"I am an outsider."
"I own nothing."
We do not for a moment suppose Mr. Carney believes his own words, but it continues to amaze us that he thinks we might. As Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner has it, quoted in a Hannaford column below, as opposed to being an outsider, he's so much an insider that he runs the club.
As for his owning nothing, we will generously assume that he was trying to express in a poetic way that his considerable wealth having been placed beyond his direct control, he was just like the rest of us.
You know, driving around looking for cheap gas and shopping the flyers.
Quite. Elections do bring out the imaginative qualities in all of us.
The thing with Mr. Carney is that to some degree, he can get away with it. Beyond the 5% of Canadians who follow the financial pages, nobody knows who he is. And until they do, they feel free to project their own feelings and ideas on to him.
However, this cannot last. Nor should it. For the Liberal leader is a successful, 60-year-old man of the world.
In comparing his resume to that of Mr Poilievre, he makes much of how he 'understands how the world works.' No doubt he does, at least for him, hence the considerable portfolio he has now placed in a blind trust.
That means questions from the press about what he owns (and the obvious follow up about how that might affect his decisions in government) are not tiresome 'gotcha' attempts, but very reasonable efforts to tell the voting public who is the man who 'owns nothing' that they are dealing with.
Voters also need to know that the 'outsider' Mark Carney was a PMO 'insider' for years, and at Mr. Trudeau's side as the latter ran up deficits year after year.
Now Mr.Carney condemns all that, so perhaps we should assume his excellent advice to the contrary was ignored.
However, what sort of a man sticks around for four years when his advice is consistently and foolishly ignored by the feckless kid in the PMO? Possible answer: One who can look past the excess spending he now condemns, because he is fixated on a different agenda of his own... a world-saving green one that leads among other things, to vicious crackdowns on Western energy production?
The further you get into the Carney agenda, the more you start to wonder about the man who tries to come across as your boring Uncle Mark. You wonder for instance about the logical inconsistencies.
For example, during nearly 10 years in government, the Liberals have beaten the drum for reduced carbon dioxide emissions. On the other hand, by aligning the government he hopes to form with the so-called Century Initiative, that wants to expand Canada's population to 100 million by the year 2100, Mr. Carney has accepted a proposal that would make Net Zero that much harder — probably impossible — to meet. More people, more carbon emissions. Is that what you want?
It should also be obvious for somebody who believes that continued CO2 emissions is going to roast the planet, that replacing coal-fired generation in Asia with much cleaner Canadian natural gas was a no-brainer.
But, apparently not if it means more emissions in Canada (and helps Alberta.) Even in the middle of a tariff war with the US, in which Canada's lack of pipelines to alternative markets illustrates the Liberal government's utter unpreparedness, there is still no firm commitment from Mr. Carney to building pipelines. (A promise conditional on Quebec's agreement is not firm. Indeed, Mr. Blanchet has already deep-sixed the idea.)
As for developing Alberta's clean fuel, forget it. Rather, it's just a weapon in a trade war, liable to an export tax that punishes Alberta as much as the US.
And so it goes on. We have another month to get to know Mr. Carney.
We already know he's not good on spontaneous remarks. Mixing up Ecole-Polytechnique with Concordia is the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, but it happened to him after he had already demonstrated a testiness with questions from the press. No surprise here: As a central banker, Mr. Carney is accustomed to the civil and deferential questioning of the financial press.
It remains to be seen how he fares in debate with Mr. Poilievre in the two debates scheduled for April 16 and 17, who will be neither civil nor deferential.
But this we should know now. He is neither an outsider, nor a man of slender means. He is the dean of the globalist movement and has a vision of the future that does not include a prosperous Western Canada.
Stay tuned.
