Carney insults Ottawa, and all of Canada with his European babble...

Sometimes I listen to this man who is supposed to be very smart and wonder what the heck he is talking about.

Mark Carney was at it again on Monday, declaring Canada to be a European country. Or at least a Europeanish country, using language that I don’t understand.

He also took time during his news conference to insult the food available in the nation’s capital, nothing like insulting your home country on foreign soil.

“As the most European of the non-European countries, Canada looks first to the European Union to build a better world,” Carney said.

Why we are looking to build a better world with the increasingly irrelevant European Union is beyond me, but I’m not supersmart like Mark Carney is.

Carney has used these lines before, including during the election campaign, but what does he mean by them? Is he saying that the majority of Canadians can trace their roots to Europe or that European leaders align with his mushy left, green agenda.

My money is on the latter, but he appears to be hinting at the former.

I’ll be blunt, I’m not a European, I am a Canadian and I am a North American. That is a vitally distinct difference in terms of our culture, our outlook, our worldview.

I say this as someone whose parents hail from the United Kingdom – they started life as Europeans and are now Canadians. I say this as someone who visited family in Europe last year, my remaining uncles and cousins, and I can tell you that the European outlook is different than the North American outlook.

Maybe in Mark Carney’s rarified world, he doesn’t get that.

Sure, he was born in Fort Smith in the Northwest Territory and grew up in Edmonton. It’s true that he didn’t come from wealth or an elite status, but he has adapted to it well.

Carney got a scholarship to Harvard, he studied at Oxford, he worked at Goldman Sachs, he married Diana Fox the daughter of a wealthy British landowner. Mark Carney may not have been born into the manor, but he fits in so well.

So well that he insulted the entire restaurant and food scene in Ottawa.

Carney was asked a question while in Brussels that his boosters have called a masterclass in diplomacy. Speaking as a Canadian, and not a European as Carney often does, his answer was insulting.

“Do you feel more comfortable in Brussels than in Washington?” Carney was asked.

He laughed nervously, which basically answered the question before he even spoke. If you look at the full video, he allows EU President Ursula von der Leyen to answer the question put to her and then the camera pans back to him, still nervously laughing and telling us the real answer.

But what is worse, is that he not only feels more comfortable in Brussels than he does in Ottawa.

“Well, in terms of relative comfort. Well, it's very hot in Washington right now and very humid. I'm sure the dinner will be better, with all due respect to our American friends, will be better than would be in Ottawa, the dinner would be better tonight,” Carney said in his meandering and repetitive verbal style.

And with that, he insulted every chef, caterer and restaurateur in Ottawa that he will be relying on to serve up meals for himself and his guests while he is in office.

Look, I lived in Ottawa for more than 20 years. Its food scene is not as wide and deep as Montreal or Toronto, not as varied as Washington, London or Brussels, but it is still good.

Very good in fact.

That is especially true if you are Mark Carney with the ability to always have access to private chefs, to the best restaurants, the best caterers. When I was living in Ottawa at the same time as Carney in the 2004-2012 timeline, I was seeking out the best wings, he was apparently dreaming of dinner in Brussels.

I don’t expect Mark Carney to pretend not to be an elitist, not to be the wealthy and out of touch man that he is, but for him to insult Canada and Ottawa as he did is too much.

Not surprising, but too much.