LILLEY: Carney is Trudeau's new adviser with lots of conflicts

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Justin Trudeau has appointed global banker and World Economic Forum board member Mark Carney as an economic adviser. After months of speculation that Carney wanted to be Liberal leader or become the replacement for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, he’s become an adviser to the Liberal Party.

This comes with a whole host of possible conflicts of interest that neither Carney nor the Liberal Party have addressed.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Carney remains a finance adviser to the British government. He’s also on an advisory board for a finance firm named PIMCO. In addition, he is a board member at online payments firm Stripe, a board member for Bloomberg Philanthropies and Chair and Head of Transition Investing at Brookfield Asset Managment, a major global commercial real estate firm.

Last year, Carney was awarded just shy of $1 million USD in deferred shares by Brookfield, it’s nice work if you can get it.

In addition to his business work, Carney is the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also a board member of the World Economic Forum, a position he has held since 2010.

So, as he advises the Trudeau Liberal Party where to steer Canada in terms of government policy, whose interests will he be serving?

It’s not an idle question.

Every member of a board has a fiduciary duty to look out for the best interests of the organization they will be serving. So, will Carney be looking out for the best interests of Brookfield, Bloomberg, PIMCO, Stripe, the United Nations or the World Economic Forum.

“As Chair of the Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth, Mark’s unique ideas and perspectives will play a vital role in shaping the next steps in our plan to continue to grow our economy and strengthen the middle class,” Trudeau said in a statement announcing Carney’s appointment.

The last time the Trudeau government appointed an Advisory Council on Economic Growth, it worked out very well for the Chair. Dominic Barton headed up that council while also working as Global Managing Partner for McKinsey & Co a global consulting firm.

Contracts for McKinsey skyrocketed under the Trudeau government helping pad the bottom line of Barton’s firm. He was later appointed to be Canada’s ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021 before returning the lucrative positions in the private sector.

Barton’s council for economic growth recommended increasing Canada’s immigration to more than 450,000 per year, a policy the Trudeau government implemented. They also said that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was too onerous, and the rules should be loosened, something the Trudeau government did in 2022 with disastrous effects.

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Beyond the impact of these two policies alone on the housing and healthcare crises, they have not improved Canada’s economic growth.

Canada’s GDP per capita, really the wealth we create for each of us, is shrinking. Over the last year and a half, Canada’s GDP per capita has been getting lower, meaning we are getting poorer, and our purchasing power is shrinking.

A couple of years ago, this lower GDP per capita meant we earned about 77 cents for every dollar a similar American worker earned, now it’s about 72 cents.

We clearly need help on the economic front but hiring Justin Trudeau’s last boy wonder only helped him and his firm, not Canadians. It’s not clear that hiring Mark Carney to advise the Liberal Party, and therefore skip all those pesky conflict of interest questions, will do any better.

“They’re basically the same people, out of touch elites that believe that they know better than hardworking Canadians,” Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer said of Trudeau and Carney on Monday.

He pointed out that Carney not only supports Trudeau’s carbon tax, he also believes that it must be increased.

“Mark Carney supports all of these extreme policies that have caused so much hardship upon Canadians,” Scheer said.

Based on Carney’s statement Monday, Scheer might be right.

“Canada’s Liberals have achieved real progress for all Canadians,” Carney said.

Voters clearly have a different view.

Carney has just climbed aboard the Titanic just before it hits the iceberg.