Category: Blog

Mark Carney’s carefully cultivated image as a pragmatic, non-ideological banker continues to shape public perception in Canada. Many commentators are now applauding him as some sort of sensible “conservative.” But this image collapses under even modest scrutiny. 

The real Mark Carney is not a cautious moderate. Before entering electoral politics, Carney was one of the most prominent and persistent global advocates of Net Zero, a radical ideology that is currently crushing Canada through higher energy costs, reduced competitiveness, and increased dependence on foreign supply chains dominated by China. 

Carney’s career trajectory demonstrates what his “green” obsessions look like in practice. 

As United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance from 2019 – 2025, Carney was an active driver of the global Net Zero agenda. After serving as Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 – 2020 – where he raised eyebrows with inappropriate left-leaning forays into politics, praising Greta Thunberg and criticizing Brexit – he was appointed, in 2020, advisor to the UK government on climate finance ahead of COP26, where he helped solidify international commitments to Net Zero.  

At the same time, Carney joined Brookfield Asset Management as Vice Chair and Head of ESG and Impact Investing, a position explicitly tied to advancing environmental priorities and monetizing the transition he was helping push on governments around the world. 

Here in Canada, Carney’s proximity to the Trudeau Liberals intersected with climate policy: he was an advisor to Justin Trudeau during Covid-19, at a time when Carney was telling anyone who would listen that the pandemic “offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to enact what he called a “green recovery.” He also chaired the Liberal Party’s 2024 Task Force on Economic Growth within a government committed to aggressive Net Zero targets. 

Since becoming Prime Minister in 2025, Mark Carney has worked to make his climate obsession less obvious. But he is still the same old green ideologue and so, as Prime Minister, he has retained key elements of the Trudeau climate superstructure. 

Before last year’s election, when Liberal strategists finally recognized that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to repeal the Trudeau-era carbon tax was resonating with voters, Carney responded by removing the consumer-facing component, while doubling down on the industrial carbon tax. 

The costs of the carbon tax didn’t disappear – they simply moved upstream. That is to say that businesses still had to absorb higher costs and those costs are passed through in the prices of goods and services. The carbon tax is passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, obscuring the true responsibility and making it less likely voters will pin the blame on his government for the higher grocery bills, more expensive housing, pricier transportation, and more.  

Carney’s so-called “repeal” of the carbon tax was a classic Liberal bait and switch manoeuvre. 

Carney has done much the same more recently in scrapping the Electric Vehicle (EV) mandate and replacing it with a 75% tailpipe emissions reduction target by 2035, jumping to 90% by 2040.  

This smokescreen obscures the radical green reality. While the focus has shifted toward automakers rather than consumers – keeping explicit EV mandates off the books – the effects will still be felt by Canadians through rising prices and a narrowing range of choices. 

Another bait and switch by climate ideologue Carney. 

Keeping Trudeau’s environmentalist agenda has come at a steep cost to our economy: billions of dollars in federal and provincial spending on “green” initiatives, energy prices rising faster than incomes, growing “energy poverty,” food inflation, and grid strains related to our increasing reliance on so-called “renewable” energy. 

Carney’s track record reveals a relentless push for Net Zero policies that prioritize ideology over affordability, stability, and opportunity.  When the Prime Minister’s top priority continues to be Net Zero – embedding climate targets into every aspect of decision-making – those responsible for infrastructure, lending, and long-term planning (like city councillors!) intrinsically understand their new marching orders.  

In order to align with the Trudeau and now Carney governments’ Net Zero targets and tied funding, grants, municipalities (which rely heavily on federal and provincial funding) have begun aligning their plans to qualify for a better chance at scoring federal government money. 

To add extra financial pressure, banks, pension funds, and insurers – also influenced by the very global Net Zero frameworks Carney helped champion – favour projects that meet climate criteria. Municipalities, seeking financing for infrastructure or development, adjust their own policies to remain “fundable.” 

To make matters worse, simple peer pressure is part of the equation. Municipal networks, planning associations, and international groups (like FCM or ICLEI) promote Net Zero targets as best practices. Once a critical mass of cities adopts them, others follow to avoid being seen as out of step. 

In summary, Carney’s influence – both before he became PM and now – has helped define the “rules of the game” at the global and financial level – and municipalities end up playing by those rules. 

That’s why Net Zero policies can appear to emerge “naturally” from municipalities, even when the underlying logic, language, and ideology began elsewhere. And when local politicians favour following harmful and expensive globalist policies over the interests of their local residents, the biggest loser is, well, YOU.  

Our green globalist Prime Minister Mark Carney holds three passports – that we know of. Appropriate for one of the international architects of the global Net Zero scam, an ideology that is pursued enthusiastically by virtually every municipality in Canada (with encouragement from Trudeau’s and now Carney’s government).

As a reminder, Net Zero means offsetting the amount of carbon dioxide a nation emits through measures such as buying e-credits or removing it from the atmosphere through “carbon capture technology.” However, since carbon credits aren’t real and carbon capture is an expensive boondoggle, in practice, Net Zero demands slashing emissions to near-zero levels through drastic measures: phasing out fossil fuels, substituting costly and unreliable “renewables” like wind and solar, and imposing various types of mandates on consumers. 

(Wonder why there is still no new pipeline approved?)

Net Zero in Europe

Net Zero constitutes a radical restructuring not just of energy systems, but of the global economy.

Net Zero’s pitfalls are evident across Europe, one of Mark Carney’s home bases, where aggressive implementation has triggered an alarming number of energy crises. Germany’s infamous Energiewende (or “energy transition”) policy program is perhaps the most well-known example. The goal of Energiewende was to clamp down on the usage of traditional energy sources – oil, natural gas, even nuclear power – creating artificial energy scarcity, with the expectation that (heavily subsidized) wind and solar would step in and fill the void.

Consequently, the cost of electricity soared, such that Germans now pay the highest prices in the EU. This has contributed to deindustrialization, with major companies like Mercedes-Benz shifting production to Hungary, whose energy rates are 70% lower than Germany’s.

Even with higher rates, wind and solar can’t really power the entire grid of a country of 80 million people, so, in recent years, Germany became increasingly dependent on imported Russian fossil fuels to fill in the gaps. When the War in Ukraine made that untenable, the government decided on a shocking course of action – to resume burning coal just to keep the lights on, while maintaining their fantastical belief that wind and solar are the way of the future.

Germany is far from the only country brought low by Net Zero groupthink. In Great Britain, another of Carney’s countries, where he also served as central banker from 2013 to 2020, Net Zero by 2050 targets were legally mandated by the then-governing Conservative Party in 2019. But the currently governing Labour Party has gone even further, embracing Net Zero with a religious mania.

Chief among the green maniacs is Ed Miliband, Secretary of Energy Security and Net Zero. Miliband has declared that “the transition [to Net Zero] is unstoppable, [though] we need to make it move faster.” He gave himself the task of picking up the national pace, setting a goal of decarbonizing the U.K.’s electrical grid by 95% by the year 2030.

To that end, the government has invested heavily in wind and solar, while banning new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. They’ve also moved up the timeline for banning new gas-powered cars in the country from 2035 to 2030. In less than four years, British drivers will effectively be forced into electric vehicles – whether they want them or not.

Predictably, British electricity rates are rapidly catching up to Germany’s. With a bit more time, and a bit more of the Labour government’s radical green policies, they will surely have the highest energy rates in the developed world. 

Other British Net Zero insanities include the U.K. Climate Change Committee’s continual over-the-top recommendations to parliament, including that they adopt policies which will reduce meat and dairy consumption by up to 50% by 2050, and reduce air travel, perhaps through a “frequent flyer levy.” No more pleasure travel for the British hoi polloi!

No wonder that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to admit recently that popular backing for Net Zero had “broken down.”

The UK has become increasingly reliant on electricity imported from other European nations, despite Miliband’s constant claim that Net Zero will make the U.K. energy self-sufficient. But because the Net Zero mind virus is catching, it isn’t a sure thing that electricity will always be there to import. Just last year, Spain and Portugal experienced among the worst blackouts in Europe in decades, with an estimated 60 million people losing power. This occurred just days after Spain had bragged that it had successfully run their grid on 100% “green” energy for a short period of time.

PM Carney was, as noted, the Governor of the Bank of England. He was then and remains a leader in this European Net Zero cult. Let’s admit it, though, we all have friends who say that Mark Carney is “ok” because he is “some sort of conservative.” 

Don’t fall for this nonsense. And take action.

This year, voters in six provinces and one territory in Canada will be electing new politicians at the local level. It’s time to wake up and get involved and elect some municipal leaders who will fight Carney’s Net Zero insanity in our cities and towns, instead of promoting it. 

Canadian municipalities have been pushing the radical green Net Zero scam since well before Carney became Prime Minister. I wrote last year about how municipalities push the Net Zero agenda and will expand further in the coming months. But how have more senior levels of government – the ones that plow billions down to the municipal level – been involved in promoting Net Zero ideology? 

Net Zero and the Canadian Governing Class

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approach to Net Zero was overt: his first big step, in 2016, was mandating that every province have some sort of carbon tax by 2018. He mandated Net Zero by 2050 into law in 2021, including emissions caps, anti-pipeline legislation like Bill C-69, dubbed the “no more pipelines act,” and Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act. At one point, even the Conservative Party of Canada’s leader, Erin O’Toole, was duped into promoting the idea of the carbon tax.

Since coming into office, Mark Carney has retained the lion’s share of Trudeau’s Net Zero madness, albeit with a more subtle bait-and-switch approach. The most conspicuous example was the scrapping of the consumer carbon tax while hiking the industrial version, so that consumers pay indirectly, through higher costs.

Carney signed an agreement in November 2025 with Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith which theoretically offers that province a single new pipeline (which might never get built) and in exchange Alberta had to accept the federal Industrial Carbon Tax, fully commit to Net Zero by 2050, and further agree to spending a ton of money on carbon capture and storage. 

So where is this pipeline? Where is it even being seriously discussed? There’s no project description, no environmental review, and no private-sector partner. It exists only as a bargaining chip – useful for selling a deal, useless for moving a single barrel of oil; in other words, still no pipeline.

Most recently, Carney replaced the federal electric vehicle (EV) mandate, which banned the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, with new tailpipe emissions standards demanding a 75% reduction by 2035 and 90% by 2040. Such stringent cuts constitute an EV mandate in all but name, since only EVs can realistically comply with them.

ONTARIO

Net Zero isn’t only a federal preoccupation. All of the provincial governments are complicit in the Net Zero scam.  And Doug Ford’s Ontario has become the poster child for provincial Net Zero fantasies.

Though Ford came into office in 2018 pledging to fix the energy mess his Liberal predecessors had left him, wind and solar today still – today, in 2026! – comprise a larger share of Ontario’s energy grid than they did eight years ago, his so-called “conservative” government plans to double wind and solar capacity over the next decade. The Ontario government is already spending billions of dollars per year of taxpayer money to subsidize electricity rates, hiding the true cost of electricity from Ontarians while ballooning provincial debt. In a province already grappling with some of North America’s highest power prices, this expansion risks repeating those past Liberal mistakes by prioritizing intermittent renewables over more reliable, affordable, and secure options, ultimately hitting households and businesses hardest. 

MUNICIPAL NET ZERO

Net Zero nonsense has filtered steadily downward not only into provincial policy but, most quietly of all, into municipal “climate emergency” declarations across the country. City councils from coast to coast have embedded Net Zero targets into long-term strategic plans, infrastructure priorities, building codes, and procurement rules, often with little public scrutiny and even less debate about cost. 

These municipal commitments are presented as morally unquestionable and technically inevitable. They are neither. They are expensive policy choices that will shape land use, housing affordability, transportation systems, and local tax burdens for decades. Net Zero’s municipal incarnation risks hardwiring those consequences directly into the daily lives of Canadian families. The cliff edge may be national in rhetoric, but the pain felt as a result will be local.

In the end, Net Zero is nothing less than economic self-sabotage dressed up as virtue. Our weakling and virtue-signalling municipalities have either signed on to this Net Zero with great enthusiasm, in some cases, or have, at the very least, completely caved into the pressure from higher levels of government.  Shame on them.

A year has passed since devastating fires ravaged Los Angeles, scorching over 57,000 acres, destroying more than 18,000 structures, and claiming at least thirty-one lives. 

Shortly after the flames subsided, I wrote about how the catastrophe was not primarily a “climate emergency,” as LA officials hastily proclaimed and the media faithfully parroted; rather, the catastrophe was a glaring example of municipal and state governance failures. 

One year on, further investigations reveal that my initial criticisms – and the observations of impartial American journalists – have not only been vindicated but amplified. 

What we saw in real-time – budget cuts crippling the fire department, empty reservoirs leaving hydrants dry, and woke leaders like Mayor Karen Bass prioritizing DEI deflection over fire-fighting action – has morphed into a full-blown scandal of incompetence.

It’s now clear that what happened in LA was a preventable disaster exacerbated by officials who put virtue-signalling and woke ideology above the public interest.

The empty reservoirs and dry hydrants, for instance, which turned a bad situation into a catastrophe, can be laid at the feet of Bass’s “diversity hire” administration and her progressive predecessors. 

As I noted originally, nearby three-million-gallon water tanks were quickly depleted, while the distant 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir ran dry, forcing firefighters to rely on tanker trucks instead of dependable hydrants. A year later, it’s clear this was no fluke but the product of chronic neglect: the Santa Ynez Reservoir – holding forty times the capacity of the failed tanks – had been offline for months for what officials described as “minor repairs.”

These repairs were overseen by a woman named Janisse Quiñones, CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Quiñones is a proud leftist who proclaimed, at the time of her 2024 appointment by Mayor Bass, that her role was about “righting the wrongs that we’ve done in the past.” 

It’s unclear exactly how her promise to use “an equity lens and social justice” to manage infrastructure was supposed to work but we know that she supported aggressive renewable energy and local water-sourcing targets, framing them as part of correcting environmentally harmful legacy systems. All the woke buzzwords, but not much about actually managing the water supply!

Quiñones was paid $750,000 per year, a salary proposed by Bass – nearly double what her predecessor had made. No doubt those extra few hundred thousand were for “righting” those historical “wrongs!”

Perhaps the least surprising revelation is that this wasn’t some inevitable climate-fueled inferno, as was widely claimed at the time. It was arson. A federal indictment unsealed in 2025 charged one man with maliciously starting the initial brush fire on New Year’s Eve in Topanga State Park, which got out of control, was beaten back by the fire department, only to later rekindle into the Palisades blaze.

This undercuts the knee-jerk “climate emergency” rhetoric from officials and media, shifting the focus squarely to why what started originally as a minor, containable fire wasn’t fully extinguished. 

According to City Journal’s Shawn Regan, “Not only was the Palisades Fire entirely preventable, the evidence suggests; it was also fueled by California state policies that, in the words of one attorney representing fire victims, “put plants over people.”’

Regan and others have documented how California’s Wildfire Management Plan for Topanga State Park prioritized protecting rare plant-life and Native archaeological sites over aggressive firefighting. Though firefighters contained the initial eight-acre fire relatively quickly, they were barred from full mop-up operations – no heavy equipment, no retardant, and as little soil disturbance as possible.

Fire victims’ lawyers unearthed one text message in which an LAFD supervisor was asked whether they should deploy bulldozers to stop the spread of the initial fire. He responded, “Heck no that area is full of endangered plants. I would be a real idiot to ever put a dozer in that area.”

The fire was left to smoulder. Park Rangers and local hikers have testified that they saw smoke and other signs that the fire was not contained, but the site went unmonitored for six days.

In short, DEI and woke hiring practices, along with eco-zealotry and plain old incompetence, managed to turn a minor arson incident into a raging inferno.

This saga should serve as an urgent wake-up call to municipalities everywhere: prioritize raw competence above all else when electing or appointing leaders to positions of public trust. 

When officials chase “woke” ideas – whether it’s diverting resources to DEI programs over disaster preparedness, prioritizing endangered plants over human lives and property, or indulging in climate virtue-signalling instead of maintaining basic infrastructure – they don’t just fail, they actively betray the citizens they are sworn to serve and protect. 

Los Angeles stands as a tragic exhibit of how thoroughly institutions captured by the woke, green left-wing will sacrifice the actual public good in a heartbeat when ideology trumps duty. The results, in this case, are death, destruction, and ruin.

Voters, take note and act: demand competence, accountability, and a relentless focus on the basics over empty ideology, identity politics, or progressive posturing. Hold your leaders to that standard, or the next time a crisis hits, it might be your house that goes up in flames.