| | | Carney has a tendency to take credit where it's not due
Author of the article: Lorne Gunter
Published Mar 29, 2025 • Last updated 18 hours ago • 3 minute read
If allegations of plagiarism against Prime Minister Mark Carney, as reported Friday by the National Post, turn out to be true, they would be more part of a pattern of behaviour by the new Liberal leader than an out-of-character anomaly.
In his 1995 thesis at Oxford University, Carney seems to have lifted quotes from others’ work without giving the original authors the required credit. According to an analysis by the Post, there are at least 10 such instances.
The Brits remember him, when he later became governor of the Bank of England, for helping stoke a fear campaign aimed at defeating the Brexit referendum, even though as a central banker he was supposed stay out of politics. Now Liberal ads claim Carney guided Britain through that crisis, too.
After his stint at the Bank of England, Carney eventually became chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, one of Canada’s largest investment houses. There he boasted about running one of the largest “green” investment portfolios in the world.
Except environmental groups frequently pointed out that Brookfield routinely under-reported the emissions produced by the companies it owned — sometimes by a factor of 12-fold — just so it could claim to environmentally conscious investors that it was at net-zero or close to it.
In 2023, Brookfield (which portrayed itself as committed to social justice and workers’ rights) bought an American insurance company, Rockwood, that had a history of insuring coal mining companies then fighting to avoid paying benefits to miners who developed black lung.
Of course, there is the move of Brookfield’s head office out of Canada to the United States (Toronto to New York), which Carney claimed not to be responsible for, even though he twice recommended the move to shareholders.
There are those little tax dodges in Bermuda that Carney helped arrange for investors in two of Brookfield’s “green” funds.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre rated Brookfield one of the worst performers for respecting human rights on its renewable energy projects in developing countries.
In 2022, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund pointed out that despite Carney and Brookfield touting their eco record, more of Brookfield’s energy portfolio was invested in fossil fuel industries than in alternative energy.
Perhaps more relevant to Canada’s current efforts to build new pipelines and diversify its list of energy customers, one of Carney’s main focuses for the last half-dozen years has been lobbying banks, insurance and investment companies to refuse to invest in oil and gas.
As recently as 2023, Carney described himself as “relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on the transition to net zero.”
He even helped found an organization, GFANZ, that sought to enact strict global “climate disclosures,” so companies would be forced to show the full extent of their emissions and investors would be able to “decide who to lend to or invest in and who to avoid.”
Plagiarism or not, Carney is not exactly what he seems to be. |
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