Who Is Mark Carney transcript

Narrator:

On March 14, 2025, Canadians learned that they had a new Prime Minister, a certain Mark J. Carney. And many are asking … who is he? There wasn’t an election, his party simply selected him to replace the terminally unpopular Justin Trudeau. Carney has tended to avoid the media and dodged or bungled most questions, and he has never faced Parliament. [NB this video was released on March 2025 and reflects the situation at that time.]

In fact our legislature is currently shut down, and even if Prime Minister Carney reopened it, the opposition wouldn’t be able to ask him any questions because he doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons. Indeed, he’s never been elected to any public office and has spent much of his career outside Canada, often in secretive professions and organizations. To most Canadians, Mark Carney is a mystery man.

John Robson:

But not to us. In our work here at the Climate Discussion Nexus we’ve watched him for years. And we know that despite his banking credentials, pin-stripe demeanour and faux populism, Mark Carney is a vocal elitist climate alarmist.

Sure, he now peddles himself as a regular guy who loves hockey and lives by homespun smalltown values including, he says, attending church but not as often as he should, and he now finds “nothing better” than a skate on the Rideau Canal and, who knows, an iconic Canadian “beaver tail” pastry. But he wears $2,000 shoes to pose on the ice and hobnobs with the global elite at the World Economic Forum, including serving on their Foundation Board.

He also claims to be an outsider after spending his life as the ultimate government insider. And though he’s lived 30 of the past 40 years somewhere else and ingratiatingly called himself “a European” until it suddenly served his ambitions to say otherwise, and his WEF bio blows past his Canadian years almost as an afterthought, he now Xes out “It is my honour to serve. Canada has given me everything. Now, I’m ready to give everything for Canada.”

So, if you’re curious about this man who seems to be from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, stay tuned because for the Climate Discussion Nexus I’m John Robson, and this is a CDN Backgrounder on “Who is Mark Carney”.

Narrator:

One reason Canadians are in the dark about their new Prime Minister is that he’s lived and worked elsewhere for most of his adult life. He was born in storybook Canadian-boy-makes-good humble circumstances in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories in 1965 and grew up in Alberta, but left in 1984 to go to Harvard University in Boston. After that he went to England where he did his Masters and Doctorate between 1988 and 1995, and also worked in Goldman Sachs’ global offices from 1990 through 2003, traveling between the US, the UK, Japan and, occasionally, Toronto.

He did return to Canada full time in 2003 to work for the federal government, parachuting in as Senior Associate Deputy Minister at the Department of Finance and eventually rising to Deputy, then Governor of the Bank of Canada, a post he held from 2008 to 2013.

John Robson:

But he did not, as he claimed, help Paul Martin balance the budget. What’s more, after accepting a seven-year term as our central bank governor in 2008, he was only here part-time from late 2011 because he then also became chair of something called the Financial Stability Board which is in Basel, Switzerland. And then, in June 2013, he bailed on his beloved “give everything for Canada” 18 months early for a much-better-paid job as Governor of the Bank of England.

In some sense his life is an open boo,k including a glittering biography as Davos Man incarnate, though some think the glitter is gold and others that it’s scales. That WEF bio we referred to above says:

Narrator:

“He is also an external member of the Board of Stripe, a member of the Global Advisory Board of PIMCO, Harvard University, Rideau Hall Foundation, Bilderberg, the boards of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Peterson Institute for International Economics the Hoffman Institute for Global Business and Society at INSEAD, Cultivo, as well as Senior Counsellor of the MacroAdvisory Partners, Advisor of the Watershed, and Chair of Chatham House, the Group of Thirty and also Advisory Board Chair for Canada 2020.”

John Robson:

Bilderberg? Yikes. Cultivo? And most Canadians have no more heard of the “Group of Thirty” than of those “Zegna” sneakers. But evidently the former is “an international body of leading financiers and academics” who doubtless ascend into their towers to discuss deep things beyond our comprehension in the high chambers. And by the time he finished at the Bank of England in 2020, he’d acquired British citizenship to go with his Canadian and Irish ones acquired by birth, and as noted started calling himself a “European”. And far from returning “home”, he continued jet-setting about, holding those various prestigious corporate and non-profit board positions, mostly in Europe and the US, some of which definitely put him on our radar here at CDN.

The first of those was his role as UN Special Envoy on Climate Change, where he worked closely with UN Secretary General António Guterres, whose unhinged climate rhetoric we discussed in an earlier video in this “Who Is” series. The second of them was his role as founder and co-chair of a lobby group called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero or GFANZ. In this capacity he wrote at length about the need to defund and close down traditional heavy industries, and the fossil fuel sector, and tweeted:

Narrator:

“Thank you @JustinTrudeau for hosting this discussion on Day 2 of #COP26 and for cont’d Canadian leadership on carbon pricing.”

John Robson:

Positions he is now trying unconvincingly to run away from. And the third was as advisor to Justin Trudeau, including as chair of the Liberal party’s short-lived and acarpous task force on economic growth where, again, he not only supported the Trudeau carbon tax but said that he thought it should be higher, though he now claims to oppose it.

And in this context, a bitter irony of him becoming Prime Minister now, in the spring of 2025, is that it’s precisely these policies that he championed that have left Canada so vulnerable to Donald Trump’s trade-war antics.

Narrator:

President Trump’s tariffs, and jokes about annexing Canada and making it the 51^st state, caused widespread anger and anxiety here, and led citizens and politicians to start searching for ways to become more economically independent from the U.S.

Unfortunately, Canada’s most valuable export, its vast oil and gas reserves, are landlocked on the prairies. And due to restrictions passed by the Trudeau government, no one (except in the case of Trans Mountain Expansion, the federal government itself) has been able to finance or complete pipeline projects to move these resources to coastal areas for shipping to Europe or Asia.

John Robson:

As for Carney, as head of GFANZ he’s spent the last few years not only opposing new fossil fuel infrastructure, but calling for the existing assets to be defunded by investors, barred from getting insurance and ultimately closed down.

Narrator:

His group calls the plan the “Managed Phaseout of High-Emitting Assets.” The list targets oil fields, gas pipelines, steel mills, cement plants and consumer gasoline-powered vehicles. Pretty much all the things Canadians are suddenly demanding more of. So Carney needs to convince Canadians he supports building new pipelines on a solid record of calling for the shutdown of the ones that already exist.

Which brings us back to the recurring question “Who is Mark Carney?” Net Zero absolutist, or pragmatic centrist devoted to making Canada “an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy”?

John Robson

But rebranding “fossil fuels” as “conventional energy” is a flimsy cosmetic solution, especially when dragging a ponderous chain of carbon tax advocacy into the room for a great American-style show on his first day in office of cancelling our consumer carbon tax through an “executive order”, which is an instrument of no legal force here in Canada under the parliamentary system. Or rather suspending it, yet keeping it in place on producers while claiming they won’t pass on the costs to households, which is a preposterous position for a PhD in economics to take, except on the theory that he’s consciously trying to bamboozle voters.

In which case this naïve outsider technocrat is a cunning gutter politician. Which would also explain his suddenly ditching the carbon tax that he’d long hailed as efficient because it was “divisive”, which means he is deliberately substituting a worse policy in economic terms because it seems to be a better one in political terms.

Except if he’s a cunning politician, he wouldn’t have said that part out loud. Nor would he have given the disastrous press conference in Europe where he revealed that his cosmopolitan French is unsafe at any speed and also said: “Guess what one of the requirements is to diversify trade to the European Union? Guess what one of the requirements is to diversify trade to the United Kingdom? Guess what one of the requirements will be to diversify trade to the emerging Asia. It’s to have a form of price on carbon?”

Which, as former Conservative Defence Minister and Alberta premier Jason Kenney promptly observed, isn’t even true, but certainly seems to suggest that he still supports a carbon tax even though he’s against it.

A true Saruman of many colours.

Narrator

So, who is Mark Carney? A pragmatic get-’er-done Albertan who wants to drill baby drill and build new pipelines, or a Net Zero fundamentalist who wants it all shut down?

Is he an anti carbon-tax populist who wants to save consumers money, or a climate zealot who wants to price gasoline out of the market?

John Robson

An insider or an outsider? A straight shooter or slick and slippery?

Does this international man of climate mystery still secretly adhere to his climate-change fanaticism while he merely feigns moderation? Or did he really have a change of heart in late 2024, a few years older but infinitely wiser than in those heady youthful days of 2021 or 2022?

If he has abandoned his earlier dogmatism it would call to mind a line we think originated with Margaret Thatcher, though we haven’t been able to track it down, asking if a philosophically slippery politician abandons things he believes in this quickly, how long will it take him to ditch the ones that he doesn’t? But we don’t actually believe in that change of heart.

Historian Tammy Nemeth recently looked through the details of Carney’s climate plan, and she wrote “there’s very little difference between Carney’s climate plan and the one that the Liberals have been implementing since 2015. The only real difference is the replacement of a consumer facing carbon tax with a hidden industrial or business based carbon tax instead. Otherwise, all of the policies are very much the same as what Trudeau’s Liberals have advocated for and implemented.”

So who is Mark Carney? He’s still the climate zealot he was in 2022. He’s committed to Net Zero at any cost, including the cost to his integrity of dissembling about his real intentions, a patrician snob disdainful of the hoi polloi.

Narrator

Even so, many Canadians are attracted to Carney because after a decade of the economy getting steadily worse under Trudeau, they think putting a highly-respected economist and banker in charge should be a change for the better. But let’s look at his track record.

John Robson:

His central project in recent years, GFANZ, has become an embarrassing as well as damaging flop. Although it began with some 450 members who collectively controlled 130 trillion dollars in assets, in recent years most major financial players, including all of Canada’s leading banks, have bailed on it.

Many were put off by the harsh economic costs of Carney’s net zero ambitions, but some were also worried about legal liabilities after the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into groups like GFANZ for potentially violating anti-collusion laws.

And Carney also seems to have exaggerated his importance as Bank of Canada Governor in meeting the 2008 financial crisis. As for his time at the Bank of England, where in classic Carney “chancer” fashion he networked himself into a record salary, a minatory piece for Canadians from Matthew Lynn in the Daily Telegraph warned that:

Narrator:

“it takes only a cursory glance at his record to work out that Carney’s reputation is completely overblown… The City quickly nick-named him ‘the unreliable boyfriend’ for his constant changes of direction on interest rates…. Carney was at best an indifferent Governor, and, at worse, a disappointing failure. … By the time he left office, Carney had created a mess which his successors have struggled to clear up. Inflation spiked up to a peak of 11.1 per cent in the UK, compared to 5.2 per cent in France, or 8 per cent in Italy, hardly a country known for controlling prices effectively, largely because the Bank had printed too much money…. It had become far more interested in the climate emergency, and in pronouns for staff, than the old-fashioned businesses of keeping an eye on the amount of risk building up in the system. ... Even worse, he politicised the role… Time and again, Carney has proved himself a man of high intelligence, but remarkably poor judgement.”

John Robson:

There’s that climate-change zealot thing again. If there is a real Mark Carney, he’s almost certainly still the prophet of Net Zero. As Dan McTeague, head of Canadians for Affordable Energy, and a long-time Liberal MP before, in his view, the party went simultaneously mad and frivolous, has warned us that:

Narrator:

“Mark Carney is an environmentalist fanatic and lifelong Apostle of Carbon Taxation. Just listen carefully to everything he’s said since he threw his hat in the ring to take over as PM. … Carney and the Trudeaupians in his cabinet haven’t had some kind of massive conversion. They’ve not done any soul searching. There’s no repentance here for having made our lives harder and more expensive… The Carbon Tax will live on, but as hidden as it can possibly be, buried under every euphemism and with every accounting trick they can think of.”

John Robson:

Carney will soon have to face an election, in which his spin doctors will present him as moderate and balanced. But if his party wins [the election was in fact held on April 28 and pending recounts the Liberal party won a plurality of seats close to but short of an outright majority], Canada will be trampled by climate policies imposed by a part-time patriot and full-time globalist who’ll shake our dust from his feet once he’s done with us, or we’re done with him.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson, and that’s our disquieting look at “Who Is Mark Carney”.