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Saul of Tarsus had his road to Damascus, knocked from his horse, blinded by a great light, reborn in a flash. Mark Carney has not had such a moment. No light, no horse, no confession. He has not, as Paul did, declared that everything he once preached was wrong. He has not admitted that his earlier sermons on climate change, carbon taxes, and banking orthodoxy were absurd.
Instead, Carney has taken the Canadian road: long, slow, evasive, littered with half-repudiations and rhetorical fog. The road to Damascus at least has an ending. Carney’s road leads nowhere — and he drags us along it.
He was elected, in large part, because we were dazzled by his accent, his air of competence, and the myth of his tenure as Governor of the Bank of England. The only problem — and it’s a rather large one — is that the English themselves were never dazzled. They lived through it.
By the time he packed his bags for Ottawa, the City’s verdict was not one of admiration but relief. He had talked more than he had governed, moralised more than he had managed, and left a nation weary of his sermons on “values” — a word that, in Carney’s hands, came to mean rule by technocrats who know better than markets, voters, or indeed God.
It takes a very special strain of Canadian arrogance to fail in Britain—the world’s capital of quiet competence—and then return home draped in laurels as a conquering hero.
But here he is again, rehearsing the same performance: the confident diction, the polished suit, the air of effortless superiority. We are watching, once more, the old Carney routine—all talk, no traction; all poise, no humility.
His intolerance of criticism, his priestly certainty, his allergy to self-doubt—these are not the marks of intellect but of vanity. And yet, we fall for it. How absurdly Canadian that we mistake verbosity for vision, a Windsor knot for wisdom, and confidence for competence. The British, with their wicked instinct for irony, tried to warn us. We just didn’t listen.
In Britain — that country where understatement is a blood sport — Mark Carney managed to achieve something close to notoriety. Westminster christened him the “unreliable boyfriend,” a moniker so damningly English it might as well have been carved into the Bank of England’s marble steps. All promises and no action, all guidance and no destination.
Business leaders like Suren Thiru of the British Chambers of Commerce accused him of “inconsistent messaging,” the kind of polite euphemism that in the British dialect translates roughly to you’ve made an unholy mess of things.
Even Michael Gove, no slouch in the department of arrogance himself, found Carney’s style intolerable — blasting him as “intolerant of criticism and lacking humility,” a sort of monetary monarch without a kingdom.
When Carney decided to turn the Brexit debate into an economic séance, predicting apocalypse from a no-deal exit, the Telegraph dubbed it “Project Hysteria,” and Jacob Rees-Mogg accused him of fearmongering with the aplomb of a man defending both Queen and chaos.
By the time he left London, Carney had perfected a peculiar trick: to appear clever while convincing no one, to sound authoritative while leaving the economy dazed, and to turn even the English virtue of restraint into an argument for his own excess.
Carney was once the high priest of sustainable finance, his Bible a thick tome called Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Its central commandment was simple: every financial decision must bow before the altar of climate change.
“Carney’s catechism is that markets must be redeemed by ‘values’ — a sermon that flatters technocrats and spares voters the arithmetic. It is not capitalism he distrusts so much as the electorate.”
Then came the campaign. Out went the banker’s cassock, in came the tough-guy jersey. “Elbows up,” he declared, promising to stand firm against Donald Trump and defend Canada’s sovereignty with swagger. Boomer women lifted their elbows in solidarity, marching to the polls like it was an aerobics class. They elected him because he appeared strong and sounded defiant. But the road curved quickly.
Once in office, Carney confessed the obvious: Canada cannot bully a superpower ten times its size. The “elbows up” was lunacy. The road he sold was theatre; the road he took was retreat.
And Carney’s very first instinct in office? Not to bring down a budget. To dodge it. To delay. A budget is the one act of honesty in our parliamentary system — the balance sheet, the arithmetic, the ledger of truth. Refusing a budget is equivalent to refusing accountability. His road was not fiscal discipline but fiscal fog.
Meanwhile, the economic reality is ugly. Canada has the fastest population growth in the G7 — over 13% in the last decade. Naturally, total GDP rises: more people, more output. And so Carney and the Liberals boast: “GDP is up.” It’s economic ventriloquism — the numerator swells, the denominator is ignored, and the voters applaud. Real GDP per capita — the meaningful metric — has flatlined and, in some cases, even declined.
From 2000 to 2023, Canada’s average annual real per-capita GDP growth was about 0.7% — second-worst among the G7. From 2014 to 2024, the cumulative growth was barely above 1%. A decade of running just to stand still. And all the while inflation ate away at wages, savings, and purchasing power. If you feel poorer, it is because you are.
Consider the arithmetic: real GDP grew by about 1.1% in 2023 while population grew by 3.2%. That means each individual’s slice of the pie shrank. And yet Carney and his friends keep repeating the half-truth: “GDP is up.”
The tragedy is not merely that the government lies, but that voters believe it. Vibes, feelings and slogans lull Canadians. The Liberals’ secret weapon is not clever policy but the uninformed voter — the citizen who hears “growth” and thinks “better off.” And the most culpable are not Gen Z TikTok voters but selfish boomers who wanted a leader to look strong, not be strong, to look green, not deliver growth.
And Carney? He pirouettes. He scrapped the consumer carbon tax — but kept industry levies and the bureaucratic machinery. He paused the EV mandate — but did not kill it. He reviewed oil & gas emissions caps — but did not repeal them. He floated LNG projects and mining schemes he once damned.
He panders to every audience, telling Muslim groups that “Muslim values are Canadian values,” as though values were costumes to be changed per crowd. He dissembles about his own investments, claiming little beyond property while interests flow through Brookfield Corporation. His road is paved with reversals, yet he never admits a turn.
But what of his record? The fingerprints of Mark Carney are all over the disasters he helped design: the carbon tax that didn’t reduce emissions, the EV fantasy, the disclosure craze, the binge-spending.
He chaired Trudeau’s task force on growth — the one that delivered stagnation. The results are plain: per-capita GDP decline, productivity collapse, housing fiasco, carbon-tax revolt, EV mandates suspended.
The Carney-Trudeau experiment failed — and Carney cannot pretend he was a bystander. He was the architect.
The most damning thing is not that he was wrong — it is that he is dishonest. The budget dodge, GDP spin, identity pandering, and investment evasions. A man who lectures others on values while treating truth as optional is not a moral leader but a moral opportunist.
And the media? They grease the road for him. The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV, Toronto Star — all indulgent, labelling his reversals as “pragmatism”. Only the National Post now and then raises an eyebrow — but even that is a lone trumpet drowned in an orchestra of deference. The road is smoothed, the bumps flattened, the contradictions covered.
So who is Mark Carney?
Is he the prophet of Value(s) who wanted banks turned into climate police? Or the Prime Minister who now shelves carbon taxes and whispers fiscal discipline? Is he the campaigner who preached “elbows up” bravado, or the leader who confessed it was lunacy? Is he the adviser who helped wreck productivity and housing, or the pragmatist now pretending to steer away?
He is all of these — and therefore none. A man of values who has no value. A man who sells virtue in hardback and expediency in office. A man whose road is not to Damascus but to nowhere — paved with evasions, lined with illusions, and patrolled by a media too timid to call his bluff.
And now we have the budget he fought like a cornered animal to delay — the second-largest deficit in Canadian history (outside of pandemics). The sleight of hand is linguistic: he calls it “investment.”
Investment, apparently, is the new euphemism for debt.
The trick is to imply that borrowed billions are magically productive and somehow future taxpayers paying principal plus interest are not paying at all. This is the oldest racket in politics: rename the bill, and hope the electorate is too distracted to notice the waiter is still bringing the cheque.
Look at where the money actually goes. The table of major federal spending tells its own story — interest on the debt now rivals the health transfer, outstripping defence and nearly equalling infrastructure. Yet the word “investment” is waved like incense, a holy term to sanctify insolvency. Austerity is invoked in the same breath as the largest deficit ever recorded. Are Canadians really this credulous? Perhaps. Call it a national talent: to be soothed by vocabulary while our wallets are emptied.
And what about execution? Carney behaves as though the state is a superior allocator of capital — as if the government can pick and choose faster, smarter, and better than the market itself. But governments are not better at allocating capital.
Economists warn of low per capita capital formation and a collapse in Canada's productivity. So Carney’s agenda — splashy housing plans, infrastructure megaprojects, “new investment bank” boondoggles — is stacked on debt, built on faith in state omnipotence, and dependent on execution he cannot deliver.
He acts as though he is smarter than the market. He spends billions and tells us we will all be richer. Meanwhile, each of us ends up poorer. The government creates the garden, but forgets that only the entrepreneur knows how to plant the seeds. Rather than back off and let entrepreneurs build, Carney wants to dictate growth—the result: stunted growth, higher debt, lower productivity.
And here’s the punchline: we have grown adults — intelligent adults — who actually celebrate his swagger, his polished chin, his “leadership.” They cheer while the denominator rises, and their denominator is ignored. We don’t even realise we’re talking about declining per capita output. We don’t recognise the difference between the numerator and denominator. And thus we are that dumb.
If he says “austerity” and “investment”, we nod. Math be damned.
We are that dumb.
Federal Spending Breakdown (2025 Budget, approximate)
Public debt charges alone outstrip defence and rival health transfers. This is not “investment”; this is mortgaging the present to service the past.
But Carney, like all conjurers, insists the trick is real. Investment! he says, as though the word itself banishes the arithmetic. He is asking Canadians to believe that the government — a machine that cannot fill a pothole without a feasibility study — is the most efficient allocator of capital. Investment in what?
How much of this deficit is going to military readiness or infrastructure repair—traditional public goods—and how much to climate boondoggles, consultant fees, and DEI bureaucracies? Carney never says. The word “investment” is meant to pre-empt the question.
So the road continues, the road to nowhere. A road paved not with repentance or reckoning but with euphemism. Canadians are told the biggest deficit in history is an “investment,” just as they were told elbows-up bravado was a strategy, just as they were told per-capita stagnation was growth. The question is no longer whether Carney is lying, but whether Canadians are stupid enough to fall for it. Given the record, the answer is: probably.
The road, the road, the road: not to revelation, not to repentance, but to the cul-de-sac of Canadian decline.
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