Canadian elections have become an auction for the votes of old age pensioners and the Boomer class, including primarily those who savor the privilege of indifference owing to the greater privilege of solvency. Indeed, the essence of Canadian elections has become the embedding of ideological programming for returns at the ballot box. Ultimately, as Michael Bliss writes in his history of prime ministers, Right Honourable Men, Canadian politics highlights “the relation between a paternal government and dependent citizens,” which has been ”expanded and abused” to the present day.
Knowing this, new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney slithered into office by relying on staple Canadian habits, counting on long-standing, feel-good anti-Americanism, ginned-up hatred of Trump, dependence on government doles, grants and subsidies, and conventions of vanity and jingoism dating from an earlier political era.
He comes to the job with a very distinctive plan in mind. It is all there in his book Value(s), a prelatical volume of vagrant and peregrine notions. Carney is not interested in Confederation. He has no love for Canada. He cares not a whit for the Western provinces that threaten separation. Hydrocarbon is a dirty word. He has other concerns and counts hordes of deracinated, oligarchic friends in the corporate and ideological communities. He is interested in so-called sustainable planetary resilience, diversity, inclusion and equity, ESG hedge funds, Net Zero, and anti-carbon environments. And Canada is the laboratory in which, like a cartoon mad scientist, he mixes the ingredients to bring his schemes and prospects to fruition. Canada is worth sacrificing to meet his aspirations.
One does not need to engage in gospel cleromancy to see what is coming. His now somewhat battered GFANZ alliance, to the principles of which he continues to adhere, gives us the measure of his intentions. In 110 pages of unreadable crankenprose, ten components grouped under five themes purport to show how the size, operating model, sector coverage, and other factors of financial and corporate institutions can be shrunken or taken apart to encourage low carbon economies. The entire market, financial and industrial portfolio and their ancillaries will be decarbonized and/or phased out: logging, agriculture, livestock, apparel, automotive, thermal coal, oil sands, drilling, the whole enchilada, and a Net-Zero Bank will be established to assist those firms that conform and punish those that resist. Companies had better deliver, or go out of business.
As Wyatt Claypool points out in The National Telegraph, Carney is essentially running a lucrative scam. Not only as the founder of GFANZ but as CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, he has cornered the government market on subsidies. His companies’ profit-making capacity is tied to political donations, patronage and loans as they lobby for Net-Zero.
How does Brookfield pursue its business? Let us consider a salient example, one of many. Carney is mandating that EVs replace internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2035 through a series of graduated steps, a directive that is being objected to by both manufacturers and drivers. We can guess that Brookfield is heavily invested, assisted by government subsidies, in so-called Zero-Emission Vehicle sales. When government support ends, as it has in the U.S. under Donald Trump, it is safe to assume that Carney will import thousands upon thousands of Chinese-made EVs, in which Brookfield is also likely invested.
These vehicles are currently under embargo, for which China has placed a retaliatory 75 percent tariff on Canadian canola oil and meal along with initiating an anti-dumping investigation, which will effectively close a nearly $5 billion annual market to Canadian growers. These reciprocities are plainly temporary once Carney gets his China-favored act together and sees to the coercive imposition of the EV mandate.
Carney is also a strong advocate for 15-minute cities, apparently without parking facilities, since there will eventually come a time when fewer and fewer people will be able to afford EVs, for which in any case there is far from sufficient electrical infrastructure to keep them on the road. I would conjecture that Brookfield will be involved in establishing these quarter-hour municipal postage stamps, no doubt flush with government subsidies, like the Brookfield subsidiary Evolugen BESS (battery energy storage system) near Ottawa.
This is how Carney operates. This is what is behind Carney’s EV plan: to reach Net-Zero by depriving Canadians of the freedom of movement, in violation of the Mobility Rights Section 6 (1 & 2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; to destroy the nation’s automotive industry; to confine Canadians to a narrow strip of decarbonized terrain; and to solidify relations with the Chinese communists with whom he is already financially interdigitated.
The Bureau reports that Carney’s Brookfield Asset Management invested hundreds of millions in renewable energy assets in China, including a 2019 Shanghai land purchase valued at approximately $2 billion. Carney’s firm also secured a $276 million dollar loan from the state-owned Bank of China. Meanwhile, he does nothing to resolve the Chinese investment infiltration of Canadian corporations or its overt interference into Canadian electoral politics.
Carney’s underlying purpose is to distance Canada from the U.S. and establish intimate bonds with China, and in the process to decorticate Canada beyond the possibility of restitution. We already know that he approved of the six-year UN/WEF program to eliminate dairy and meat and reduce the purchase of clothing to three items a year, all to diminish carbon—the element of life, as it happens—to as close to zero as he can get. We have brought this misadventure upon ourselves.
The upshot is that a once-free and prosperous country will plunge into a debt-ridden, unproductive, ESG-indentured third world crater. It’s all spelled out with burgravial self-importance in his book and other instruments which he has contributed to or endorsed.
Any responsible Canadian citizen who might have taken the time to consult Carney’s graph-and-chart encrusted, repellently theoretical tome—and/or his other published papers and guidance manuals—would have voted him not into parliament but into Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa. His initiatives belong in comic fiction—but with miserable effects. For all its technical-laden passages leading to a depleted future, the book is a flight of ephemeral fancy. It is dull, platitudinous, redundant and opaque.
Nonetheless, it needed to be examined by an adult electorate that, to the country’s ill destiny, turned out to be more than willing to be taken in by this master prestidigitator. This was not a time for negligence or apathy. This was not a time to act like a Canadian. The evidence was there for easy assessment by any sentient person.
Canadians who voted for this prime minister but did not take the trouble at the very least to skim his book or devote a couple of hours to check him out did not do their duty as citizens. They will live with the result: Value(s), GFANZ, Brookfield, and voters’ remorse.
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