Carney seems to be following another Liberal’s roadmap — and it’s a cynical one

AKA Lies the Liberals tell themselves

It’s been almost almost 15 years since I penned a blog under the heading “Governor Carney's future political career looking good,” and now he’s the Prime Minister of Canada (designate). That was long before the Hon. Scott Brison started organizing Mr. Carney’s first Liberal Leadership campaign, and we see now how right they were to back away in December 2012 as the Trudeau wave was about to swamp his Party’s shores the following year.

Patience is a virtue.

There was a time when the idea of Mr. Carney taking roost in the Langevin Block would have been exciting, but that was before we came to learn of his impractical views on the role Canada’s energy industry should play in the world’s net zero efforts. Mr. Carney’s exhortations as a leading global banking regulator have already hurt Canadian workers and our broader economy, as I outlined in a Star column last June (see prior post “Bank chiefs walk tightrope on energy evolution” June 12-24):

What gets less attention is that global banking regulators have spent the last decade jawboning the financial sector about “Breaking the tragedy on the horizon — climate change and financial stability,” as outlined in a 2015 speech by then-Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney. The same fellow who may well be a leadership candidate for the carbon-hating Liberal party.

As a regulator, Carney ominously warned financial institutions to plan for “the likely future cost of doing business” with “companies that produce and use fossil fuels.” Canada’s own bank regulator, Peter Routledge, the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, followed suit last month during his appearance before the same house environment committee when he outlined OSFI’s expectations for “sound climate risk management.”

Banks face a multi-faceted dilemma: are they taking on undue risk if they don’t favour the environment over the fossil fuel industry?

Canada’s O&G sector accounted for $71.4 billion (greater than 3 per cent) of GDP at last count, employing hundreds of thousands. Provincial governments will rake in more than $20 billion of royalties in 2024 — cash that pays for countless schools and hospitals.

Given the sector’s economic impact, bank CEOs may be asked to explain the eye-popping $23 billion drop (48 per cent) in the Big 6’s drawn O&G loans between 2020-23. MPs may also wonder why drawn O&G loans have fallen, on average, from 5 per cent to a modest 1.9 per cent as a share of the banking sector’s total lending to business/governments over the same short period.

Bank executives will assure MPs that this is merely a function of the heady cycle, as a profitable O&G sector pays down its debts. That may be true, but lender JP Morgan’s O&G credit exposure dropped just 12 per cent during this time frame.

If you watched his Leadership acceptance speech, there was no talk of a “tragedy on the horizon.” Mr. Carney didn’t repeat his earlier warnings about millions of people dying each year due to climate change. For someone who says he’s “not a politician,” Mr. Carney certainly qualifies as a quick study.

I’m sure that he doesn’t have time to read very many Op-eds, even in The Star, but I’m relived that our incoming PM has come to embrace the following (see prior post “There’s a better — and more lucrative — way to help the environment than Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax” Sept 18-24):

Conservatives are told that they should favour a carbon tax as a political theory, but that’s usually recommended by well-meaning people who’ve never run for office themselves. Former Ontario PC Leader Patrick Brown supported a carbon tax at his first convention as leader in 2016, while Andrew Scheer won the federal leadership a year later as an outspoken opponent of the concept.

That Canada’s share of annual global greenhouse gas emissions is reported to have dropped from three per cent to 1.5 per cent post-Second World War is a function of many things. What can’t be denied is that if Canadians cut that remaining 1.5 per cent share to zero tomorrow, some combination of China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam will backfill our environmental sacrifice as they continue to build new coal plants to support their own needs.

Billions of our fellow global citizens want the same modern conveniences and standard of living that we enjoy here in Canada. Until there’s a more cost-effective, environmentally-friendly and scalable source, most nations will consume carbon to drive their vehicles, heat their homes, and all the other things that we took for granted as Canada industrialized.

That’s our business opportunity.

As former PM Brian Mulroney would say: “Only donkeys don’t change their minds.” It will cost Mr. Carney his membership card in Greta Thunberg’s “social movement,” but it’s for the best.

I’ve posted the first half of my latest Star column below; if you want to see how it ends, buy a print copy, use your Apple News, or subscribe to The Star online via my special discount code: www.thestar.com/informed:

If prime minister-designate Mark Carney is looking for a roadmap to victory in the upcoming election, he could do worse than follow in the footsteps of Jean Chrétien.

The rules are simple: ignore everything you’ve ever said previously and beat up on the sitting Republican U.S. president at every opportunity.

Amid all the revisionist history that the former prime minister rolled out during his address to last weekend’s Liberal leadership convention, I was struck by the pride Chrétien took in his fiscal management in the late 1990s, having inherited an alleged “mess” from the Progressive Conservatives following the 1993 election.

There’s no doubt that the world was coming out of a tough recession at the time, but it was the newly introduced Goods and Services Tax that played the “critical” role in eliminating Canada’s budget deficit — the same “Mulroney GST” that Chrétien promised to “kill” or “abolish” at multiple stops during the 1993 campaign.

Chrétien initially tried to deny ever having made the promise, only to later apologize for not having followed through on that key platform plank. Last Sunday, Chrétien ignored these inconvenient historical details as he talked about balancing the budget via a tax he had once vowed to “axe.”

In wriggling away from his long-held views on the urgency of addressing climate change, Carney is taking a page from Chrétien’s book. It wasn’t so long ago that Carney told the BBC, “When you look at climate change from a human mortality perspective, it will be the equivalent of a coronavirus crisis … every year.” In his 2021 book, Value(s), Carney advised that the world would need to move “away from fossil fuels to renewables.”

Those existential fears seem now forgotten.

During Carney’s leadership acceptance speech, party members applauded him for essentially adopting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s position and promising to remove “the divisive carbon tax.” He also claimed that Poilievre “would let our planet burn,” even as Carney himself committed to making Canada energy “superpower.”

If Carney wants Canada to become a “superpower in both clean and conventional energy,” he shouldn’t have backed the Liberal government’s cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline back in 2016. Originally approved by Stephen Harper’s government in 2014, it would have made Canada less dependent on the United States by making our oil more available to Asian markets.

To read the rest of the piece, hit the link.

MRM

(this post is an Opinion Piece)