Say Goodbye to Woke Globalist Justin Trudeau and Hello to Woke Globalist Mark Carney

Canadians have a new prime minister. After a leadership election in the ruling Liberal Party, it’s out with the woke globalist, Justin Trudeau, and in with the woke globalist, Mark Carney.

Extraordinarily, in an age where justified populist rage against an out-of-touch establishment is spreading across the globe, Canadians have ended up with a leader who embodies that very establishment. In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bone fide citizen of nowhere.

The new Canadian PM’s CV reads like a parody of an archetypal Davos man. He has been governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England and a United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance. Before he entered the public eye, he worked for Goldman Sachs – in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Yet he has never once held any form of elected political office. He does not even currently hold a seat in Canada’s House of Commons.

Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.

Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.

More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.

As Bank of England governor, he quickly tired of his mandate to manage monetary policy and soon became bizarrely preoccupied with climate change, turning it into a focus of central-bank policy. His eco-interventions were largely low-key to start with, but he soon began making major public-policy pronouncements on the environment. He appeared on a BBC programme guest edited by Greta Thunberg and gave speeches alongside David Attenborough, always warning how the world could face irreversible heating unless more bankers did their bit. In one speech, made as a prelude to the UK-hosted COP26 in Glasgow, he proclaimed that his goal was for ‘every financial decision to take climate change into account’. This would strike most rational people as a preposterous goal, but it undoubtedly helped his pitch, in 2020, to become a UN climate envoy.

Of course, it is now abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already back then, that reorganising society around climate change has had disastrous economic consequences, pushing up energy prices, harming industry and damaging productivity. Even Carney seems to have reluctantly realised this, having promised recently to cut Canada’s punishing carbon tax, a flagship policy of Justin Trudeau.

Carney hasn’t yet cottoned on to voters’ agitation with wokeness, however. In fact, during a campaign rally in February, he explicitly opposed Donald Trump’s ‘war on woke’ south of the border, claiming that Canada would always stand for ‘inclusivity’. Of course, ‘inclusivity’ in this context means men in women’s sports, men in women’s private spaces and the medical mutilation of mostly gay and autistic children – deranged policies to which most ordinary people are opposed but our supposedly sensible overlords still cling to like dogma.

After nearly a decade of the woke, woeful Justin Trudeau, Canada deserves a break from the pseudo-progressive globalism that keeps on failing and irritating voters. Mark Carney is the last man they need to be PM.

Source: Spiked