» Mark Carney crumbling under pressure of tough questioning

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Mark Carney was asked some tough questions on Tuesday and he had no good answers for any of them. That goes against his sales pitch to voters that he’s the guy you need in a crisis, in a pinch.

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The thing is the crisis can change and it often does with governments.

While governments come to power with big plans, they often end up lurching from crisis to crisis, not of their own making. They need to be nimble, they need to be able to respond to changing circumstances quickly and Carney doesn’t appear to be able to do that.

Carney wants to talk about one thing and one thing only: Donald Trump. He sees Trump as his meal ticket to being elected as prime minister.

On Monday, federal officials released information showing that China was “targeting” Carney with an information campaign. The details revealed that the targeting was a co-ordinated effort by the Chinese government and state-owned media outlets to push a positive narrative about Carney to Chinese Canadians on the wildly popular Chinese-language social media platform WeChat.

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Carney was asked about that support on Tuesday and couldn’t really give an answer.

“Why do you think that China, the PRC, seems to like you? Why are they praising you?” a reporter asked.

Valid question, but the answer was lacking.

“I have absolutely no idea and I, um, I, ya, I have absolutely no idea and I think — well, I’ll leave it at that,” Carney said.

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No, that’s not good enough.

How about he denounces the idea that the Chinese government, which he is quite close with, has effectively endorsed him. How about Carney states plainly and clearly that China and the Chinese government have no business interfering in Canadian elections, as they did in 2019 and 2021 to aid the Liberal party that he now leads.

His answer on tax havens wasn’t any better.

Carney has been facing serious questions for the last two weeks after CBC News broke the story that while he was chair of Brookfield Asset Management, he set up two investment funds worth $25 billion US in Bermuda, a well-known offshore tax haven. Bermuda has no capital gains taxes and had no corporate taxes when the funds were established.

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Even though the funds were run out of a Toronto office, they were registered in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes in Canada. When asked about using offshore tax havens, Carney served up a word salad.

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“I, look, I’ve very strong, I have a long career in the private sector. I have a longer career in the public sector,” he said.

“What’s important is that we have an effective tax system and that companies, every company follows the rules of those taxes to not just the letter, but the spirit of those regulations. And we need to continue to refine our tax system to ensure that companies are paying their fair share of tax.⁩”

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Well, according to calculations released by the NDP, Carney helped the company avoid $5.3 billion in Canadian taxes while he was at Brookfield.

Asked in the past about tax evasion, Carney has simply said, “I know how the world works.” In Carney’s world, that apparently means he can hide money from taxes in offshore accounts while the rest of us sweat, especially this time of year, to make sure our tax returns are clean and accurate so we don’t get audited.

Carney hasn’t been able to answer how standing up for Canada includes voting to move a head office from Toronto to New York. And on Tuesday, he struggled to answer how he could support keeping Bill C-69 and giving Quebec a veto on pipelines, while also saying we shouldn’t be dependent on the Americans for our energy needs.

Governing isn’t easy and it doesn’t come with a script. If Carney and the Liberals win the election, he can’t respond to every question with “Donald Trump is bad,” which appears to be all he has.

Canada faces real challenges, many of which have nothing to do with the American president. It’s those challenges, those questions that Carney just can’t answer for.

He’s not up to the job.

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