LILLEY: Mark Carney — The unreliable boyfriend Canada can’t afford
· Toronto Sun
When Mark Carney was the Governor of the Bank of England, he earned the nickname the unreliable boyfriend. He earned the nickname for his habit of giving off mixed signals on interest rates — hot one day and cold the next.
The unreliable boyfriend fits when it comes to Carney and his inability to have a coherent message on Canada’s relationship with the United States.
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“I know the president, I’ve dealt with the president in the past in my previous roles when he was in his first term, and I know how to negotiate,” Carney said during the Liberal leadership race last year.
Carney’s changing message and tone
During the election, he promised to get the best deal for Canada. By the summer, he was saying we had the best deal.
Now, he’s warning us that our closeness to the United States is a weakness and holding up a little figurine of Sir Issac Brock to invoke the War of 1812 and standing up to the Americans. That might excite Carney’s Liberal base, but it does nothing for the autoworker in Oshawa or the steelworker in Hamilton dealing with the pain of tariffs.
There haven’t been any serious talks on trying to lift those tariffs since October. We haven’t started our mandatory review of the CUSMA agreement that must be completed by July 1.
As we get ignored, or worse in Washington, Mexico is about to wrap up their review of CUSMA. Donald Trump’s trade ambassador Jamieson Greer is in Mexico for those talks and delivered some bad news that will also apply to Canada.
“Greer said tariffs are here to stay. President Trump likes them. We will never go back to a zero-tariff world,” Reuters reported early Tuesday from the talks citing four unnamed sources.
Carney likes talking but what we need is action
Hours after that news broke, Carney announced a new Advisory Committee on Canada-U.S. Economic Relations. He’s appointed 24 different people including TC Energy CEO François Poirier, Flavio Volpe of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, Lana Payne from Unifor and former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole.
There are plenty of bright people on this list, and it’s always good to talk, to get advice, but what we really need from Carney is action.
A year after the election, more than a year after he became prime minister, he’s still not taking the steps needed to boost Canada’s economy. Instead of action, we are getting bureaucracy like setting up Build Canada Homes which is not accelerating home building and the Major Projects Office which has yet to approve a single new major project that wasn’t already underway.
Carney truly is the unreliable boyfriend; we don’t know where he stands.
We’ve even seen that in how he talks about Donald Trump. When standing on the world stage, like in Davos, Carney speaks of the American president in dark tones but when standing next to him in Washington or Kananaskis, Carney is embarrassing in his praise from Trump.
We could be acting to boost the economy now
Regardless of Trump or tariffs, there are things that Carney could have done over the last year to boost the Canadian economy.
“We cannot control what the US does to be fair, but we can control what we do to make Canada affordable and autonomous here at home,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in his own video responding to Carney’s.
As he has done in the past, Poilievre laid out a number of steps that could be taken now to boost Canada’s economy. He called for a six-month approval window for projects like mines, cutting taxes and red tape on homebuilding — an industry that uses mostly Canadian products, he called for tax reductions and reform and for the repeal of Trudeau era anti-development laws like C-69 and C-48.
These are all things that are within the power of Mark Carney. They are steps he could have taken a year ago, maybe he should take them now.
He promised a deal with Trump; he promised to strengthen Canada’s economy. He hasn’t delivered on either promise, but he keeps talking as if he has.
Mark Carney truly is the unreliable boyfriend.