In March 2025, newly installed Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney enjoyed a much-hyped practice skate with the Edmonton Oilers, at the time among Canada’s best NHL teams. Having grown up in Edmonton and been a devoted follower of the Oilers, Carney had been, in his youth, a third-string goalie for his college. After years of living outside of the country, he was now burnishing his credentials as a true Canadian, a deep-down hockey fan, a real fighter and part of the “elbows up” movement meant to position him as a patriot and tough negotiator in the trade tussle with Donald Trump. So he skated around a little and flexed for the camera.
Six months later, we need to take into account what has been called the “Carney Curse,” which, according to fan-based lore, devastated the Edmonton Oilers hockey team after the Carney visit. The fear now is that the curse has been transferred to the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series hopes following another Carney appearance, or visitation. “While many fans were doom and gloom in reaction to the Carney Curse,” reports Juno News, “one X user said a prayer: ‘Dear Lord, Please put your loving hands around the Blue Jays, lift this curse they call The Carney Touch off the bats, balls and especially our bullpen’.”
Unfortunately, not all prayers yield results. We are now in the spruce-and-moose hinterland of our imminent future as the country under a Liberal administration and Carney’s sinister oversight barrels toward bankruptcy. “Charting a path out of Canada’s collective mess,” writes Trafalgar Strategy director Andrew MacDougall, “would tax God Himself and a cabinet of saints.” Problem is, God seems to have written off Canada a long time ago and a cabinet of goofs is not about to carve inroads into our national destiny with a panoply of performative gestures.
Indeed, the Carney Curse is not limited to sports, as we have discovered to our exorbitant cost. When Carney enters our energy sector, the source of our prosperity, beware! Carney is big on solar projects and Ottawa has just bought four. Farms built on open land accomplish two things superbly; they kill birds that touch down on the hot panels and they kill the earth below with contaminants. The same is the case with windfarms that are inherently deficient, require backup energy support, steal agricultural land, are massive bird killers, and cannot be efficiently recycled. These inadequate substitutes for reliable hydrocarbon energy are typical Carney programs. This is also the Carney curse. Bad power drives out good power.
In essence, Mark Carney is a nothing man. For instance, his level of participation in the House of Commons Question Period, which the Western Standard defines as a barometer of prime-ministerial engagement, accessibility, and accountability, is lower than that of all previous leaders. He has been present at only eight of 23 Question Periods to date. He may be missing in parliament but he is definitely a frequent flyer as a political tourist. His foreign travel is through the roof.
“Carney’s itinerary has included stops in Paris, London, Washington, Rome, Brussels, The Hague, Kyiv, Berlin, Riga, Mexico City, New York, and Sharm El-Sheikh.” His journey to Egypt for a Gaza peace summit he had zero to do with was the most aeviternal and gibberish-laden of his various excursions. He has thus far concluded trade deals with no one of any importance, though South Korea has bid on a shipbuilding contract. Such an arrangement, however, does not constitute a trade negotiation but a contract tender.
Carney did sign a deal with Mexico that includes a plan to build port, rail, and energy infrastructure while tackling crime and protecting the environment. The fact is that Carney has done absolutely nothing to combat crime—removing legal firearms from lawful citizens while doing nothing to stop the inflow of illegal firearms to the criminal element cannot be described as “tackling crime.” Protecting the environment is a perfumed phrase to cover the economic stench of legislating against energy extraction and delivery while diminishing the supply of electricity with merely periodic renewables and polluting the water table with toxic substances. The deal itself is little more than a statement of intent.
As for policy concerns in general, Carney believes in “long-term resilience over short-term efficiency.” This is just another duplicitous way of saying: let people suffer now so that they can get used to suffering later. Playing with Carney is merely a prelude to inevitable collapse.
What Carney and a clique of domesticated Canadian premiers, for example, called the “Canadian team” and “team players,” flaunting “elbows up” in confronting Trump and his tariffs, is perhaps the prime illustration of Carney’s Curse. “Elbows up” is a phrase customarily associated with Gordie Howe, one of the greatest hockey players in the game, who was known for his ability to wield his elbows to clear a path to the opposing net. The phrase is now a Canadian rallying cry to suggest resilience, national pride, and ultimate victory in an economic or cultural context.
We saw how effectively the Canadian team of sorry politicos, led by Captain Carney, comported itself in the bargaining with Trump, a rather hilarious contest that led to the complete defeat of the Canadian scrum of ragtag braggarts. Of course, Carney had major help from fatuous imbeciles like Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, who irritated Trump sufficiently with his anti-tariff ad for the president to end negotiations immediately and disqualify the Canadian cohort from contention.
Further, in response to the Ontario government’s decision not to immediately pull its TV ad broadcast, Trump has raised his crushing tariff load—already at 50% on steel, aluminum and copper, 25% on vehicles and parts, and 35% on Canadian exports not covered under USMCA—by an additional 10%. And he has no intention of meeting with Carney anytime soon since, as Trump said, “whether it’s provincial or Canada itself, they all knew exactly what the ad was and the prime minister knew.”
Not according to Carney, who disclaimed responsibility for the ad, saying that Ford “took a decision which is different than the Canadian government’s, which is responsible for that relation.” It was an “obvious” choice for any reasonable leader not to run anti-tariff advertisements in the context. Ontario Premier Doug Ford gave the lie to Carney, claiming that the prime minister and his chief of staff both saw the ad before it was released, “and we moved forward on it.”
Trade between the U.S. and Canada totals $1.3 trillion (CA) annually—nearly 20% of Canada’s economy. “When talks freeze, working Canadians bear the cost through higher tariffs, lost exports, and weaker business investment.” This is how the Carney Curse operates in the political arena. But as we’ve noted, the Curse is ubiquitous. Nothing is safe.
In the wake of Carney’s visit, the Edmonton Oilers quickly lost their goaltender and their two best players to injuries, before going on to eventually bow ignominiously to the Florida Panthers. As for the Toronto Blue Jays, despite an early success, I suspect they do not have the managerial smarts or on-the-field talent to beat the L.A. Dodgers and are destined to lose, whether welcoming Carney or not. But Carney’s presence will surely seal the deal—unless the Lord bethinks Himself, answers the heartfelt prayer of a despairing fan, and disperses the tenebrous shadow of the wizard of destruction that shrivels and languishes all he ostensibly represents.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is still ongoing, and polls are now showing Americans are increasingly blaming the Democrats for this mess, but we can’t let them spin their way out of it.
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