LILLEY: Mark Carney and the truth don't seem to know each other

Article content

Mark Carney, the Liberal leadership front runner and likely next prime minister of Canada, is being widely mocked online, and he deserves it. Carney, it seems, is economical with the truth, he has a faulty memory, he’s not familiar with the eighth commandment from the Bible.

It’s why he’s being laughed at for a series of silly statements that make it look like he wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him in the you know where. From his “experience” balancing the budget, his “experience” saving Canada’s economy, that he has dealt with Trump or his claim that Canada supplies the United States with most of its semiconductors, Carney and the truth are simply not compatible.

“It was my privilege to work with Paul Martin when he balanced the books and kept the books balanced,” Carney said during last week’s English debate for the Liberal leadership.

He even went on to post a video clip of that statement, a way of boasting about his time working with Martin to balance the budget during the Chretien government. Except, he never worked for the government at the time. In the 90s, when the Chretien-Martin team was slaying Canada’s deficits, Carney was either working for Goldman Sachs or studying at Oxford, depending on the year.

He didn’t join the finance department in Ottawa until 2004, six years after the first balanced budget.

On Monday, Stephen Harper sent an email to Conservative Party members taking issue with Carney trying to take credit for his government’s reaction to the 2008-09 financial crisis. Carney has tried to bask in the glow of claims that he saved the Canadian economy at the time. He’s using that experience to win the Liberal leadership, become the next PM and will try to use it in a general election to say he’s the man with the experience to take on Donald Trump.

Harper, who appointed Carney as Governor of the Bank of Canada, and worked closely with him during the financial crisis, has had enough of what amounts to stolen financial valour.

“I have listened, with increasing disbelief, to Mark Carney’s attempts to take credit for things he had little or nothing to do with back then,” Harper wrote. “He has been doing this at the expense of the late Jim Flaherty, among the greatest Finance Ministers in Canada’s history, who sadly is not here to defend his record.”

Harper said that while Carney was part of the team, “Carney’s experience is NOT the day-to-day management of Canada’s economy during the global financial crisis.” Harper went on to say that the difficult decisions and the heavy lifting of the Canadian response to the crisis were taken by Flaherty.

None of this seems to be denting Carney’s ego. The man compared himself to Churchill at a recent campaign stop in Barrie, saying the trade war with the United States is like the Nazis trying to take over Europe and he is just like the man who won the Battle of Britain and ultimately the war.

“I know the president, I have dealt with the president in the past when he was in his first term,” Carney said in Barrie last week.

During Trump’s first term, Carney was Governor of the Bank of England and would have had no official interactions with Trump. Perhaps they met at a reception at an international conference. That is hardly the same as knowing him, but as we’ve established, Carney and the truth are simply not friends, in fact, they don’t seem to know each other at all.

Finally, Carney, the master economist, tried to claim that Canada has leverage because of all the semiconductors we export to the United States.

“They all need semiconductors. They all come from Canada,” Carney said last week.

The problem is, Canada is responsible for 0.79% of all American semiconductor imports while the vast majority come from Asia and a Taiwan company just announced a $100 billion investment in building these products in the USA.

Carney’s sales pitch to voters is that he has the experience and the smarts to deal with Trump and the tariffs. With all of his false claims, and foolish statements, that is something voters should really be doubting at this point.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video