Liberal leadership frontrunner Mark Carney has walked back or “clarified” several false claims he’s made while on the Liberal leadership campaign trail.
Conservatives are pointing out several instances where Carney has misled Canadians during the nearly two months since he launched his campaign to be the next Liberal leader and Prime Minister of Canada.
His most recent blunder occurred during a stop in a bar in Barrie, Ont., where Carney falsely claimed that Canada was the U.S.’s number one exporter of semiconductors for electronics.
“(Canada) is the biggest supplier of furtilizer, aluminum, the biggest supplier of semiconductors. We supply, almost all of (the U.S.’s) semiconductors,” Carney claimed. “Everybody in the White House is a tech-bro except for Trump. They all need semiconductors, and they all come from Canada. Maybe they won’t maybe one day they won’t show up. We’ll see.”
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre shared a post on X fact-checking Carney’s claim. It found that Canada is actually the U.S.’s 18th largest supplier of semiconductors making up less than one per cent of the U.S.’s imports of the product.
Mark Carney’s campaign team later walked back the claim in a statement reportedly given to the Toronto Sun, saying that Carney’s statements were only meant to emphasize Canada’s role in the North American semiconductor supply chain.
“His remarks underscored the need for Canada to leverage its strengths in critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, and R&D (research and development) to bolster North American semiconductor security and competitiveness further,” the statement read, according to the Toronto Sun.
Carney’s team has repeatedly ignored True North’s requests to comment and has barred True North reporters twice from entering campaign events.
In another instance, Carney responded to a question from CTV News about another apparent lie when he was caught falsely claiming to have no part in a decision from the board of Brookfield Asset Management to move its headquarters from Toronto to New York.
Conservatives pointed out a letter from Dec. 20, after Trump had begun making Tariff threats against Canada, where Carney urged shareholders to approve the move which the board he chaired “unanimously agreed” upon to increase profits.
Carney said he should have been more “precise” when claiming to have “no part” in the move.
“Look, there’s several elements to the transaction and I should have been more precise in my answer,” he said. “There’s an overall move with a plan of arrangement, and the plan of arrangement and the agreement of all that, which is also true, it’s complicated. The corporation and the company, which happened after us was (sic.)”
He said it was a technicality and that the moving of Brookfield’s head office to New York doesn’t make “no difference” to “any” employment in Canada, and the move simply improves the company’s access to capital.
Conservatives criticized Carney as implying that for Canadian companies to be successful, they have to move to the U.S.
When pressured into saying he should be more precise on issues he was accused of lying about, Carney chalked the discrepancies up to him “not being a politician.” He said he often goes too much into detail on things and should instead “keep it at a higher level.”
Carney also claimed to have worked with Paul Martin “when he balanced the books and kept the books balanced” when he was finance minister. However, Canada balanced the budget in 1997-1998 after a plan launched by Martin in 1995. Conservatives note that Carney was outside the country at this time and only began working for the federal government in 2004 after the budget had been balanced and Paul Martin was Prime Minister.
Similarly, as first reported by the National Post, Carney claimed to have resigned from all his positions when he announced his bid for the Liberal leadership, though several of those companies confirmed that he still worked with them.
In a Sunday letter sent to Conservative members, former Prime Minister Steven Harper accused Carney of taking credit for Canada’s economic recovery during the Great Recession in 2008. The letter stated that Carney’s day-to-day experience was not in managing Canada’s economy, and Carney is taking credit for the work of the late Jim Flaherty.
Carney did not respond to clarify or respond to any of these accusations.