Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Political Matters of Concern

Transfer of Power to
Prime Minister-Designate

• Transfer of Power to Prime Minister-Designate

Economic Pragmatism Versus Politics

• The World of Mark Carney Ain't the World of You and Me

Political Matters of Concern

Transfer of Power to Prime Minister-Designate

With the Prime Minister-designate of Canada to be sworn in this week, the issue of the transfer of power has come to the fore. When Trudeau announced he was leaving office on January 6, he said, "I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process."

On March 4, Trudeau told reporters the date for the swearing in of the Prime Minister-designate is not determined. "That will be up to a conversation between the new leader and myself to figure out how long a transition is needed," he said. "It should happen reasonably quickly but there are a lot of things to do in a transition like this, particularly at this complicated time in the world."

David Zussman, who was involved in Jean Chretien's transition to power, told CBC that there are "legal and technical steps" to be taken. There are "a huge number of really important elements in the transition," he said and they require advance planning. Without that, there is a "situation where they are sworn in and they don't know what to do next."

According to the CBC, "the Liberal Party says it is working with the campaign directors of all the candidates on the transition to becoming party leader, preparing for the next election and key decisions involving the Party that will have to be made in the first hours and days after the leader is chosen."

This involves using the resources of the Privy Council Office (PCO) and those of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) headed by Katie Telford.

The PCO serves both the Cabinet and the PMO.

Zussman told CBC, "We have a long tradition in Canada, even for the opposition parties, to have conversations with the Privy Council in advance of an election to signal, again, what their interests are, what their intentions are, so that the public service can be ready to welcome a new government."

CBC also reported experts saying that the selection of a "transition team" is particularly important given that the Prime Minister-designate will "inherit a minority government" with opposition parties promising to force an election. The transition team, it says, is required to "sketch out plans for the first days and weeks."

This is not only yet another admission of the power and privilege afforded the cartel parties with seats in the House of Commons but confirms how the Liberal Party has used the prorogation of Parliament and its leadership race and now the transition period as an election campaign.

Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick told the CBC that the public service has overseen 13 transitions in 40 years and that "succession within the same party" has the advantage of "a certain amount of continuity." The transition from Stephen Harper to Justin Trudeau in 2015, Wernick said, took 16 days. "The ability for (the new prime minister) to do that this time depends on their transition team and how many decisions they've made in advance," he said.

The selection of cabinet ministers and the staffing of the PMO with partisan advisors is said to be a key question. One of the reasons why an inner-party transition is said to be easier is that there are individuals who have already been vetted for security and submitted their filings to the Ethics Commissioner about potential conflicts of interest. If the Prime Minister-designate wants "new blood," Wernick said, "the transition team can start vetting them now." Security screening can take "an eternity," he said.

For a prospective cabinet minister, it involves "a thorough review of [their] social media history, in addition to police checks and reviews of any debts or conflicts of interest."

If Parliament is summoned on March 24 as scheduled, Canada will have been under executive rule with Parliament prorogued since January 6 -– a total of three months and seven days. This is more than a quarter of a year since the House last sat on December 18, 2024.

Should that be the case, since the Prime Minister Designate has no seat, the Deputy Prime Minister, if she or he has a seat, would presumably lead the Party in the House of Commons.

It is also possible that once he is sworn in as Prime Minister Mark Carney will ask the Governor General to call an election. If this is the case, a 36 or 51 day election period will follow.

What to Expect from Mark Carney

Already Canada's industrial workers are talking about "Carney's Carnage." This refers to the carnage they are thinking Mark Carney is sure to leave in his wake.

Having Mark Carney as Prime Minister is part of the trend under the neo-liberal anti-social offensive of putting business people from outside the political establishment into positions of power within government ministries. It amounts to the direct usurpation by international financial oligarchs and the technocrats in their service of the state power of the countries called liberal democracies. It goes hand in hand with how the cartel parties use their majorities in Parliament, or coalitions of cartel parties if the government is in a minority position, to pass laws which make it legal for Ministers to wield prerogative powers with impunity to do whatever the business interests decide.

Of course, to legitimate this, everything is done in the name of the common good, greening the economy, economic prosperity for all, national security and the like. Life experience tells another story. The front runner in achieving the all-round deterioration of the conditions of life and work of the working people in Canada is Quebec's Premier François Legault. For example, In 2023 the Legault government brought in legislation to restructure the health care system and create a new agency, Santé Québec, with its directors hand-picked by the Minister of Health from the CEOs of private industry.

For that matter, Donald Trump in the United States is a prime example of putting un-elected oligarchs such as Elon Musk in positions of power where he acts with impunity. But these examples are not unique. This trend has become the new normal wherever ruling elites in what are called the liberal democracies are clinging to power by destroying what they call the institutions of representative democracy, further eliminating even the token role the people have played in the past by belonging to political parties.

In this regard, Carney represents this trend par excellence. In 2018, he was listed as one of most powerful individuals in the world in the book titled Giants: The Global Power Elite. The book provided "a look at the top 389 most powerful players in world capitalism" at the time. It documented the "cementing at the global level of political and economic power in [a] transnational elite through an unprecedented concentration of financial capital and through the political influence that this economic control wields over states as well as intergovernmental and transnational state institutions."

Far from reducing the criticism of Mark Carney to calling him a multi-millionaire who must disclose his assets, Canadians need to change the direction of the economy by becoming decision-makers themselves. The aim must be to activate the productive forces to exercise control over their own productive powers by humanizing the natural and social environment. All the country's resources -– both the human factor and technology -– must be activated to bring into being a world which puts humanity at the centre of its concerns, not the interests of the international financial oligarchy.

"Heart or no heart," the world of the oligarchs does not belong to you and me.

Economic Pragmatism Versus Politics

The World of Mark Carney Ain't the World
of You and Me

Mark Carney belongs to a world which is not the one most Canadians live in. He is not a political man, but a technocrat used to rubbing shoulders with financiers and oligarchs of all stripes whose main aim in life is to be billionaires and now trillionaires. They do so by claiming they are saving the planet and managing markets with heart. This is done by applying technology to resolve the problems society and nature face at this time.

The trajectory of this person amply reveals who he rubs shoulders with. After obtaining his BA in economics at Harvard (1988), Mark Carney obtained a Masters and a PhD in the same subject at Oxford University. He worked for Goldman Sachs Asset Management while studying and after graduation in London, Tokyo, New York, Moscow and Toronto for 13 years.

According to a 2005 item in the Globe & Mail, Carney "earned his spurs" at the Goldman Sachs Moscow office "where he advised on the privatizations that, for better and for worse, transformed Russia's state-owned industries into private enterprises." In other words, the creation of the oligarchs who got uber rich by running off with the assets of the former Soviet Union.

According to Britannica Money, as he rose to become a managing director, "he helped post-apartheid South Africa gain access to international bond markets and advised Russia as it navigated a financial crisis in 1998."

After Goldman Sachs, Carney became Deputy Governor at the Bank of Canada in 2003. He was seconded from the bank to an appointment as Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Finance by the Paul Martin Liberal Government, two days after Parliament was convoked on October 19, 2003. His appointment was made under a Special Appointment Regulation by Order-In-Council, a provision that allows for the appointee to be exempted from the Public Service Employment Act when it is deemed to be "neither practicable nor in the best interests of the Public Service to apply" normal hiring procedures. His salary was set at $180,500 — $212,300.

One of the projects he worked on was the controversial taxation of income trusts during both the Martin minority government (2003-2006) and that of the subsequent Harper Conservatives.[1] Under Harper, he negotiated the final steps in the privatization of Petro-Canada's last holdings. The Globe & Mail reported in 2006 that Carney had walked away from "one of the top-paying jobs on Wall Street – a $3-million-plus-a-year partnership ... to become a public servant."

Carney returned to the Bank of Canada as Governor, appointed by Harper in 2008, where he stayed until 2013. During this period he was also appointed as Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, replacing Italian banker Mario Draghi in 2011.[2] He served as Chairman for two terms from 2011 until 2018. In 2018, he became Governor of the Bank of England, a position which ended in 2020.

In December 2019, Carney was appointed UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. He launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) which brought together 160 firms with $70 trillion in assets involved in "zero initiatives" across the globe. Along with King Charles, then Prince of Wales, Carney worked to create the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which brought together 43 banks with assets of U.S. $28 trillion. According to news reports, it has not been smooth sailing in the recent period with contradictions mounting between the banks and state institutions. In January 2025, five of Canada's largest banks — Bank of Montreal (BMO), National Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), and Scotiabank — withdrew from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), a part of the GFANZ. They followed the lead of six of the largest U.S. banks and announced their withdrawal. Other asset management corporations such as BlackRock also pulled out.

In August 2020, while he was still serving as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action, Brookfield Asset Management appointed Carney as Vice Chair and Head of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Impact Fund Investing. Brookfield manages assets of over $1 trillion. It says it invests "on behalf of institutions and individuals around the world with the goal of helping them to create long-term, sustainable wealth." It inserts its own capital into the transactions. The corporation said Carney would develop a "group of funds that will work to combine positive social and environmental outcomes with strong risk-adjusted returns for investors." Worldwide, Brookfield Asset Management has 250,000 employees including 2,500 "investment professionals."

In September 2020, California-based Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) which describes itself as "one of the world's premier fixed income investment managers," announced the appointment of Carney to its Global Advisory Board. The purpose of the Board, PIMCO says, is to provide its "investment professionals with insights on global economic, political, and strategic developments and their relevance for financial markets."

Carney served on the Board alongside former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who is the Chair of the Board, Gordon Brown, former U.K. Prime Minister and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ng Kok Song, former Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department, Joshua Bolten, former White House Chief of Staff, and Jean-Claude Trichet, former President of the European Central Bank.

In February 2021, Stripe, a tech company which provides online payment and business management software, appointed Carney to its Board of Directors. Stripe says it serves 100 companies in over 140 countries and territories which process payments of more than $1 billion annually. It has dual headquarters in San Francisco and the tax-avoidance haven of Ireland, as well as offices in London, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo. On his appointment, Carney praised Stripe as a pioneer in the "new digital economy" that "has been breaking down barriers to global trade and accelerating economic output." Stripe's clients include Zoom, Slack, Wayfair, Maersk, Shopify and Amazon.

All to say that Carney is considered uber qualified in the world of finance and will now use his considerable prerogative powers as Canada's Prime Minister under Charles III King of England, to create a cabinet of like-minded people who consider that to be efficient, governments must be run by savvy business people.

Notes

1. The controversy involved a period of uncertainty about whether or not the Liberal government would tax income trusts, a tool which was increasingly being used by corporations to distribute cash flow directly to investors so that the corporation does not pay taxes. In 2005, it was estimated that the federal government had lost some $300 million in 2004 due to this tax diversion method. On November 23, 2005, then finance minister Ralph Goodale announced the government would cut the tax on corporate dividends and would make no changes to the tax on income trusts. In the hours before his announcement trading volumes and prices in many income trusts and dividend-paying stocks skyrocketed. The RCMP later charged Serge Nadeau, the General Director of Analysis, Tax Policy Branch for using confidential government information for personal benefit.

2. According to its website, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) is an international body that "promotes international financial stability; it does so by coordinating national financial authorities and international standard-setting bodies as they work toward developing strong regulatory, supervisory and other financial sector policies. It fosters a level playing field by encouraging coherent implementation of these policies across sectors and jurisdictions." It "coordinates national financial authorities and international standard-setting bodies."

"More specifically, the FSB was established to:

-Assess vulnerabilities affecting the global financial system as well as to identify and review, on a timely and ongoing basis within a macroprudential perspective, the regulatory, supervisory and related actions needed to address these vulnerabilities and their outcomes.

-Promote coordination and information exchange among authorities responsible for financial stability.

-Monitor and advise on market developments and their implications for regulatory policy.

-Monitor and advise on best practice in meeting regulatory standards.

-Undertake joint strategic reviews of the international standard-setting bodies and coordinate their respective policy development work to ensure this work is timely, coordinated, focused on priorities and addresses gaps.

-Set guidelines for establishing and supporting supervisory colleges.

-Support contingency planning for cross-border crisis management, particularly with regard to systemically important firms.

-Collaborate with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to conduct Early Warning Exercises.

-Promote member jurisdictions' implementation of agreed commitments, standards and policy recommendations, through monitoring of implementation, peer review and disclosure."

Carney got the job when the Chairman Mario Draghi was appointed Prime Minister of Italy from 2021-2022. In 2024 he produced the Draghi Report on European Competitiveness and the Future of the European Union. It was one of two widely anticipated reports on EU reforms in 2024, together with the Letta Report on the EU Internal Market.

Draghi followed a similar career path as Carney. During the 1980s he worked for the World Bank in Washington DC before becoming Director General of the Italy Treasury Board. He went from a ten-year job at Goldman Sachs to become Director General of the Bank of Italy from 2006 to 2011.

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