Who is Mark Carney?
The man comes to us from a glamorous but allegedly mediocre career in banking. He was in fact, as many claim, an ineffectual and counter-productive Bank Governor for both Canada and the U.K., despite his frequent braggadocio of having saved two economies. One recalls that Jordan Peterson disdainfully pegged him as a self-anointed “planetary savior,” for Peterson understood that Carney, a man with no class or pedigree, was given compulsively to self-promotion.
We should remember, then, that Carney is neither a historian nor a seasoned politician nor a hands-on entrepreneur. Nor is he any sort of metaphorical hockey player or goaltender, as the image proliferates in the media. True, he did skate around in a practice session with the Edmonton Oilers and was a third-string netminder in his college days, but he is essentially a banker, and apparently a rather poor one at that. He has the credentials, but, judging from performance, not the competence. He was also the CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, and the firm is now in a blind trust. But it is Carney’s banking experiences that are his key to the city, nothing else.
Team Canada needs to pull the goalie.
— Dean Skoreyko (@bcbluecon) August 23, 2025
He sucks. pic.twitter.com/w0E4jENOH4
One should not be fooled by the messianic bombast of the man. His CV is really a laminated gloss. “Poor Canada,” said Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former U.K. Conservative minister. “I hope he is a better prime minister than he was governor of the Bank of England, because he was a dreadful governor and left us with a major inflationary problem. Instead of a first-rate banker, we got a second-rate Canadian. [Carney’s approach] will drive the Canadian economy farther down rather than up. [He] was disastrous for the UK and… will be disastrous for Canada.” Other officials have claimed that his focus on climate change was overdone for a central banker. Climate change and ESG urgings were simply not his business.
I have often quoted former British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ denunciation of anti-Brexit Carney’s advocacy for “woke policies, high taxes, high spending,” his refusal to regulate the pension industry properly, and an unwillingness to use natural resources. This sounds very much like the Carney who has brought his expertise to bear on Canada’s ruin, which he has diligently furthered. The nation is now bedeviled by issues of government debt, moral standards, and political accountability, by a presentiment of living on borrowed money and borrowed time. But Carney clearly has no serious plan of putting the nation’s financing on a businesslike basis and (re)introducing the principle of ethical responsibility. In fact, the nation’s deficit is lustily growing.
None of this seems to matter. Carney has had considerable help from a credulous and politically myopic electorate who variously believe in climate change, rely on the Liberals for handouts, are too senescent to think clearly, are largely dwellers in urban centers that tend to veer socialist, and, for those who are still employed, earn their living for the most part in the abstract world of discourse, documents, and digitals. It is a very rich voter pool and one divorced from the hard and necessary task of learning how to be responsible citizens.
One thinks, too, of the decelerated intellectuals pickled in the brine of the Academy or steeped in government maple syrup who are either too woke, too stubborn, or too ignorant to understand the obvious. They are Liberal voters almost to a man and woman, many quite ridiculous, fatuous, and venal. Perhaps a majority earn salaries for comparatively non-important functions that are greatly in excess compared to the wages of those who actually make the world work — blue-collar toilers, struggling low-to-middle class families, and farmers whose livelihoods depend upon the elemental forces of nature and are always worried about prices in city-dominated environments detached from the vicissitudes of the natural world. They are real people, not social algorithms or clamshell ideologues insulated from reality. But for the easily suborned, those whose thinking is as shallow as a bird bath, Carney is their man.
Their man is not up to the game. At a Conservative Party national committee shortly after the 1962 election, party executive Finlay MacDonald said of John Diefenbaker, “He’s certified mad. We’ve got a prime minister who’s a lunatic.” Carney is neither certified nor a lunatic, but he is shallow, unprepared, and inept, defined by a poverty of invention and woefully uninformed.
He has shown himself incapable of dealing with the immigration disaster, stranding a generation of young people in hopelessness; of handling the purchase of American-made F-35s; of conducting trade talks with Donald Trump; of quelling rampant antisemitism (as did Trump); of combatting exploding crime; and of managing the menace of provincial balkanization while Alberta is on the very cusp of seceding from the Confederation. Aside from some minor tinkering and vacant promises to undertake policy reviews, he is clearly out of his depth on practically everything he has undertaken. He will not be moved by common sense, prudent decisions, or principled considerations.
Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre points out that “It has been the Seinfeld summer, a big show about nothing.” Indeed, the National Citizens Coalition has issued a “failing grade to Mark Carney's start in office, as job losses, unemployment, and crime and chaos surge.” President of the NCC Peter Coleman adds that jet-set Carney’s priorities are clear: “profits for his friends and corporate lobbyists, pain for the people.” Unless, of course, the travesty of Carney’s stewardship is all part of his left-wing globalist intention to undermine the nation rather than the result of his overall stupefaction in dealing with the task before him. One way or another, his glabrous insincerity is front and center.
In any event, it is hard not to think of Carney as a political projection, all image and no substance. As Toronto businessman Fiorenzo Arcadi has said, what is missing is “someone who stands at the top of the crease and owns the game…He may have played chess with global banks, but on the ice of Canadian politics, that timid body language won’t save a single puck.” Canada does not need “another goalie built by bankers, frozen in the blue paint while the world skates circles around him. We play hockey on frozen ponds, not spreadsheets.”
Related: Canadian Voters Get What They Deserve
After a decade of darkness with Justin Trudeau and now a Carney fan base that is all too forgiving, we might take the time to reconsider. We might at least ask ourselves, “Where are the netminders of talent”—those who work for shutouts, are not content with lopsided losses or losses of any kind, who seem tall and impenetrable to frustrated attackers, who keep the opposing team at bay, who actually win games, who go for real Net Zero?
There is much to re-imagine here. Carney will never be a jamcracker of a prime minister but a mere logroller. And I’m afraid the promo image of Carney as a goaltender will never make a bubble gum card.
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