Mark Carney is a litmus test

You can’t really blame Mark Carney for not taking the plunge into partisan politics just yet. The former Governor of the Bank of Canada’s supposedly imminent entry into parliament has been a popular rumour for years now, but he has continued to decline the opportunity. Instead, he recently signed on as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s special adviser and chair of the Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth, a job that doesn’t require him to field questions in the House of Commons. 

After this past week’s shenanigans, I doubt he’s second-guessing his decision. Whether it’s during Question Period or in parliamentary committee hearings our highest democratic institutions have increasingly become a showcase for some of the lowest forms of behaviour. They’ve also become an advertisement for why public life just isn’t worth the trouble — or the risk. 

All of the major political parties are guilty here to some extent, but you’d have to be blind not to see which one stands out above — or perhaps below — the rest. The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada clearly prides himself on his capacity for petulance and personal attacks, and his caucus and staff have all taken notice. Combine this kind of leadership, or lack thereof, with the ever-worsening environment on social media and you have a recipe for the most toxic form of politics imaginable. As University of Ottawa professor Raywat Deonadan noted on social media, “we now have a political system in which only the worst people seek public office, while the best people are scared off by trolls and troglodytes. I don't see an obvious solution.” 

This isn’t an accident. By raising the price on participation so high that only the truly devoted — and perhaps the truly crazy — would dare getting involved, the Conservatives are effectively sidelining a huge swath of society that might otherwise be inclined to speak up. It’s why they spend so much time undermining experts, attacking journalists, and polluting social media with negativity and insults. 

It’s also why they keep turning a blind eye to the increasingly hostile far-right protests on and around Parliament Hill that consistently target Liberal and NDP MPs. In some cases, whether it’s Pierre Poilievre’s ongoing flirtations with far-right activists or Conservative MP Michael Cooper’s recent meeting with the so-called “Wellington Street Regulars”, they’re not even bothering to look away. And while Jagmeet Singh’s recent confrontation with one of them made national news, he’s hardly the only progressive MP to get harassed by the protesters — many of whom were also involved in 2022’s so-called “freedom convoy”. As the Hill Times noted in a recent story on the growing problem, the Parliamentary Protective Service has “significantly adjusted its security posture” of late. 

The pre-emptive Conservative attacks on Mark Carney are all part of this deliberate degradation of our politics. Poilievre already branded him as “Carbon Tax Carney”, of course, while the party tries to make hay about the various board positions and roles he maintains, including his position as the chair of Brookfield Asset Management and head of its transition investing. “He doesn’t have to have his interests and his investments exposed online like the rest of us,” Poilievre said, not realizing that as the chair of a public company he’s exposed to more disclosure requirements than MPs like Pierre Poilievre. “He gets all the power and all the money and none of the accountability.” Poilievre even went after Brookfield, a Canadian company with $1 trillion in assets, by describing it as “a large multinational corporation that’s moving investment to China.” 

In a more reasonable political universe Conservatives would be ecstatic to have someone like Carney involved in public life, and probably be trying to recruit him to their side. He grew up in Alberta, was educated at Harvard and Oxford, and worked at Goldman Sachs before joining the department of finance in 2004. In 2008 he was appointed by some guy named Stephen Harper to serve as the Governor of the Bank of Canada, and helped steer the country through the biggest global financial crisis anyone had ever seen. This is not, in other words, a career politician. 

But we don’t live in a reasonable political universe anymore. Instead, we live in an age where success is viewed as a liability, expertise as a weakness, and connections to the global community as proof of one’s disloyalty to Canada. In this most serious of times we are saddled with political leaders who are deliberately and often dangerously unserious. And yes, that even applies to the one you might like, whether it’s the NDP leader’s fondness for TikTok videos (and consistent failure to understand things like jurisdiction and the division of powers) or the Prime Minister and his longstanding preference for style (and celebrity) over substance. 

Carney, then, is a kind of litmus test for the entire system. We need a political leader who’s willing to take both the job and its responsibilities more seriously. We need a leader who can elevate our political conversation rather than constantly dumbing it down. And we need a leader who's willing to hold themselves and their colleagues to a higher standard.

I don’t know if Carney is actually that leader, if only because nobody does yet. But I do know that I’d like to see him find out — and that the Conservative Party of Canada's obvious interest in keeping him out of public life is a sign of why he’s needed in it.