Carson Jerema: Mark Carney is a misinformation machine
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Also when running for the leadership, Carney claimed to have resigned from all his roles before throwing his hat into the race, even stating on Jan. 16, 'Just to be clear: I resigned all my roles, cut all my ties. I am all in.'
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However, this also proved to be untrue. According to reporting by National Post's Ottawa bureau, as of Feb. 28, Carney still had connections to at least five organizations, including as president of Chatham House, a British charity that claims to help 'governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world,' as a board member of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and as chair of the Group of Thirty, an international non-profit, among others.
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These are just some of the blatant lies told by Carney, but he has also committed an impressive list of gaffes and exaggerations about his past.
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There is the now iconic exchange between Carney and the CBC's Rosemary Barton, when she asked about potential conflicts of interest that could arise from the assets he may still hold in Brookfield. Carney responded, 'Look inside yourself Rosemarie, you start from a position of conflict and ill will.' He then reiterated that he was following the ethics rules as laid out by Parliament, and accused Barton of trying to 'invent' new ones.
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Of course, the next day, Carney admitted that there is, indeed, a potential conflict of interest between the assets he holds and his role as prime minister.
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When Carney was heckled at a Calgary event about the false claim that a 'genocide' is taking place in Gaza, he said, 'I'm aware,' only to later claim he didn't properly hear the heckler. During the French Liberal leadership debate, Carney similarly said that he agrees 'with' the terrorist group Hamas, but later claimed he intended to say that he agreed 'with no Hamas.' He was also caught telling western audiences that he supported pipelines, while appearing to tell Quebec audiences the opposite, that he would 'never impose (a pipeline) on Quebec.'
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In another time, any number of these gaffes and lies would at least have dented a politician's popularity, if not ended his career altogether. But in this day and age, where reality is a matter of politics, Carney is getting a pass, riding on the myth of his presumably impressive pre-politics career, but even here the truth isn't what it seems.
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During the English Liberal leadership debate, Carney said, 'It was my privilege to work with Paul Martin when he balanced the books — and kept the books balanced,' a statement that is, at best, highly misleading. Martin balanced the budget as finance minister in 1998, and Carney didn't join the finance department as a senior bureaucrat until 2004. Yes, that was when Martin was prime minister, but it was long past the time when he balanced the budget, and the finance department would have reported to the finance minister of the time, Ralph Goodale, not the prime minister.
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