Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s alleged connections to China are being scrutinized after a video resurfaced of him in 2016 telling investors about $500 billion in “green” investment opportunities in the People’s Republic of China.
During an address to the Toronto Region Board of Trade in 2016, Carney, then the governor of the Bank of England, praised the virtues and profit opportunities for investors to invest in China’s “green” capital market.
The Conservative incumbent candidate for Grande Prairie–Mackenzie, Chris Warkentin, blasted Carney on X, scrutinizing him over potential outstanding financial connections to China.
“Mark Carney talking about how much more money he can make investing in China compared to Canada,” Warkentin said in the post. “How financially exposed is Mark Carney to the CCP? We don’t know. He’s covering it up.”
The exchange was with former Liberal climate minister Catherine McKenna, who shared how Trudeau’s Liberal government sought to develop deeper trade ties with the communist dictatorship.
“I don’t know how many people who are in, who are part of the 100 trillion dollar global institutional fixed income investor pool here, but there’s some of them, right? Now are your yields relative to the expectations of your insurance company, policyholders, pension fund, pensioners, or unit holders mutual fund?” Carney told the crowd.
“It won’t surprise you that yields in China are considerably higher than those in Canada, the UK, elsewhere. It also won’t surprise you, if you have any dealings with the Chinese, that they’re keen to open up this market.”
He said the Chinese government removed restrictions in institutional capital investments for long-term fixed income investment, calling it a “tangible opportunity” for investors.
“There’s just a core, mainstream fixed income opportunity around this that comes,” he said. “The relative value opportunity that gets exposed by this in equities is pretty considerable. You know who’s leading, who’s lagging, who has opportunity, you know, low-hanging fruit to move forward. And that becomes one of the considerations and that and which is positive for everybody.”
He spoke about his role with the Bank of England and how it’s working with the People’s Bank of China to invest in green investment opportunities in China.
Brookfield Asset Management, the firm Carney chaired, reportedly took a $250 million loan from the Chinese state-owned bank in October last year – after Carney became a financial advisor to Trudeau’s Liberal Party.
When Carney’s finance minister Francois-Philippe Champagne was Trudeau’s foreign affairs minister, he had two mortgages valued at $1.2 million with another Communist Party of China-run bank, the Bank of China.
“Bank of England’s been working with the Peoples Bank of China over the course of last year, year and a half, on developing a green bond market in China,” Carney said to the audience. “Now, that’s a desire of the Chinese government. It’s part of a much bigger set of initiatives, but the order of magnitude of issuance in China of capital market instruments for lower carbon, cleaner, you know, energy, sanitation, etc, is about 500 billion US dollars a year.”
Despite promoting the virtues of Beijing’s move toward opening up global investment in green bonds and other climate initiative investments, China’s CO2 emissions have only grown since 2016.
Though China had signalled a shift toward green energy to reduce emissions for international investors, the country’s annual fossil C02 emissions rose by 17.44 per cent, according to Worldometer. China’s annual emissions went from nearly 10.79 trillion tonnes of emissions in 2016 to 12.67 trillion tonnes in 2022.
In 2016, China’s emissions went from 29.75 per cent of the world’s share of C02 emissions to 32.88 per cent in 2022. According to The Diplomat, CO2 emissions rose by 565 million tonnes the following year.
“One of the many strengths of China is its medium- and long-term perspective,” Carney said in response to a question. “This is an ambitious G20. It’s an ambitious Chinese leadership. These issues…are central to their priorities.”
During Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s “Canada First” speech before the election writ dropped, he vowed to cut foreign aid funding to another Chinese state-run bank, the Asian Infrastructure Bank, to pay for increased defence spending.
This comes just a day after Carney backed a since-resigned Liberal incumbent candidate, Paul Chiang after Chiang suggested to Chinese-language audience members that they could kidnap Conservative candidate Joe Tay and hand him over to the Chinese government for an HK $1 million ransom.