Critics are not happy with Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s calls to “build a new Canadian economy” along the campaign trail, saying they echo the same “build back better” and “Great Reset” policies he pushed as an economic advisor to former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
“Above all, we will build a new Canadian economy,” said Carney during a rally in Oakville, Ont. in response to U.S. tariffs, which he called “an opportunity” in February.
However, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner called out Carney over his failure “even acknowledged that his ‘new’ post-pandemic policies failed, let alone that he’s abandoned his adherence to them.”
According to Remple Garner, Carney’s campaign talk is similar to what he said “at a similar juncture of economic precariousness.”
“Carney’s “opportunity” for a “new Canadian economy” rhetoric is nearly identical to the language he used to push a set of economy-crushing policies in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.
Carney was asked by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink if he was worried whether the economic policies he advised on, enforced under the Trudeau government, would lead to inflation, to which he replied he was not.
“From your history as a banker, are you worried about the deficits at all? Are you worried about rising potential inflation?” asked Fink during an interview in December 2020.
“Look, in the horizon of normal central bankers,” Carney answered. “Two to three years, the horizon for monitoring policy, it (inflation) is unlikely to materialize to a serious extent.”
While Carney may not have seen inflation on the horizon, Emmanuelle B. Faubert, an economist at the Montreal Economic Institute said the “runaway inflation” experienced in Canada in the wake of these policies was “entirely foreseeable.”
“As Milton Friedman used to say, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, so when the money supply increases to fund government deficits, inflation is sure to follow,” Faubert told True North. “The doubling of our debt under this past government has resulted in runaway inflation and skyrocketing interest payments. This was entirely foreseeable.”
During that same interview Carney later went on to say, “we need some inflation to come on from where we are because there is a lot of spare capacity in this economy,” referring to the U.K. where he’d served as Bank of England governor from 2013-2020.
“What’s worse is that now, as a result, we’re diverting tens of billions of dollars away from tax relief of social programs, only to spend it paying interest on these excesses from our recent past,” said Faubert.
Remple Garner said that Carney used the pandemic’s “economic upheaval as a path to remake the global economy by repackaging a collection of proven-to-fail socialist policies from an assortment of far-left, pro-interventionist think tanks.”
“Fast forward five years to today. Rather than ushering in the utopian high-growth “new” economy he sold, the policies Carney personally championed during the pandemic have clearly had the opposite effect in Canada,” she said. “The practices of massive deficit spending, aggressive pivot away from traditional energy, and mass immigration that Carney supported via dusting off socialist-era thinking have all contributed to Canada’s current economic malaise.”