Carney caught in China cash scandal—Poilievre demands answers on secret $276M loan

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre expressed outrage Tuesday that Prime Minister Mark Carney would meet with Chinese central bank officials in October 2024 to negotiate a loan for the Carney-chaired Brookfield Assets Management while he was economic advisor to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Carney left with a 1.96 billion yuan or $276 million (CDN) loan.

“After Justin Trudeau named Mark Carney his economic adviser, giving him massive power over public policy in Canada, Mr. Carney went over for meetings in Beijing, where he just had secret talks with the deputy governor of the Chinese central bank. Two weeks later, Brookfield got a quarter-billion dollar loan. What did they talk about? What did Mr. Carney, in his role as Trudeau economic adviser offer to China? Why would he be having secret meetings with top government controlled bankers about getting a quarter billion dollar loan while he was supposed to be acting in Canada's interest as the prime minister's economic adviser?”

The Conservative leader suggested it would be difficult for the new prime minister to “stand up to foreign interference when he is so financially compromised.” He described Carney as “a weak, out of touch leader so terribly compromised and conflicted, whose interests go against our national interests … Mark Carney will never be able to protect our national interests because he has massive financial conflicts of interest overseas. What we need now is not to give the Liberals a fourth term with a weak and compromised leader. What we need is a prime minister who will put Canada first for a change.”

It is only the latest revelation of Carney’s tenure as a chairman of Brookfield, a massive conglomerate which Carney moved to New York City before he announced that he was running for the leadership of the Liberal Party. As chairman of Brookfield, Carney invested billions in fossil fuels and pipelines even though Carney, as a senior advisor to the Trudeau government, was committed to net zero environmental policies and opposed the construction of pipelines.

Carney also has a history of being a promoter for China and its policies. As the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Change and co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), Carney actually expressed optimism that China – with all of its coal consumption and production of gas-guzzling automobiles – could be a world leader on green energy and net zero.

"China has made a huge contribution to the fight against climate change, not only in terms of its massive investment in clean technologies and exporting them to other countries, but also in actively developing the financial system needed for the green transition," he said.

Since at least 2019, Carney has been an enthusiastic advocate of the Chinese yuan replacing the US dollar as the preferred global currency. On March 10, 2024 Carney said at a conference in China:

"I have been arguing for many years that it would be more beneficial for the global system if our reserve currency system could be richer and more accurately reflect the weight of the Chinese economy in the global economy, given the rise of the Chinese economy."

At the China Development Forum Carney went onto say, “It is good that the Chinese currency has become the global reserve currency.”

He pointed out that to enhance the yuan's status as a reserve currency, expanding its international use will be one of the most important factors.”

Carney has also said this before. At the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in 2019, Carney advocated for both the Chinese currency and also a "new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency" (SHC), that could subsume the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

He gave this speech during President Donald Trump’s first administration after Trump had slapped tariffs on Chinese products. “And the most likely candidate for true reserve currency status, the Renminbi (RMB), has a long way to go before it is ready to assume the mantle. The initial building blocks are there. Already, China is the world’s leading trading nation, overtaking the US at the start of this decade. And the Renminbi is now more common than sterling in oil future benchmarks, despite having no share in the market prior to 2018.”

Carney’s apparent hypocrisy as a public figure who advocates extreme climate change policies while being a private sector executive who cozies up China and invests in fossil fuels has drawn the ire of many conservatives. In an interview with The Post Millennial, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss said Carney’s policies as governor of the Bank of England were corrosive to the British economy.

“One of the main culprits in the failure to revive the British economy is the Bank of England and the terrible monetary policies they pursued, printing too much money, enabling too much government spending. Mark Carney in particular, was fixated on net zero, and one of the key proponents of Britain hosting Cop26 one of the key proponents of us committing to even more unrealistic and disastrous net zero targets,” she said.

“And if you look at Britain's economy now, it's we haven't had any serious economic growth for quite some time, we've had too much immigration, GDP per capita is actually lower than it was, and we've got the highest energy prices in the world thanks to those net zero policies. But not only did Mark Carney advocate those policies as governor of the Bank of England at that last election, he backed Rachel Reeves, the now labour chancellor [of the exchequer] who has made the situation even worse through tax rises, through more net zero policies, through more government regulation – and Britain is teetering on the brink now of a financial crisis.”