Mark Carney is the Anti-Colvin

It is somewhat comforting to know, despite how few and far between, that people of Richard Colvin’s moral character exist within the Canadian Public Service. I wished I could say the same thing about Mark Carney, except Mark Carney is the polar opposite of a Richard Colvin. Richard Colvin respects the truth and the importance of Parliament in the way that Mark Carney chooses to clearly abuse both of them.

When Mark Carney went before a similar Parliamentary Committee before being appointed as Governor of the Bank of Canada, he was asked some very pointed questions by Liberal MP Garth Turner and NDP Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair about income trusts.

Both of these elected representatives, in their own way, wanted to know more about Mark Carney’s role within the Department of Finance as the architect of the Harper government’s income trusts policy. The most telling and penetrating question was the one asked by Thomas Mulcair, for the simple fact that the NDP had supported the Income Trust tax in the first place. That didn’t stop Thomas Mulcair from inquiring whether the tax had achieved its stated goal in light of the vast number of takeovers of trusts, by foreign interests that had occurred.

Mark Carney, unlike Richard Colvin, refused to answer the questions that were being put to him, by these two elected Members of Parliament. Instead, Mark Carney responded as any coward and deceptive minded person would. He evade these simple factual questions by invoking a bunch of hog wash about how advice to Ministers is confidential. And yet neither Garth Turner nor Thomas Mulcair were asking him about what advice he gave to Jim Flaherty. Garth Turner simply wanted to know whether Mark Carney anticipated that investors ( along with the CPP) would lose $35 billion of their retirement savings or not and Thomas Mulcair simple wanted to know whether more taxes were being lost as a results of trusts or as a result of the large number takeovers of trusts like Prime West Energy by Abu Dhabi Energy.

Mark Carney reverted to the worst conduct that Canadians can expect of their public servant. He avoided revealing the truth in order to hide his incompetence and that of his Minister, Jim Flaherty. He evaded their questions to hide the truth and cover his sorry ass. Perhaps he learned that job survival skill working for Goldman Sachs?

Such disreputable conduct on the part of Mark Carney should come as no surprise as being the Modus Operandi of the civil service and the Department of Finance, as you will recall the testimony of Senior Department of Finance official Brian Ernewein ( a lawyer no less) who upon being questioned about the “bad science” that was behind the government’s claims of tax leakage, testified “I guess if we were incompetent, we wouldn’t admit to it.”

I wonder whether the same goes for being corrupt and deceitful? Would they readily admit to that?

Here is the evasive testimony of Mark Carney caught on tape.