Poor Mark Carney: The Man Who Mistook His Ego for a Country
The saint of Davos descends to Ottawa and finds mud instead of Olympus.
Poor Mark Carney, the global finance messiah turned reluctant politician, now writhing in office like a vegan tossed into a Stampede barbecue, trying to convince himself that tofu tastes like rib-eye.
Every morning must feel like the tinnitus of the soul. That electric buzz in his skull is not divine inspiration — it’s cognitive dissonance, the sound of his Davos sermons crashing into Canadian reality.
Cognitive dissonance, for the uninitiated, is that exquisite condition where one’s lofty convictions collide with one’s grubby necessities — like a televangelist caught in Vegas or, in Carney’s case, a climate prophet forced to approve pipelines. The man who once declared fossil fuels doomed to bankruptcy now signs off on LNG exports and whispers sweet nothings to the oil patch. If irony had a patron saint, Carney would be canonised by acclamation.
Remember his opus Value(s) — a bedtime story for bankers who wanted to feel like Boy Scouts? “Humility, solidarity, sustainability,” he intoned, sprinkling catechism like confetti. Markets, he warned, had become “corrosive.”
Capitalism must be moralised by enlightened mandarins — preferably with cufflinks and Davos lanyards. And who better to provide salvation than Mark, the smartest boy in every room, even when the room is the Bank of England and his forecasts are wrong on everything from Brexit to inflation?
He thundered that climate change was the “tragedy of the horizon” — that only top-down diktat could avert planetary doom. He peddled carbon taxes like holy water, warned of “stranded assets,” and spoke of ESG as if it were not a regulatory fad but the Ten Commandments of investment. To disagree was to flirt with apocalypse.
Fast-forward to Ottawa, 2025. Carney, newly minted as PM by an electorate hypnotised by his media hagiographers, discovers that Canada is not a TED Talk but a cold country with jobs, energy bills, and voters who actually like heating their homes.
His very first act? Axeing the consumer carbon tax — his own sacred cow, slaughtered in the name of political survival. The irony could light half of Alberta.
But it doesn’t end there. Mr Net Zero is now Mr LNG. Mr Pipeline Approval. Mr. Free-Trade-Across-Provinces. The man who once sneered at markets now races to appease them, like a dog begging the very master he tried to bite.
His “One Canadian Economy Act” — red tape sliced with the zeal of a convert — could have been drafted by the very neoliberals he once derided.
Meanwhile, his utopian base is howling betrayal. Suzuki’s disciples hiss. Campus greens faint. Twitter activists screech that the high priest of carbon restraint has defected to the temple of oil. And yet Carney’s economic reality — trade spats with Trump, Chinese retaliation on canola, stagnant GDP — leaves him no choice.
Reality is a merciless auditor.
Picture him in the mirror each dawn, rehearsing: “Mirror, mirror, who’s the greenest PM of all?” And the reflection snickers:
“Not you, Mark. You’re the one hugging the oil patch while your book rots on discount racks.”
Like Trudeau before him, Carney wraps failure in a cloak of inclusiveness. He prattles that “Canadians value inclusivity while America wages war on woke,” as if pronouns were more urgent than inflation.
But inclusivity doesn’t pay the grocery bill, and carbon virtue doesn’t keep Saskatchewan’s lights on. His rhetoric is a self-help seminar for billionaires, colliding with the asphalt of politics.
Carney’s tragedy — no, his farce — is that he is caught between two selves. The priest of Davos wagged his finger at capitalism. And the PM of Ottawa, desperately bribing capitalism to keep jobs from fleeing south. He is neither one nor the other — a schizoid figure half-dressed for a climate summit, half-dressed for a pipe-laying ceremony.
And the buzz in his ears? That’s not tinnitus. That’s the sound of his credibility imploding.
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