Trump will soon fill a 4-year WH vacancy known as the “Biden/Harris Administration.” Meanwhile federal governance in Ottawa is shut down by Trudeau resigning without leaving but also suspending parliament. There being no one at the helm is eerily similar to the US adrift, and a fitting close to the Trudeau decade. Jamie Sarkonak goes to the core of the upcoming election in his National Post article It doesn’t matter to Mark Carney if Canada survives. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images
I hope he wins the party’s support. The Liberals aren’t likely to resonate with the population by running an out-of-touch cabinet minister in the next federal election — and they’re certainly less likely to do so by running an out-of-touch global elite who left small-time federal politics behind for a career at the pinnacle of international poshdom.
Yes, Carney is Canadian. But he’s also a citizen of Ireland,
and through it the European Union,
as well as a national of the United Kingdom.
He can leave this country any time he wants, and he already has: after serving as governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, he moved on to head the Bank of England. Now, he’s embedded in the international ecosystem as a climate finance adviser at the United Nations (among other things, he’s a strong advocate for mandatory climate disclosures by banks).
Oh, and according to his World Economic Forum bio — another mark of borderless eliteness — he is also the following: “an external member of the Board of Stripe, a member of the Global Advisory Board of PIMCO, Harvard University, Rideau Hall Foundation, Bilderberg, the boards of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Hoffman Institute for Global Business and Society at INSEAD, Cultivo, as well as Senior Counsellor of the MacroAdvisory Partners, Advisor of the Watershed, and Chair of Chatham House, the Group of Thirty and also Advisory Board Chair for Canada 2020.” Us rubes have no idea what most of that even means.
Carney might call himself an “outsider,” and it’ll be true — in the sense that he is not currently in the Trudeau government’s cabinet. But he’s still very much an elite, one who has advised the Liberal party, and one whose well-being doesn’t depend on local happiness and prosperity.
And everyone filling out a ballot next election will know it.
Different people have different terms for this. Freeland wrote a book on the new richesse mondiale, calling them plutocrats. Circa 2013, she was warning the rest of us that the global plutocracy might one day end up turning into a system of crony capitalist “insiders”; perhaps an aristocracy. Carney’s not Bill-Gates rich, but he’s still part of the global upper class.
Chrystia Freeland is also a Trustee on the WEF Board.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper put it in more digestible terms in his 2018 book, “Right Here, Right Now”: there are people who live “anywhere,” and there are people who live “somewhere.” “Anywheres” are cosmopolitan types who usually have professional, internationally oriented careers. “Somewheres” live and work closer to where they grew up, and share more of their values with people of a similar, localized background. The former tends to look down on nationalism; the latter depends on it.
Carney counts among the “anywheres” of Canadian society; yes, he’s got the passport, but he’s got more in common with a foreign banking executive who makes an annual Davos pilgrimage than he does with regular Superstore-shopping Canadians.
We “somewheres,” on the other hand, can’t just up and leave
in the face of turmoil because our entire life is here.
Our friends and families are here. Our savings and investments (if we have them) are in CAD; our partly-paid mortgages are tied to Canadian land; our children’s education depends on the quality of Canadian schools; our safety depends on Canadian laws; our job prospects suffer when low-wage foreign labour is allowed to flood our local markets. We’re not being forced to leave, but the price of relocating is prohibitively high.
Carney’s Monday appearance on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show was revealing in that way: he targeted his pre-audition pitch to the world through an American late-night show that treated him with the same humorous fascination as it would a fuzzy exotic animal. It was a soft and unserious interview because the people our former central banker is campaigning toward aren’t Canadian and aren’t witnessing the country’s dire situation firsthand.
Poilievre’s appearances on Dr. Jordan Peterson’s American-produced podcast were of a whole different category; both men are Canadian and can talk about Canadian issues with the weight and care they deserve.
None of this is to say that the upper crust of society should stay out of politics — many great leaders come from the elite class, including on the conservative side of politics. But after years of regular Canadians being the low-priority afterthought of a trust-fund supported, second-generation prime minister who seemed happiest at G7 photoshoots and Gavin-Newsom meetups, the animal spirits are hungering for a leader who truly has skin in the game.
And yes, I’d count Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre among the “somewheres.” He’s had an entirely Canadian career, he isn’t gunning for CV-padding UN advisory roles, his ongoing career doesn’t depend on pleasing the moral sensibilities of the world’s politically active, post-national liberals, and he doesn’t seem to think that pre-election media courting should be performed for an international audience.
If the ship that is Canada starts sinking — and it’s been sitting alarmingly low in recent years — most of us are going down with it. Not Carney, who has and always will have a premium life raft, ready to isolate him from the consequences of his political actions. Which is exactly why I can’t wait to see him run.
