Carney’s lost opportunity to stand by his capitalist ways

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On Tuesday, Liberal Leader Mark Carney tweeted these words: “If it’s built by Canadian workers on Canadian docks, it should be made with Canadian steel and aluminum.” And I thought to myself: well, there goes the Economist Party dream. There’s been a long-running social media joke about how what Canada really needs is a party of ruthless optimizers, led by economically educated people devoted to rationality, liberal doctrine (whether neoliberal or classical-liberal) and reduction of trade barriers and socialistic/nationalistic wheel-spinning. An Economist Party, if you will, free from expensive Conservative gesticulating, Liberal pieties and New Democratic nonsense.

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Somehow it has scarcely been noticed that we had what could be concisely described as an Economist Party coup d’état. The dream came true, folks: our governing party had a crisis, and the country’s single most famous honest-to-God economist, a creature of high capitalism and defender of markets if ever there was one, swooped in and took supreme power without much of a fight. How could a good classical liberal like myself feel anything but excitement? The millennium, one would have thought, had arrived.

Well, now we know how this dream was always bound to work out. The old prime minister hasn’t had time to shop for new Speedos yet, and the new one is yelping about how if it’s built by Canadian workers, its molecules must have exclusively Canadian bona fides — a thought practically designed to make his economist brethren, or any economically educated person, spew.

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Carney, of course, wouldn’t have chosen to have his big political opportunity coincide with a weird revival of manifest destiny in the United States and a stampede of justified anti-American feeling. But that’s just the problem: if the near-future role of the Canadian prime minister is to wave the flag and convince Canadians to accept the sacrifices of a trade war, are Carney’s globalist credentials any real use?

Some people keep saying he’s obviously a better choice as a prime minister than the Conservative leader, who spent years as a notorious and effective attack dog for a struggling Opposition. Meanwhile, it looks for all the world as if we’re auditioning for a guard-dog-in-chief, and I’m sitting here watching a frankly bloodless and uninspiring technocrat awkwardly pull on a Cane Corso costume, and I just keep thinking, “Funny old world, ain’t it?”

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Funnier still is that Capitalist Carney, who has had little time to brush up his act as a politician, is still occasionally visible through the Captain Canada garb. This week, when he was challenged by reporters on Brookfield Asset Management’s use of Bermuda as a tax haven, he made the … interesting choice on the spot to defend tax havens.

Why, these alleged warts on the world economy, Carney explained, actually serve an important purpose in helping companies avoid unfair doubling (or n-tupling) of business and income taxes. Dollars should ideally only be taxed once: that’s what’s best for entrepreneurs and for investors, some of whom are Canadian pension funds and governments, don’t you know. As a fund executive, Carney implied, he had a positive fiduciary duty to make use of rogue Bermuda as a conduit for free-flowing capital.

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Which he absolutely did! I am not surprised to hear all this talk from someone fed at the bosom of Goldman Sachs; and I am only vestigially surprised that the new leader of the Liberal party, a man almost literally resurrecting departed members of Team Trudeau, should say something that conflicts so nakedly with decades of Liberal doctrine and practice.

Think about it: “tax havens prevent suboptimal double taxation” would be a remarkably extreme thing for a Canadian Conservative leader to say into a microphone! After all, people might wonder whether his intention was to turn Canada itself into one of those nasty low-tax biz-friendly jurisdictions, shredding the social safety net and harvesting other national treasuries’ lifeblood along the way. Me, I sigh and wish I thought there was a chance of it.

National Post

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