January 17, 2025
Mark Carney has been on the Canadian political leadership radar for more than a decade , bleeping away well before Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were elected in 2015. He continued to feed his political ambitions over the years, including his time as a central banker hectoring corporations for hoarding “dead money .” Then he moved on to his guiding ideological theme, which is that if humans are allowed to pursue their own interests in a free-market economy, they will destroy life on Earth.
Carney’s grand scheme to remake the Canadian and global economies, and impose a new moral structure on decision-making, was put forward through 570 pages of dense advocacy in his 2021 book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All . If he wins the Liberal party leadership race , Carney would certainly raise the political style and intellectual tone of Canadian politics, but in policy he’s really just another Justin.
While he claims to be a Liberal “outsider,” Carney has been a backer of Trudeau policies, including the carbon tax, which he says “has served a purpose — up until now.” Carney is also advisory board chair at Canada 2020 , described in a 2017 Maclean’s magazine article as “the ‘progressive’ think-tank that really runs Canada.” His leftist sympathies were on display in 2011 when he said the anarcho Occupy Wall Street movement was “entirely constructive.”
Carney’s progressive ideas are also on full display in Value(s). At one point in the book, he hitches his intellectual wagon to teen scientist Greta Thunberg and her “ How Dare You! ” speech to the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. “There it was in black and white,” Carney fawned, “with the clarity and certainty of youth: we were failing.” With Greta at his side, “you are always conscious of misplaced priorities, of the time slipping away, of the need to rearrange national priorities and act. Now.”
To fix the teenager’s looming “existential” crisis, as he repeatedly describes climate change, Carney proposes an alternative economic model — The Net Zero Revolution — which involves transforming “the information, tools, and markets at the heart of finance so that every financial decision takes climate change into account.” Rather than allowing corporations to focus on sales and profits, they must now adopt other “purposes.”
Making a profit is good and essential, conceded Carney, but corporate chief executives, bankers and boards must bring political objectives into decision-making, including environmental, social and governance (ESG) purposes such as employee diversity and measuring carbon emissions throughout a corporation’s supply chain.
In Value(s), Carney claimed that the ESG and stakeholder purposes could enhance shareholder returns and achieve what he describes as “divine coincidence.” Under divine coincidence, corporations that focus on non-profit objectives can, seemingly miraculously, achieve even better profit performance. “In theory,” said Carney, “the more that society values the transition to net zero, the more valuable companies that are part of the solution will be because of greater demand for their products.” There is evidence, he said, that as society comes to value net zero and other objectives, the more value investors will place on corporations pursuing divine coincidence.
But Carney’s miracles have failed to materialize. Over the past week alone, the umbrella agency for Carney’s model, known as the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero ( GFANZ ) —of which he is co-chair — is said to be “ in crisis ” as the world’s major financial firms pull away from membership. Abandoning GFANZ implies that major financial firms are finding it difficult if not impossible to achieve the promised divine outcome. Statements from the financial giants suggest the problem arises around legal and financial confusion over the meaning of ESG and other purposes.
Royal Bank of Canada chief executive Dave McKay said the real problem may be that Carney’s net zero financial organization “isn’t the right mechanism to do it.” The world’s largest financial institution, BlackRock, said memberships in net zero alliances “have caused confusion regarding BlackRock’s practices and subjected us to legal inquires from various officials.” Along with many companies, BlackRock has been accused of “greenwashing” for mislabelling fossil fuel investments as “sustainable.”
BlackRock was once a Carney hero. In the 2021 edition of Value(s), BlackRock was hailed as one of a growing number of institutions that have “made the connection between purpose and profit.” But the second 2022 print edition dropped the BlackRock reference as part of a 10-page cut that also removed references to two other global companies, the French dairy giant Danone and British consumer goods giant Unilever. Reasons for editing out the companies were not given, although both Danone and Unilever were later charged with greenwashing .
Accusations that corporations are greenwashing and faking their ESG achievements is a natural product of the structure of Carney’s net zero corporate governance theory. The key problem is the impossibility of identifying, defining and measuring corporate attempts to establish non-monetary purposes.
Despite the problems and setbacks, Carney has a new book coming in May, titled The Hinge: Time to Build an Even Better Canada . The promotion blurb promises the Liberal party’s newest leadership candidate will tackle “the scourge of autocratic governing and our growing confusion between value and values.” To fix the mess, Carney sees a solution in “two of the most profound — and rapid — economic and social transformations in human history: the net zero revolution and the AI transformation.”
The Hinge release date is May 13. Justin Carney could be prime minister before then.
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