Prime Minister Mark Carney has spent the past year sounding like two different men. When wrapped in a Maple Leaf flag, he tells Canadians their country will become a sovereign energy superpower and promises massive nation-building projects. In his Davos-whisperer mode however, his alter ego touts Canada becoming a European-style middle-power, burdened by a governmental style that could limit the very investments he says he wants..Tonight, Vancouver economist Jerome Gessaroli argues the ambiguity is not accidental – and that Canadians should be asking the prime minister harder questions about which version is real. For Gessaroli, a fellow at both the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Montreal Economic Institute, sees a consistent pattern beneath the shifting rhetoric.“I see Carney as someone who believes that government should direct investment toward what he deems national priorities, while also closely working with international partners,” he says on The Hannaford Show..There is, he allows, no automatic contradiction between building a strong Canada and maintaining alliances. The difficulty arises when the alliances begin to dictate the domestic choices:“What I question is whether these new commitments that he’s tried to get Canada into could lock the country into policies that don’t serve our national interests or could limit our economic development.”That question becomes sharper when the same government – his – that talks about energy superpower status goes on to scare off the private capital needed to build the pipelines that would actually deliver it. Gessaroli points to the long history of regulatory obstruction that drove the last major private pipeline proponent out of the country and left taxpayers owning Trans Mountain. The same dynamic, he says, now surrounds Pacific Link, (formerly known as the West Coast Oil Pipeline, intended to run from Bruderheim near Edmonton, to Roberts Bank Superport in Delta, British Columbia, largely following the corridor of the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline System..But meanwhile what is Mr. Carney’s government trying to accelerate? Well, projects with far weaker economic cases – most notably the Alto high-speed rail line between Quebec City and Toronto – are pushed forward with public money on the order of $75-113 billion.“Whose interest is actually being served in that case?” asks Gessaroli. Too often the answer is politicians seeking a visible achievement and the interest groups that stand closest to the announcement.The same logic applies to the prime minister’s enthusiasm for closer alignment with Europe. Europe, Gessaroli notes, designs its rules for European conditions. Those rules are not written with Canadian geography, resource endowment, or productivity needs in mind..“I think he and we as a country have to be very careful that we’re not caught up in having to abide by those same policies the Europeans designed for themselves.”Which brings us back up the hill to Davos. When Mr. Carney spoke to the World Economic Forum there in January this year, he sketched a middle-power bloc standing apart from both the United States and China. His remarks were widely acclaimed.But, whether Mr. Carney’s words served Canadian interests is another matter. During the subsequent tariff dispute with Washington, Gessaroli observed, the hoped-for solidarity from other middle powers failed to appear. The idea sounded attractive; the practical support was not there when it mattered..Throughout the interview Gessaroli returns to a simple test. Governments, he has written, frequently mislabel their own policy failures as market failures and then respond with subsidies. The EV battery commitments that have since been scaled back or cancelled are only the most recent illustration. True market failures are rarer than political rhetoric suggests. In most cases the obstacle is a policy that makes commercially viable investment unattractive. The remedy is not more public money directed at favoured projects, but clearer, more predictable rules that let private capital decide which projects are worth building.Mr. Carney’s supporters will say the Major Projects Office and the new language of nation-building show a different approach from his predecessor’s.Eighteen months on however, the office has yet to deliver a major project, while the rhetorical pull toward European standards and middle-power coordination remains strong..But Mr. Carney’s ultimate end-game seems no clearer.However, Gessaroli insists that the pattern of top-down direction, selective public financing, and international commitments that may constrain Canadian options is clear enough to warrant closer scrutiny.“We take him at his word,” he says of the prime minister’s stated beliefs. The question for Canadians is whether those beliefs actually serve the country he leads.The Hannaford show is uploaded at seven o’clock.
