Like Canadians aren’t already so indebted that they don’t answer numbers they don’t recognize? We call that having a tin ear.(MetCredit has now asked the Carney to cease and desist using the design, which they trademarked four years ago.).More substantively, the Conservative social media-meisters who mocked his pedestrian style and the entire event’s low-energy tempo were not wrong on point of fact. His remarks, though from a technical point of view well assembled with an inspirational message derived at the end from what seemed at the start to be merely a comfortable, crowd-warming childhood recollection, nevertheless left one feeling excited in the way anybody might, after a long drink of warm water.But, it worked. It wouldn’t have done him any good to channel Tommy Douglas, anyway. That's not his style.As it was, Carney seemed authentic. He came across as an adult. And as the Conservatives are well aware, campaigning against an adult is going to be a world different from campaigning against Justin Trudeau. Not to put too fine a point on it, the sharp decline in Liberal polling numbers is less likely to be the consequence of a considered rejection of Trudeau’s policies, but of Mr. Trudeau himself.At 59 one would hope Carney would be an adult of course, but at 53 and after more than 9 years in office, Justin Trudeau still comes across as the bright, earnest Grade 12 student from Mr. Bones’ debate class. The difference is rather obvious and plays to Carney’s advantage.Carney is also unlikely to go to important gatherings, wearing odd socks..Joe Rogan calls Trudeau ‘f*ckhead,’ ‘c*cksucker,’ claims Canada on path to ‘legitimate communism’.Apart from maturity, Carney is sufficiently well-known as a central banker and investment manager, and to understand economics well enough, that he doesn’t have to mention it. After years of somebody who makes a virtue of disavowing any knowledge of or interest in monetary policy — Mr. Trudeau disdains to think about it — some frustrated Liberals will find that all the permission they need, to return to the fold.So, contra the mockers, should Mr. Carney get the nod, he will be a bigger and different problem for Pierre Poilievre than any of the other Liberal retreads currently on offer. But don’t be fooled. Likeable as Mr. Carney presents, he will also be every bit as bad for Canadians in general and Albertans in particular, as Mr. Trudeau ever was.Three things on that.1) For the last four years, Mark Carney did his best to mentor Justin Trudeau. He has been a senior adviser to the Trudeau Liberals off and on since COVID.So he either has to claim that he gave them good advice that for four years they kept asking for, he kept giving and they kept ignoring... or he has to defend the Liberal borrowing that raised interest rates, sparked inflation and doubled the national debt between 2020 and 2024. And now, he also has to wear an unforeseen $60 billion deficit. He is not hands off with this government.2) Neither is he an ‘outsider’ as he told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Nor, as he claimed in Edmonton yesterday, is he ‘regular people.’.'WE ARE REGULAR PEOPLE': Carney launches Liberal leadership bid.He is a complete insider, whose Rolodex includes the great and the good from around the world, from the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberger Group, the G-30, the list goes on and according to the London Daily Mail, he dines with Prince Andrew.3) Most important for the attention of Western Canada, Carney has been a vigorous and loud proponent of fighting climate change by disinvestment in the oil and gas industry. The Western oil and gas industry, that would be. He said nothing about it at his campaign launch, and Edmonton would have been a bad place to mention it, but that is a hundred percent of what Carney is all about.A speech he made while Governor of the Bank of England to Lloyds of London, is instructive. In it he tells Lloyds 'names' the that 'the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity. While there is still time to act, the window of opportunity is finite and shrinking.'And so, he has been on the road for years peddling the self-fulfilling prophecy that investors should back out of oil and gas because one day, nobody’s going to want it.He is a true believer. Everything the Trudeau Liberals have done to cripple the Western energy industry, from cancelling pipelines, chasing out energy investment, the clean fuel strategy, emission caps and so forth, is consistent with his own worldview. .HANNAFORD: What could possibly be in it for Mark Carney?.This is the man to whom the Liberals, in their hope to stave off electoral extinction, seem likely to award the crown.Nice guy. Terrible policies. Not entirely forthcoming about them. And, for Canada, a disaster in the making.
