In the face of an erratic Donald Trump and because Justin Trudeau left our economy in shambles, Canada desperately needs solid leadership. But is newly crowned Liberal Leader Mark Carney likely to provide that? Or is he just like Justin?

That’s what the Conservatives say he is, and with good reason: Carney spent years in Trudeau’s policy circle, he has advised the government since 2020, he was hired by the Liberals to head the party’s economic “task force” last year, and last December Trudeau tried to make Carney his finance minister. Carney is now trying to disown the Trudeau government’s disastrous record, but his own policies on major issues like government spending, carbon taxes and environmental regulation are no better than Trudeau’s and probably worse.

One difference between Carney and Trudeau is that Carney cannot last-name his way into the prime minister’s office and is instead riding the strength of his c.v., which includes an unprecedented double as governor of the Bank of Canada and then governor of the Bank of England. But Carney seems to have exaggerated his accomplishments in other roles. “I have listened, with increasing disbelief,” Stephen Harper wrote in a recent letter, “to Mark Carney’s attempts to take credit for things he had little or nothing to do with” during the 2008-09 financial crisis. In his most recent private sector role, too, Carney was forced to backtrack after making exaggerated claims about his company’s environmental performance.

If Carney is not exactly like Justin, maybe he is more like Kathleen — Kathleen Wynne, that is. Back in 2013, she took over as Ontario’s Liberal premier from Dalton McGuinty, who like Trudeau, had resigned after calamitous policies had made him deeply unpopular. Wynne proceeded to take McGuinty’s policy book, much of which she had helped write, and make everything even worse, rendering Ontario much less affordable and imposing environmental policy that significantly damaged the economy while delivering little or no environmental benefit. Sound familiar?

One of McGuinty’s signature policies was the Green Energy and Green Economy Act of 2009 (GEA), which massively subsidized renewable energy and was advertised as a boon to the clean energy sector. As Ross McKitrick documented in a 2013 Fraser Institute study, however, “the claim by the government of Ontario that 50,000 jobs will be created by the GEA was a guess without any basis in formal analysis, and the province has since admitted both that the vast majority of any GEA-related jobs will be temporary and that the figure of 50,000 does not account for offsetting permanent job losses caused by increases in the price of electricity under the GEA.” A C.D. Howe Institute study, pointing to estimates by both the auditor general and the ministry of energy, came to the same conclusion.

Moreover, more than offsetting the approximately 30,000 highly-subsidized temporary jobs the GEA did create was the permanent destruction of over 74,000 manufacturing jobs from 2008 to 2015 because of skyrocketing electricity costs, this according to a 2017 Fraser Institute analysis. From 2008 to 2016, Ontario residents’ electricity costs (home hydro bills) increased 71 per cent, and from 2010 to 2016 in Toronto and Ottawa large industrial users’ electricity costs spiked 53 and 46 per cent, respectively, compared to an average 14 per cent in the rest of Canada.

In all, the province’s auditor general concluded in 2015, Ontarians paid $37 billion in excess costs for electricity from 2006 to 2014, and would pay another $133 billion in excess costs from 2015 to 2032. Thank you, Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne!

Returning to the current federal scene, Justin Trudeau’s economic policy book, which Mark Carney helped write and now owns, includes not only an economically damaging and badly implemented carbon tax, but also a web of regulations and diktats that are overturning industries and antagonizing consumers. In particular, Ottawa has hit the oil and gas sector with punitive regulation, has imposed bans on plastics and is phasing-in an outright ban of conventionally powered vehicles.

Mark Carney, who has spent recent years cheerleading disastrous Liberal policies while simultaneously attempting to marshal as much of the world’s money into his bureaucratic climate crusade as possible, now proposes — like Kathleen Wynne — to make everything worse with a more inefficient carbon tax, a carbon tariff to compound the negative effects of Trump’s tariffs and an increased regulatory burden on businesses.

Of course, if Canadians don’t want four more years of Liberal pain, we have it in our power to prevent Carney from being like Kathleen: we don’t have to re-elect the Liberals. Ontario suffered the very painful consequences of doing that in 2014. Canadians should not make the same mistake in 2025.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.

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