Trust Me, I’m Mark Carney (*just don't check the footnotes)

Today's plagiarism allegations are the latest drip in what's becoming a waterfall of red flags on the Liberal leader's trustworthiness. That's a big problem for the Liberal campaign.

Is Canadian Liberal Party leader Mark Carney's credibility dying a slow death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts?

The question of whether Canadians should be able to take Carney at his word was raised again today with a scoop by the National Post claiming that Carney's doctoral thesis contained multiple instances of plagiarism.

Whether or not Carney is trustworthy is not only a problem for Canadians (he is the current Prime Minister but does not hold elected office) - but it's becoming a problem for the Liberal campaign, too. The Liberals have the anchor of a decade of scandal and failed policies to account for, with an electorate struggling to make ends meet and feeling rightful anxiety over the threat of American tariffs. So, the challenge for the Liberal Party is this election to convince enough Canadians that a fourth term of government can deliver this change.

Central to this premise is whether Carney- recently hot-swapped with scandal-plagued former leader Justin Trudeau - is trustworthy enough to persuade Canadians that he's different from his predecessor. So, while today's plagiarism allegations might seem like a minor scandal when considered in isolation against the enormity of a federal election campaign, the problem for the Liberals is that this new story builds upon a litany of very recent examples where Carney has demonstrated a willingness to bend principles and appropriate others' work to advance his own ambitions.

For example, Carney was recently caught lying about his role in moving Brookfield's headquarters from Canada to the United States after Donald Trump threatened tariffs. He tried to take credit for helping Paul Martin balance Canada's budget but wasn't living in Canada then. He's repeatedly refused to publicly disclose his assets, exploiting a loophole in the law designed to protect the public from politicians with potential conflicts of interest.

When Carney wants to talk about the housing crisis in the context of the campaign, he has to contend with the inconvenient fact that the company he chaired up until a few short weeks ago - Brookfield - bragged about opportunistically (their word, not mine) capitalizing on the scarcity of homes in Canada. It's also hard for Carney to speak about tax fairness when Brookfield, under his leadership, frequently utilized offshore tax havens to shield profits. The same goes for anything Carney might say about taking an assertive stance against the regime in Beijing: as recently as last year, Carney secured a $276-million loan from the communist government's Bank of China.

If Carney wants to convince Canadians that they can fix the immigration system that the Liberals objectively broke, why did he re-recruit Sean Fraser, the minister who oversaw that chaos, and Mark Wiseman, an advocate for rapid immigration-driven population growth, onto his team?

All these dichotomies, half-truths, and outright lies should make it tough for Canadians to believe that Carney—a longtime senior advisor to Justin Trudeau—will actually change course on some of the Liberals' most disastrous policies of the last decade. For example, Carney made a career out of supporting the carbon tax and yet needs Canadians to believe that he's suddenly had a change of heart.

All of this subterfuge is starting to clearly spell out a calculated deception to retain power on the part of Mr. Carney. After more than a decade of economic erosion—burdening Canadians with debt, neglecting infrastructure, and mishandling housing, trade, and immigration—they dare to request yet another mandate. But there's nothing to suggest that Carney's leadership would alter this trajectory; the opposite is true.

At least I can rest assured that Mr. Carney is unlikely to plagiarize any of this particular column.