Chris Selley: Mark Carney has quickly become the ultimate establishment Liberal
Mark Carney gave a heck of a performance at a Monday press conference in Fredericton. Political newbie he may be, but when it comes to casual Liberal hypocrisy and entitlement, he might as well have been born in a manger in Shawinigan.
First, Carney lavished praise on the late Pope Francis. Which is fine! I am as atheist as they come, and very fond of capitalism as a general concept — as is Carney, apparently — but I have quite a lot of time for Francis’s washing-the-peasants’-feet vision of Christianity , and his skepticism of the dominant global economic system. The world has enough energetic and well-connected capitalists to survive an alternative spiritual vision being offered them on a Sunday morning, should they choose to hear it.
It’s just that, well, not so long ago, Carney said the articles of his Catholic faith were purely a private matter . He suggested — as faithful Liberals often do, when asked — that those beliefs were firewalled off from his political views, specifically (having been asked by a reporter) vis-à-vis abortion. The recently deceased so-called ”Cool Pope” certainly wasn’t cool enough to be cool with abortion.
Now look at Carney’s fulsome tribute to the late pontiff in New Brunswick on Monday: “Pope Francis was a voice of moral clarity, spiritual courage and boundless compassion. He was in many respects the world’s conscience, never hesitating to challenge the powerful on behalf of the vulnerable,” he averred.
Carney used an anecdote about meeting Pope Francis that he has deployed before, including in his 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World for All . The occasion was a 2014 summit of various business, academic and policy-making bigwigs held at the Vatican, titled “The Global Common Good: Towards a More Inclusive Economy.” (Carney was there representing the Swiss-based Financial Stability Board , of which he was then chair.)
“Pope Francis surprised us by joining (us for) lunch,” Carney wrote in the book. “(Francis) observed that: Our meal will be accompanied by wine. Now, wine is many things. It has a bouquet, colour and richness of taste that all complement the food. It has alcohol that can enliven the mind. Wine enriches all our senses.
“At the end of our feast, we will have grappa. Grappa is one thing: alcohol. Grappa is wine distilled,” Carney recalled Francis saying. “Humanity is many things — passionate, curious, rational, altruistic, creative, self-interested. But the market is one thing: self-interested. The market is humanity distilled.”
“(Francis) called on us to reintegrate human values into our economic lives,” Carney said in Fredericton. “He reminded us that markets don’t have values — people do, and it’s our responsibility to close that gap and turn that grappa in to wine.” Carney “committed” himself to “meeting that challenge.”
If I didn’t know better, I would think these were the words of a prime minister who is quite serious about his Catholicism, and whose faith very much impacts the way he thinks about politics and public life.
And that would be fine too, if he hadn’t essentially disavowed the notion before. “My faith is private” is the standard to which religiously observant Liberal and Tory ministers have been allowed to hew for most of my lifetime, though in more recent years Conservatives have not been afforded that courtesy. ( Readers may recall a ludicrous episode in 2022 , in which several high-profile morons took offence at Poilievre’s bog-standard Easter greeting in a newspaper ad: “He is risen.” They actually thought he was referring to himself.)
That has always been a clumsy, facile demarcation. No politician would argue that their non -religious philosophical convictions have no effect on their day-to-day decision-making — that they’re guided by nothing but day-to-day political expediency. Why would they, when their convictions are divinely inspired?
In any event, later in the press conference, a reporter from La Presse asked Carney why he had earlier accused Poilievre of intending to use the notwithstanding clause to override abortion rights, when Poilievre has in fact totally forsworn any government legislation on abortion whatsoever.
“It’s not an accusation, it’s a fact,” Carney responded, astonishingly. His reasoning: Because Poilievre has indicated a willingness to use the notwithstanding clause to keep violent people in prison for longer, there’s no telling where he would stop.
It was a bizarre, stupid argument that certainly did not turn any grappa into any wine. Presumably Poilievre would “stop” wherever he wanted to “stop,” right? It’s like saying “if we let the government make one law, there’s no telling what other crazy laws they might make.” No one accuses Quebec’s notwithstanding clause-loving politicians of plotting against abortion rights, because that would be idiotic.
The irony, as University of Ottawa law professor Stéphane Sérafin noted in National Post last week , is that under existing case law, Poilievre wouldn’t need the notwithstanding clause to outlaw abortion. It’s Liberal dogma that the Supreme Court has definitively adopted abortion-on-demand as the only acceptable policy, constitutionally, but that never actually happened. As on many issues, neophyte though he may be, Carney seems to have had decades of self-serving Liberal cant and tactics downloaded directly into his brain.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
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