The Ben Mulroney Show - Mark Carney scrummed for all of two minutes on his first day after winning the leadership race

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Mark Carney scrummed for all of two minutes on his first day after being selected as the next Prime Minister Guest: Robert Fife, Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau Chief  If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With partial shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own less than one full share, so expensive stocks are within reach. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. Mark Carney is now the prime minister designate and the leader of the Liberal Party and yesterday, finally, he spoke with reporters. Let's listen. With respect to President Trump, I'm not yet Prime Minister. His interlocutor is Prime Minister Trudeau. And I look forward to the opportunity. When are you going to be sworn in? We will, as I said, I just spoke with the Prime Minister at length on issues around the transition.

It'll be quick. We'll be coming back to you soon. The good news is that you will be seeing probably more of me than you want and you will have other opportunities and I will be making an announcement on that. What did you tell caucus today? What did I tell caucus today? So this is important. The first thing, I went to caucus today because you start as you mean to go on. And we are a liberal team, and so it's incredibly important for me to hear directly from the members of caucus the concerns of Canadians on the ground, their priorities. As I said last night, they're the voices of their communities and they're the conscience of the party. There's tremendous energy in that group.

We know this is a crucial time for our country. We're united to serve Canadians and we will build this country. I would play you more, but that's pretty much it. That's what we got from the man who any moment will take over the reins of power and be our Prime Minister. That is the extent of the accountability and transparency that we are getting from Mark Carney. It shouldn't surprise any of us because that was the MO throughout the entire leadership race and now he finds himself a hair away from being our leader and we got what

two minutes worth of time in a scrum that is not that's not enough for me but according to the Minister of Employment Steve McKinnon he told Vashi Kapilos Mark Carney's being very transparent. Why didn't he tell the truth? he was asked that question? Mr. Carney has explained many times that that decision was ratified. By shareholders, but he did have involvement in it. But it happened after he had departed. And I think all of this has been discussed very transparently. I don't think Minister McKinnon knows what transparent means. The saying something doesn't make it so.

And I've said this before, I'll say it again. One of the reasons Mark Carney has been successful is that his image, his brand, is diametrically opposed to his predecessor. One was all about the flash and the other is all about the substance. And Mark Carney is deliberate in the words he uses and the words he chooses.

And when he says something that is inaccurate, one has to wonder why, because he does not, it feels to me the man he wants to project, the image he wants to project, is one of deliberate thought. And somebody who is an adult in the room and an adult at the table. And saying something that isn't true is not being transparent. It's simple as that. If you say something that's not true and you are a serious person, then that is not transparency. It doesn't matter if you call it transparency, it is the exact opposite.

I would love to invite Minister McKinnon onto the show to discuss all manner of things. The invitation is open to him and to members of the Liberal caucus and the cabinet. There's always a welcoming seat and a welcoming microphone for any of them. And so that considered an open invitation. So, okay, so we got two minutes from the soon to be prime minister of the country. We also got a full press conference from Pierre Poliev yesterday.

I find it really interesting that we got one from the leader of the opposition and not from the prime minister designate. Here's what a Pierre Poliev said when asked by a reporter about what experience he has to deal with Donald Trump. Mr. Poliev, what economic and diplomatic experience do you have to go up against Donald Trump? Quite a lot actually.

So I was the minister of jobs and Housing in the Harper government, during which time housing costs half as much as it does today. I helped Mr. Harper cut the GST, cut income tax, cut business tax, and balance the budget. Over my time in Parliament, I've been scrutinizing and studying the books on the Public Accounts Committee, the Operations Committee, the Finance Committee. Asked and answered. Very good. Thank you very much, Mr. Poliev.

He went on. He was asked about all the policy ideas. That's right. All the policy ideas that he says he was right about, all the stuff that liberals now say they're in favor of or they were wrong about. He lists all the reasons why. You know what? He's actually had his finger on the pulse for quite some time. And if you want any proof that my economic ideas are the best, the liberals are all trying to pretend that they're copying them right before the election. All the big economic questions of the last five years. Mark Carney has been wrong and exactly wrong and I have been right. I said five years ago the money printing would cause inflation. He said deflation

was on the horizon. I turned out to be right. I said the carbon tax would drive up food prices and it did. Throw them up 37% faster in Canada than in the United States of America. I was the first parliamentarian to predict that we would have the inflation crisis, while Carney, Freeland, Trudeau, and others were saying that we would not. I was the first one to be, along with my conservative colleagues, fighting for pipelines. Pipelines now everyone claims that they support after opposing them for the last 10 years. So if Mr. Carney is so smart on economics, how is it that he was so wrong for so long

on all of the economic issues? One thing I don't have experience with is taking jobs out of Canada, moving them to the United States, selling out our resource workers to support Middle Eastern resource workers. That's not the kind of experience that I have, but that's not the kind of experience that we want. Show me one thing that he said that was wrong. One thing he's right on all of that stuff.

All of that is on the public record. And to those of you who have this automatic knee jerk hatred towards Pierre Poliev, who claim that he only speaks in soundbites and denigrates people with cheap shots and nicknames, listen to what he just said there and tell me where he is wrong. He's talking about actual policy initiatives. He's talking about ideas that were put forth by the liberal government, not ideas, policies that were put forth that hurt the country that he stood against.

And now in many cases, those same people are reversing course and trying to take credit for his positions. This is a man who's standing there taking questions from the media, something our, our prime minister designate has not done in any meaningful way in any way that rises to the level required of somebody in his position. To me, this is a tale of two completely different people with two completely different views on what Canadians deserve and how you communicate with them in this exceptionally trying time and this time of crisis.

And at that same podium, during that same press conference, he took Mark Carney to task. He's the guy that sold out to Trump. Six days after Donald Trump threatened Canada with tariffs to steal our jobs, Mark Carney announced to Brookfield shareholders that he would move his headquarters from Canada to New York. And when you asked him about it, he lied to your face. We got it in writing and we proved it. He sold out Canada. He put his profit ahead of our people.

And he did exactly what Donald Trump wanted. Never before have we had a Prime Minister so conflicted and compromised and yet so little scrutinized, just like when he supported carbon taxes in Canada while investing in American coal. He opposed Canadian pipelines while his company bought Middle East pipelines. He has millions of dollars of financial interests that run against Canada's national interests. He gets rich, making Canadians poor. You can be sure about one thing.

Donald Trump's gonna have a briefing on his desk of all of Mark Carney's American investments. Good luck to you, Mr. Carney, because that's Pierre Poliev without breaking a sweat. You know, up until this moment, David, it's really been the resume of Mark Carney that's been running. It hasn't been the man, Mark Carney, and he's going to have to run now and he's going to

have to do interviews and he's going to have to do debates and it'll be interesting. That was a former conservative cabinet minister, Lisa Wray, talking about what Mark Carney needs to do now to be accountable to the Canadian people and to allow them to get to know him so they can make an informed decision once we all ultimately go to the polls. The question I have is why is Mark Carney avoiding the media? And to hopefully help answer that, I'm joined now by Robert Fife, the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau Chief. Bob, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show.

Welcome. Happy to be here. So a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was a week ago, Bob, I heard you on television talking about this sort of his inaccessibility to the press. And I don't want to ascribe anything to you, but it did sound, I sensed what I thought was exasperation or frustration in your voice.

Would that be fair to say? Yeah, look, I mean, we're in, we were in the process of a liberal leadership campaign. It was pretty clear that Mark Carney was going to be the front runner. This is a man who has a very impressive record as a central banker and as an in the business community. But we don't know a lot about him in terms of kind of in-depth ways he looks at policies. And so this is an opportunity to ask some questions. The frustration that we had as journalists is that he was not very available to reporters. At the most, we'd get two questions and then his handlers would haul them away. When he has had questions asked, he got himself into trouble as he did when he claimed. Actually, it was a question that I'd

asked one of our reporters in Montreal to ask Mr. Kearney about the movement of Brookfield assets management from Toronto to New York. We asked him about that and he didn't like the question and he said you got your facts wrong and he said I wasn't the chair of Brookfield Asset Management when it was moved which in fact as we found out the next day that is completely wrong and then we had to wait another week to try to get him at another event in the Hamilton area on a St. Louis stone to get him and ask him. And then he said, well, he was just imprecise. And then he explained that this was just a move to get access to New York Stock Exchange

indices and that there were no job losses. But he could have said that right from the beginning. And we've had similar things with him, it was skirting questions in terms of what he's going to do with his financial assets and public disclosure. He has actually put everything into a blind trust, just revealed that today. But again, it was like he didn't want people to ask him those kind of questions. And that's just not going to be good enough. When election campaign is called, I mean, I would hope that none of our colleagues are going to roll over and get away with, he's

going to have to stand up and take tough questions. And, you know, Ben, the thing is that he's a central banker. He's worked in the,'s worked in the governor of the Bank of Canada, the governor of the Bank of England. He's used to the financial media being quite deferential. People don't tend to go hard after central bankers, but he's not wearing that hat anymore. He's wearing the hat of somebody who will be prime minister and wants to continue to be prime minister. And, you know, you're going to get tougher be prime minister. And you're gonna get tougher questions. Yeah, and, Bob, I mean, you know that. Well, I do.

I mean, I say I wasn't even technically in the arena and I carry some of the scars from the battles that my dad was in. But battle testing is part of it. You have to, you've gotta learn how to deal with the blood sport that is politics. And I struggle to understand the logic behind bubble wrapping this man as he is about to get into the arena with somebody who has been sharpening his skills for the better part

of two decades in Pierre Poliev. This is, he faced no tough questions from his competitors for the leadership. The press did not have the ability or the chance to push him. And so he was treated with kid gloves, unfortunately, during the leadership. And here we are two days after assuming the leadership. He still hasn't sat down for a long-form interview. I don't understand the logic knowing what is the buzz saw that's coming. Well, he has not had a news conference at all.

I mean, yesterday he- It was a scrum. Said a few, well, he said a few words going into the prime minister to see the prime minister. And then he said a few words when he came out of the liberal caucus, but they were like, they were less than a minute conversations or I'm sure with like 40 seconds and then he was gone, which is not good enough. You know, we have to, we have to put our leaders

to the test of being able to answer questions. Everybody else does it. Francois Blanchet does it. Pierre Pauli does it. so does Jarrett Mink saying this is part of the political process. They're being very careful with him. He's not a seasoned politician and they are clearly trying to run a campaign that guards him as much as possible. I, again, I struggle to understand the logic. I mean, this is, this flies in the face of the sort of the notion that this man is the agent of change in a party that is in no way a party of change,

at least if you take the last 10 years as an indicator. So for him to conduct the Herculean task of reframing the last 10 years, he needs to put more in the window. I struggle to understand the logic about it, Bob. I mean, at some point, at some point that becomes the story, doesn't it? Yeah, it will become the story. I mean, you know, we expect a cabinet shuffle either tomorrow or sometime this week. And one will hope that when he comes out, he's going to take more than two or three questions. If he was really smart, he would say, I will meet you in the

parliament and the National Press Theater in a half an an hour and we'll have, you know, half an hour or 40 minutes of questions. Yeah. That's the way to do it. I mean, that's really, given his history, Bob, that's really throwing yourself into the deep end where all the sharks are. Well, he's supposed to be a really smart guy.

Well, obviously he is a very smart guy. If you're a smart guy, you know, meet the test. Yeah. In your, in your experience, you've covered a lot of campaigns and a lot of prime ministers. Is there a historical analog to this? I mean, have you ever seen any, anything close to this? Well, I've seen things where leaders try to hide from the press because they're ahead. I would try to hide from the press because they're ahead. You see, there's a famous election campaign in 1980 after Joe Clark lost. And Pierre Elliott Trudeau just basically got on the plane

and flew most of the time, so he didn't have to answer anybody's questions, and he won a majority of government. So yeah, there was precedent for this, frankly. But but but this isn't a this isn't an honest to goodness front runner campaign. I mean, he's not there are certain polls that put him ahead and they're certainly doing a heck of a lot better in the polls now than than they were before the leadership race. But this is not a pure front runner campaign.

It's not like I get the old political adage. When you're ahead, don't give them anything to punch at. But this is a party with a lot of baggage. This is a party that a lot of Canadians are expecting some explanations for. Why should I trust you with a fourth mandate, even if you've changed your leader? I mean, the questions abound. And so, so I don't get this belief that that he's a he's a front runner and therefore he should just do nothing.

Well, it's so far it's working for them. The polls are showing them down a dead eat with the with the conservatives. And there's a big problem with the conservatives. Polly doesn't know how to change his message. You know not from Canada's broken and it's certainly not the carbon tax anymore, but they're still on the carbon tax. They're trying to move off Canada's broken to Canada's first. But I mean, I was stunned yesterday that they were still back on the carbon tax when the number one concern of Canadians is how to deal with Donald Trump. Mr. Pollard has some good policy ideas, some of them which have been stolen from the liberals

from Mr. Carney has already taken some of his ideas. But they better figure out a new strategy to counter Carney and to deal with Donald Trump or they're going to be in big trouble. Well, Bob Fife of the Globe and Mail, we know that you will be keeping the pressure on and we appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. You're welcome. Ciao.

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