How can Mark Carney deliver "equality of outcomes" without raising our taxes?

Is the MSM so hungry for a tight election campaign that they'll turn a blind eye to some fundamental questions?

I’m not sure what’s worse: that the MSM have blindly accepted Liberal Leadership candidate Mark Carney’s storylines, or that the resurrected team of former Kathleen Wynne / Justin Trudeau campaign managers think they can trick voters a third time with the same refried promises of costless, strategic investments in rainbows and unicorns.

Take Saturday’s interesting Globe and Mail piece setting the stage for tomorrow night’s Liberal leadership debate. There was plenty of good reporting, which is to be expected from each of the remaining large Ottawa newspaper bureaus. The challenge for voters is what isn’t being reported, and while I have no reason to single out this particular writer, I worry about the (lack of) coverage to come. As far as I can tell, this generation’s best and brightest journalists seem ready for Mr. Carney to waltz into Langevin Block without a critical view, just as the Parliamentary Gallery of 1992-93 swallowed Kim Campbell’s PC leadership buzz hook, line and sinker.

To start, if I was going to go the “Poisoned Chalice” route, I’d give a “hat tip” to former Mulroney staffer David McLaughin, who wrote a book about our challenges in the lead-up to 1993 election. Poisoned Chalice was indeed his book title, and the parallels between the Mulroney-Campbell handover in 1993 and today are clear, as I outlined on BNN when PM Justin Trudeau resigned last month.

Small potatoes, I know.

How about this reference to Mr. Carney’s alleged membership in an “elite” all-male “final club” while he was a Harvard student? I assume the source for that anecdote was a Feb. 12/25 piece by Abigail Gerstein in the Harvard Crimson. Now, if Mr. Carney is going to tell the media that Canada is much more “inclusive” than America, that claim would sound more credible had HE HIMSELF NOT BEEN PART of the very exclusionary society that he now dismisses on the campaign trail.

I’m not here to do anyone’s research for them, but this recent article in the Harvard Political Review is pretty explosive:

Of course, there’s been a lot of controversy surrounding final clubs, especially allegations of sexual assault and predation in some of the male clubs. Yet, in spite of this, the clubs are still highly sought after.

As a Harvard student, I have my own opinions on final clubs. Personally, I’ve always heard that they are designed for the white and wealthy students at Harvard. Their exclusivity and secret society-type facades always gave me a pretty negative impression.

Now, as a member of fraternity at Western, I’m not one to criticize Mr. Carney for his own University club choices. What is a bit shocking is how the Canadian media seem so disinterested in this hypocritical stuff. Mr. Carney says he’s an “outsider,” despite being a member of a society that some of his fellow students believe “was designed for the white and wealthy students at Harvard.”

I doubt any media outlets beyond The Toronto Sun will delve any deeper into this, but perhaps that exclusionary period in his life explains why he would go on to become a fan of “Inclusive Capitalism.” As Mr. Carney advocated to a BIS audience in 2014, “Inclusive capitalism is fundamentally about delivering a basic social contract comprised of relative equality of outcomes.” There was a time when I was a fan of putting this “smart, sober, engaging and energetic [person]” into Stephen Harper’s cabinet, but that was before these ultra-Left ideas started to flow.

I recall Kamala Harris’ pitch for “equality of outcomes” during her 2020 White House run, which was panned by Republican Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in a way that we may soon need to broach here in Canada: “Sounds just like Karl Marx. A century of history has shown where that path leads. We all embrace equal opportunity, but government-enforced equality of outcomes is Marxism.”

That Marxism angle might be over the heads of most, but there’s no excuse for promoting the idea that Mr. Carney shepherded Canada through the financial crisis, at least, not without some contemporaneous evidence. All we have at the moment is journalists repeating what other journalists have written, which usually doesn’t qualify as proof.

If Mr. Carney has been advising Mr. Trudeau since 2020, is he partly to blame for the horrible state of our economy (see prior representative posts “‘60 additional intern jobs’ is not an Innovation Strategy” Apr 18-23 and “Where's the plan to fix Canada's ‘grim’ business climate?” July 2-23)? If not, why not? Which were the good ideas that Mr. Trudeau ignored — are they the ones in the Leadership campaign platform?

Which is a great segue to Mr. Carney’s “Spend Less, Invest More” rule.

I have questions, and perhaps the moderators at these upcoming leadership debates will help us understand some simple details, including:

1. If the government is “spending more than it needs to keep the lights on,” where specifically will Mr. Carney cut federal spending?

2. How will Mr. Carney provide his promised middle class tax cut without reducing Gov’t spending elsewhere?

3. One of my fav ideas is a sensible clean tech strategy in Ottawa (see prior post “Clean technology advancements, not circular taxes, is Canada's best hope to reduce global greenhouse gasses and grow our economy” May 11-23), but how does a solar panel farm, like the one in this video, grow the economy?

4. How is government capital investment in high speed rail (see prior post “When it comes to "key" infrastructure projects, should price matter?” Feb 21-25) at all like a young family buying a house that builds value over time as they slowly pay off the initial mortgage? Which other “big investments” will pay off in the future? Why does this sound the same as former Premier Kathleen Wynn and Mr. Trudeau?

5. How is any of this different than Mr. Trudeau’s Super Cluster strategy (see prior post “It's a ‘Cluster,’ alright” Apr 17-23), for example? Without specifics, pitching a new generation of “big investments” is in keeping with the same hollow, if well-meaning, promises that Mr. Trudeau and Co. has been making for the past nine years.

MRM

(this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece)