When Carney talks about Canada strong, does he really mean it?

By Patrick Keeney

By elevating Mark Carney during a prorogued Parliament, the Liberal Party once again reveals its uneasy relationship with democratic transparency. This was not a moment of open debate or public contest but rather a stage-managed affair, choreographed behind closed doors while the people’s forum remained still and silent.

One is reminded of a previous Liberal pageant: the quiet return of Michael Ignatieff, summoned — by his own admission — by ‘the men in black’ to rescue the nation. Like Carney, he was neither elected nor tested in the crucible of open contest; instead, he was installed and anointed in the shadows. One emerged under the cover of prorogation, while the other did so through the discreet rituals of Liberal backroom diplomacy.

The parallels between the two men are striking, yet the contrasts reveal even more. Both Ignatieff and Carney spent most of their adult lives abroad, building reputations not in the messy soil of Canadian politics, but in the rarefied air of foreign institutions.

Each returned, haloed by international prestige, to save the nation, as if Canada were a province in need of rescue from an emissary of the global class.

However, the similarities end there. Ignatieff is a genuine scholar. His commitment to intellectual rigour is evident in a lifetime dedicated to writing, reflection, and public philosophy. He is a person molded by books and ideas.

Carney, in contrast, is a product of Davos and central banking, a technician of global capital, fluent in the language of carbon offsets and stakeholder capitalism. If Ignatieff was a tragic figure — an exile in his own land — Carney represents something entirely different: the polished avatar of post-national Canada.

While Ignatieff wrestled with questions of identity and belonging in his memoir Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, Carney floats serenely above such anxieties, dispensing climate platitudes and DEI orthodoxies to a citizenry he seems to view as data points — inputs to be managed, rather than voices to be heard. He is not merely from elsewhere; he embodies elsewhere.

And that, perhaps, is the point. In the Canada imagined by Justin Trudeau — a self-declared “post-national” state with no core identity, no binding mythology, and no shared memory — Mark Carney is not merely a suitable leader; he is its perfect heir. He embodies the very ethos of the post-national project: technocratic rather than democratic, globalist rather than patriotic, managerial rather than visionary.

Carney is a man of polished surfaces and carefully curated credentials, a product not of place but of pedigree — Harvard, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, and the Bank of England. He has navigated the heights of global finance and international institutions with the quiet confidence of one who belongs to a class that transcends borders, customs, and loyalties.

If his life suggests any allegiance, it is not to Canada or its people, but to the abstract ideals of the global elite and their non-negotiable terms: sustainability, stability, and equity.

Such a figure would have been viewed with suspicion in an earlier Canada. A man who spent decades abroad and speaks more fluently in the language of bond markets than in the idioms of his own country would have had to prove himself — to demonstrate that he understands the character of the land he seeks to lead.

However, in Trudeau’s Canada, such rootedness is not only unnecessary; it is actively discouraged. Patriotism has been replaced by performative cosmopolitanism, history by apology, and citizenship by consumer choice.

Carney’s detachment from any rooted sense of place is not a liability; it is, in fact, his chief credential. His rise represents the culmination of the Liberal Party’s long effort to detach Canadian political life from its cultural and historical foundations.

Nowhere is this more starkly symbolized than in the recent “lobotomizing” of the Canadian passport — a deliberate act of cultural erasure where historical touchstones like Vimy Ridge were replaced with a sterile collection of squirrels and snowflakes.

As Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri put it, “Who thought it fitting to replace images like Vimy Ridge with a squirrel and nuts?” She added that the redesign “sends a pretty significant message about what the government’s priorities are.”

However, for Liberals, this historical amnesia is perfectly acceptable. Carney’s credentials are not rooted in any substantial familiarity with the lives of ordinary Canadians; rather, they derive from the glowing endorsements of elite transnational institutions — the IMF, the World Economic Forum, and The Economist. He does not engage with Canada as a nation with a history, a people, and a place, but rather as a platform, a technocratic sandbox for testing global policy trends.

In the post-national imagination, people are not sovereign but spectators. Governance is less about moral vision or historical continuity and more about managing systems: carbon levels, diversity, equity and inclusion, housing metrics, and GDP. And who better to manage these systems than someone who has spent his career at the top?

Mark Carney is not just the Liberals’ preferred candidate; he is the logical outcome of a political philosophy that has long stopped asking what it means to be Canadian.

Instead, it inquires: how best to manage the system? His rise is not an aberration but the realization of a post-national ideal, in which leadership is defined not by civic rootedness, but by one’s fluency in the dialect of Davos. For the Liberals, he represents the logical next step.

First published in The Western Standard