Jordan Peterson: Mark Carney doesn't value a prosperous Canada
This would-be planetary saviour has no respect for free markets
Jordan Peterson
Published Mar 08, 2025 • Last updated 3 days ago • 20 minute read
Mark Carney gestures during a press conference following the second night of debate in the federal Liberal leadership race to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in Montreal, on Feb. 25. Photo by ANDREJ IVANOV /AFP via Getty Images
Mark Carney, heir to the Canadian throne, such as it is, is indeed wrestling with a difficult problem in his 2021 book?Value(s) ?— or even a difficult set of problems. The title indicates as much (or, more accurately, the presumptuous subtitle): “Building a Better World for All.” We should first note in evaluating the quality of Carney’s thought (as we should, given his desire and likely opportunity to lead our fair land), that this is a very difficult set of nuts to crack: “building,” “better,” and “for all,” and that success in such a venture is tantamount to the actions of a veritable world redeemer or saviour. The question that then arises should then clearly be “is Mr. Carney up to such a task?” Our initial position with regard to that question should be one of extreme doubt and skepticism, given that very few, if any, have ever demonstrated such truly awe-inspiring ability.
Consider instead a less grandiose subtitle: “Governing a Moderately-Sized Middle Economic and Political Power Competently.” That would still constitute a major ambition and accomplishment — and one that should be managed successfully, before daring to address all the problems of the world, individual and corporate. That would also be a goal much more in keeping with the position of “humility” that Carney repeatedly insists upon as a virtue and claims he unfailingly adopts while putting his thoughts, such as they are, to paper.
Why review?Value(s)?now? Haven’t Carney’s ideas changed, and reasonably so, since then? Perhaps — but it might be hoped that ideas capable of reshaping the entire planet in a positive direction might have a shelf life of more than a few meagre years. Furthermore, there is, as of now, no more complete statement of Carney’s ambitions, thoughts, beliefs and moral claims than this book. Thus, its review at this date is both necessary and reasonable. And what he reveals in his writing, both explicitly and implicitly is, I believe, sufficient for the potential beneficiaries or victims of his ideas (and that is all Canadians, at a minimum) to judge both his competence and his character.
Value(s) is an odd book, taken as a whole, even when considered merely as a literary endeavour. It begins with an evaluation of values, as promised, but then digresses into an economic primer, akin to an introductory text in that field, and stays precisely there for the majority of the adventure. Near the end, to be fair, we are once again led into a discussion of values — a restatement and extension of the preface. However, this return takes a good while, and it is by no means obvious why the book isn’t one third its current length.
I found it difficult to shake the suspicion that the book veers into the merely historical first because Carney really doesn’t have that much to say about values, per se, and second, because he wants to convince himself and us, as he walks through the mountains and valleys of economic theory and his career, that he does know of what he speaks and is the man for the moment. However, the mere fact that he can write an introductory treatise on the world of finance, conceptual and institutional, tells us very little about his capacity to undertake the more difficult task with regards to values, per se, that he promises to manage.
And what is that task, precisely?
Carney is aware, as he should be, that market systems on their own cannot address all the problems of the world. Nothing can. Addressing “all the problems,” is impossible, as the brute facts of our ignorance, mortality and fallibility means that all the solutions we manage to conjure up in the face of life’s difficulties are imperfect and partial and even finally so.
Furthermore, it is most definitely the case — and this is a fundamental conservative or even classic liberal conviction — that free societies and markets operate within a broader framework of values. In the West, for better or worse (and certainly for comparative better) that framework is Judeo-Christian, religious and cultural in its essence — a framework that has established the principles of “self-evidence” referred to so famously by the authors and signatories of the American Declaration of Independence.
These include the propositions that all people have intrinsic worth, made as they are in the image of God; that each person owes all others the due that such worth necessitates, including the responsibility to trade in goods, ideas, cooperation and competition, honestly and fairly, and with an eye to mutual success; and that all of us, our leaders included (and perhaps first and foremost) must pay obeisance to what is truly transcendent and divine.
This is the framework that Carney purports to replace, even though it is not clear that he understands this, or that he has developed any understanding whatsoever of the culture he wants to reshape from first principles. He knows, or intuits, that there are a priori or axiomatic game rules, so to speak — statements of faith, even — that must underpin or define civilization itself, and that provide necessary structure for the free market, so that its collective computations can develop and distribute resources in a maximally productive, efficient and just manner.
What are his suggestions, regarding such replacement? This is where the rubber hits the road or, more accurately, where the train flies off the track. Instead of facing the problem of values seriously (and it is the most serious of problems) — instead of making the difficult journey through the complex landscapes of theology and philosophy that is truly necessary before such an attempt might be dared — Carney betrays his alliance with the worst particularized ideas of the last twenty or thirty years, and the even worse generally radical intellectual presumptions of the last century.
First — and this is in the preface, restated in the conclusion (the true meat of the book) — he ensures us that the apocalyptic climate change insisted upon by so many hellbent on justifying their pursuit of unlimited power on moral grounds is, in fact, tantamount to the apocalypse. Addressing climate change is therefore the number one issue of our time, as all moral actors must agree — or else. This is his prime self-evident truth, albeit not the only one, as we shall see. This means that “preserving the planet” is his primary value, and the North Star that must guide all — and he means all —personal and economic decision making. This also means (take note, please) that he is willing to and even must use fear as a shaper of policy; the very fear of impending cataclysmic emergency that has always been capitalized on by even the most explicitly reluctant of tyrants to ensure that their hypothetically benevolent dictates are applied absolutely everywhere, and now. To wit:
“Our goal has been to put in place the information, tools and markets so that every financial decision takes climate change into account — to create a financial system in which a company’s contributions to climate change and climate solution are fundamental determinants of its value. So that value reflects values. At COP26 in Glasgow, we delivered twenty-four major reforms to transform the information, tools and markets at the heart of finance. These include climate stress testing, net-zero transition plans and clear, comparable and decision-useful climate disclosure so that financial markets can manage risks and seize opportunities in the climate transition.”
It is best when faced with such claims to do some deadly serious reading between the lines. First, consider “every financial decision….” Really? Every financial decision? Literally “every financial decision” must take “climate change into account?” What the good-thinkers?who claim to be planetary saviours, or their equally virtuous supporters and enablers, fail to recognize to their great eventual peril and worse, ours, is that such a statement provides an utterly unlimited license for tyranny.
If the fate of the planet — all of its ecosystems; all of its beauty; all of its provision for mankind — is literally at stake every time every financial decision is made, at every level, individual, corporate and state, then every aspect of life must clearly be regulated in keeping with that aim — and that means every aspect of life. And how might we understand that state of affairs? We could turn to the? stated goals?of the C40 consortium of major cities, and their overtly Carney-like aims, to gain a differentiated and immediate understanding.
The consortium has?stated?that there “must be an average 28 per cent reduction in the number of flights across C40 cities.” How might that be enforced? No more flights for the ordinary person (an overstatement: the C40 nature-worshippers will allow the peasants one short-haul flight every three years). They also mention “reducing and eventually nearly eliminating the need for car ownership.” Ever wonder where the electricity for your soon-to-be mandatory electric car will come from, given the woeful inadequacy in that regard of the current grid, and the impossibility of rectifying that, before gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles are banned? No matter! There is no reason to presume, as you have so far, that you are entitled to a vehicle of your very own. Problem solved! And even if you are one of the fortunate few with a car — serious limitations will be imposed on the number of miles your peasant hide is allowed to travel, with equally serious restraints on velocity and road access.
A radical decrease in the availability of meat and dairy?— preferably a complete turn to a plant and even perhaps insect-based diet, as? mused by the WEF.? Three new articles of clothing a year, maximum.
The utter abandonment of the wealth of the fossil fuel economy — the coal, oil, and natural gas that all of our industrial economy and much of our agriculture depends upon, absolutely and finally. Carney himself states explicitly in?Value(s)?that 80 per cent of such resources will have to be left “in the ground” to meet the net-zero goals — goals which if pursued (make no mistake about it) will not produce the new golden age of purified economic development that Carney so blithely promises (without any plan whatsoever in that regard). Instead, we will experience the penury, misery and petty tyranny that has currently been inflicted on the U.K. and Germany, where the poor suffer disproportionately from the? extremely expensive and unreliable?“renewable” energy promised by the globalist utopian greens and delivered by them with exactly the efficiency a perspicacious observer might expect.
Carney even has the nerve to suggest that a hydrogen economy might be just the ticket, for example, for Alberta (and Canada), which will somehow be much richer as well as more morally virtuous when the miraculous transformation he promises makes itself somehow magically present. To say he’s a little short on details is to say almost nothing. He is very good at telling everyone what they won’t have — won’t be allowed to have, more precisely — while falling short of detailing what will be offered in replacement. Perhaps a moral peasantry would come to understand the necessity of a dramatic fall in their standard of living, and a reduction in the opportunities available for their children (all in the name of the great Goddess Gaia, to be sure).
Make no mistake about it, people. Those who promise, like Carney, to save the planet, while waving evidence of its forthcoming demise over your heads like the sword of Damocles, will use the purported seriousness of the crisis to rule over every conceivable aspect of your life — for the moral reasons of “value” that cannot be properly computed, in Carney’s estimation, by the flawed free market system.
Tyrants use fear and force, rather than invitation, when formulating policy, and they do so for their own narcissistic reasons, all claims of universal benevolence to the contrary. If the crisis is severe enough — and it is, in Carney’s estimation — it is only cowards who allow the niceties of such things as personal choice and freedom to interfere with what has to be done, and now, despite everything, in the face of the universal emergency. Emergency, or unfettered justification? You might think that the radicals who presume that all motivation is based on will to power would be a bit more circumspect in their admiration for the extreme climate change doomsayers, given the danger of such a universal reason to act — and order.
Consider Carney’s very words, camouflaged in the moral claims that invariably accompany all such far-reaching and bone-chilling pronouncements: “Firms that align their business models with the transition to a net-zero carbon economy will be rewarded handsomely; those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.” Consider that statement in detail. Use your imagination. Replace, if you dare, the word “firms” with the word “individuals.” Give the implications of that substitution some due consideration, as well.
The would-be planetary saviour continues, elsewhere: “Your actions through climate-smart consumer choices, through local initiatives such as recycling and greening your neighbourhood, and through holding to account those who manage your savings may seem small relative to the scale of the challenge, but they all matter. By living the values of sustainability, resilience and responsibility in tackling climate change, you will inspire others just as Canadians have during Covid. And collectively these efforts are helping to shift market values, putting them in service of our human values.”
Am I saying too much, when attempting to point out the pig under the lipstick? Am I too skeptical — even paranoid, when it comes to the evaluation of such high-flying pronouncements? Consider this, then: Carney has the unmitigated gall and lack of self-reflection to offer our response to the COVID “crisis” as a model (!) for how we should all conduct ourselves in the face of environmental Apocalypse Now:
“As we have seen, people’s responses to Covid have demonstrated the values of solidarity, fairness and responsibility. The right framework to address the twin economic and health crises wrought by Covid must therefore embody these values in agreed social goals and then assess policies in terms of their impact on them. In developing a Covid policy framework for the common good, we can take the lessons from climate change (see the next two chapters). In that case, there is an overarching goal — environmental sustainability — that is set by society’s values of intergenerational equity and fairness.”
As it is said: “he who has ears to hear, let him hear.” To put it slightly differently: when your betters — or wannabe betters — speak, it is best that you listen. What does this grandiose paragraph, penned by the former governor of the Bank of England, truly reveal? Nothing less than one Mark Carney’s genuine belief that the international, state and individual reaction to COVID set the proper pattern for the universal response to the climate “emergency.” If you enjoyed the tyranny of the public health mavens and their craven political henchmen, the informing of your neighbours, and the continual moralizing panic of the COVID era — well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
It was merely the death of some finite proportion of the population that was threatened during COVID, and justified all the heavy-handed intervention. Now, we are faced with nothing less than the fate of the entire planet! What wonderful emergency dictates must then be necessarily at hand! And, more to the point: what is the value of your petty freedom when everything everyone holds dear is held to be threatened, and all-too-soon? Particularly because there are far too many like you and yours on the planet in any case.
This is Carney’s take on the matter: “The experience of Covid has reinforced the public’s desire for sustainability. The world began to translate this resolve into climate action in Glasgow at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) last November, starting to turn what the Industrial Revolution has wrought into the sustainable revolution that our kids and grandkids deserve.” God help us. Truly. Because there is little evidence that we will have the wisdom to help ourselves.
It would be wonderful, indeed, if the listing of Carney’s appalling presumptions was exhausted by our inquiry into his willingness to use compulsion, force and fear to “save the planet.” In totality, however, the situation is much worse. There is virtually no bad idea recently promoted by the top-down globalists (as alluded to earlier) that Carney has not championed — worse; not merely championed, as an acolyte or ally, as in the case of the hapless narcissist he is attempting to replace, our very own Justin Trudeau. Trudeau was little more than a globalist shill, shiny and attractive though he may have been. Carney is no such mean thing; no mere WEF infiltrator. He is instead a veritable globalist author, master-planner and leader, as he says (insists upon) himself:
“As the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, I have been working with a core team of incredible public servants, as well as thousands of dedicated people from around the world from the private sector, NGOs, standard setters and governments in various focused working groups. Our goal has been to put in place the information, tools and markets so that every financial decision takes climate change into account — to create a financial system in which a company’s contributions to climate change and climate solution are fundamental determinants of its value….
“This momentum is fed by a growing realisation that addressing climate change is one of the greatest commercial opportunities of our time. That’s one reason why a new group that I chair, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), was formed. GFANZ is comprised of the world’s largest banks, insurers, pension funds and asset managers. Over 450 major financial institutions from 45 countries are committing to manage their balance sheets, totalling over $130 trillion, in line with a 1.5-degree net-zero transition — fully 40 per cent of all global financial assets.”
It is not only climate change he hopes to address, regardless of cost or consequence, while manipulating the entire financial order of the world. We must now remind ourselves that he wants to retool the landscape of value itself, and believes himself capable of doing so, and justified in the attempt. To begin, he oh-so-casually identifies the following values as central to Canadian and, he hopes, global identity — as if his claims are self-evident: “nature, community, diversity”; “solidarity, fairness, responsibility and compassion”; and, repeatedly, “sustainability.” What the hell does any of that mean? And this is an important question, given that nothing less than the planet itself is apparently at stake.
Who says, exactly, that solidarity, diversity, and compassion are core and paramount Canadian, let alone properly and desirable universal values? That they constitute the pinnacle, essence or foundation of virtue, nationally and globally? That’s what his book purported to be about, before it degenerated into a lackadaisical wander through introductory high-school economics. To call his proffered metaphysics shallow is, simultaneously and inappropriately, to accept it as a genuine and valid metaphysics. It is, in fact, nothing but a mishmash of globalist utopian slogans (the linguistic root of slogan? Sluagh-ghairm, from the Welsh: battle cry of the dead).
Carney is not only an avid advocate of the divisive doctrine of Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity that has been so devastating in the universities and in the general culture (key to his “values”) — he is a major? contributor?to the spread of that ideology internationally, across the political and corporate worlds. And tyrannical climate change fear mongering and DEI not yet exhaust the litany of his sins.
Carney also agitated for “ stakeholder capitalism” — the genuinely fascist insistence on top-down central planning at the corporate and state regulatory level. That is all the emphasis on “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) policy, attempting to insert non-market values of precisely the type espoused by Carney by fiat into corporations and governments everywhere. Such centralizing utopian ideas were taken up enthusiastically, at least initially, by pathologically-guilty evil-capitalist players such as Blackrock and Vanguard, who exert massively disproportionate influence in the corporate world internationally, but abandoned even by them in the last year, as the catastrophic consequences of such doctrines made themselves known in the form of stark economic failure and widespread and increasing unpopularity.
Thus, not only is Carney the advocate of the worst ideas — climate apocalypse tyrannizing, DEI moralizing, ESG regulation — he is literally their champion; poised at the vanguard of their distribution and imposition. And not only are these terrible, divisive, economically destructive and narcissistically grandiose ideas; they are ideas that have already failed. The Americans are abandoning the DEI shibboleths en masse, individual voters, companies and governments alike. The populist rebellion is gaining force in the U.K. and Europe. Even Blackrock and Vanguard themselves have leapt off the ESG bandwagon. Thus, Carney’s much-vaunted international consensus in such regards is collapsing — or has collapsed. This means not only that our would-be prime minister led the whole world in the wrong direction — literally, in the worst of directions — but that he failed while doing so, and by the criteria that he himself established. More tellingly, however, and more damnable: he appears to have learned from that failure only that he is now fit to leave the international scene and lead a hapless Canada over the same precipice.
We already only produce sixty cents to the Americans’ dollar. Our richest province, Alberta, now has median employment earnings? less than that of Mississippi, the poorest state to our south. We could easily find ourselves in a position within five years where we produce forty cents worth of value for every dollar the Yanks manage. And if that’s the dismal direction we intend to pursue, Carney is the man to lead us there.
Value(s) is, in truth, one of the shallowest books I have ever read, and I have read many, both shallow and deep. It contains no original ideas whatsoever, while the ideas it does contain, however few in number they may admittedly be, are literally the worst that have been formulated by the worst of thinkers in the last few generations; even in the last century or two.
As a walk through the philosophical domain, outside of free market economics, Value(s) is a dismal and pretentious failure. Carney fails entirely to grapple with the issue of values at any level of depth whatsoever, while purporting to write a whole book on the matter — a task which he truly did not manage. This is not least because he has availed himself of no genuine training in the theological, philosophical or psychological domains that must be mastered or at least considered when the very foundation of civilization itself is to be retooled. Worse — much worse, even — he does not appear at all to understand the shallowness of his offerings, or to appreciate, at all, the gigantic lacunae in his conceptualization and understanding.
Mark Carney has failed, therefore — and dismally; spectacularly — in his attempts as a thinker, as well as an international leader. His practical multinational ventures have been recently revealed as the empty vessels they most truly are. His book, which most truly indicates his conceptual failures, fails additionally as a literary enterprise, meandering as it does in an entirely self-justifying manner though topics that are entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is that of the foundation of civilization and even of individual psyche as such.
In closing, a warning to Canadians, hoodwinked into believing that Carney’s much-vaunted international experience makes him capable; makes him someone able, even less convincingly, to stand up to our erratic American compatriots to the south. Mark Carney, formerly of the Bank of England, has the patina of foreign-bestowed competence. In truth, however, he is a man with all the flaws of Trudeau, and that’s saying something. However, in his admitted networking, managerial and administrative prowess he presents far more danger. Our hapless previous Dear Leader was at least hamstrung in his pretension by his incompetence. Carney is as addled in his values as his predecessor, but much more efficient and unwavering in his implementation.
If you want, my fellow Canadians, to continue the combination of flight to poverty and mounting government intervention that characterized Trudeau in general, and the COVID years in particular, then Carney’s your man. If you want the globalist nature-worshippers to subjugate all of your enterprise and your personal freedom to the hypothetical and indefinite needs of the planet, while they pursue their desire for unlimited power, and camouflage that pursuit in the headiest of moral presumptions, then Carney’s your man.
If you want to feel good about yourself, in comparison to the evil capitalists to the south, as you descend self-righteously into the confusion and poverty that now increasingly characterizes, say, France, Germany and the U.K., then Carney’s your man. If you believe that some magical force will replace our resource-dependent economy and the future for your children with a made-from-scratch renewable/hydrogen infrastructure, suitable for use at minus forty for months at a time, then Carney’s your man. And I’ve said nothing in this missive about his preposterous and deceitful posturing as a man of transformation — and “outsider” — when in reality, he has been an architect of the Liberal party’s cataclysmic failure since at least 2020.
Carney’s “values” are, in my careful estimation, your gilded prison bars — and a worse yet jail for your children.
If you don’t want Canada to be a self-immolating martyr-state, subject to the whims of an economic order increasingly dominated by the coal-burning titans of India, China and the rest of the BRICS; if you don’t want your every move and every decision evaluated by the top-down tyrants of the new global order — then you bloody well better think twice about who you are going to vote for when push comes to shove for Canadians in the next six months. Whatever Canada’s values might be, they best not be the shibboleths of false virtue, intellectual pretension, and well-camouflaged oh-so-virtuous totalizing tyranny put forth by the newly coronated dear leader of the appalling Liberal party.
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