Carney is naive on foreign affairs, Israel, bureaucracy and more...

Our PM is very smart on some things, and on most things, out of his depth.

I’ve been watching more of that interview where Mark Carney made his foolish comments about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s an interesting watch on many fronts and disturbing on others.

I wrote about the Netanyahu comments in my latest column for the Toronto Sun and I encourage you to read that as I share information that I’ve never published before. This is particularly around the issue of how Mark Carney’s personal positions on the Middle East conflict, which is very anti-Israel, is hurting Canada-U.S. trade talks.

But back to the interview.

Mishal Husain is actually quite good. It’s a friendly interview, which is how I conduct sit down interviews. As a mentor explained to me early in my career, it doesn’t matter who they are, if they come into your studio they are a guest and should be treated as such.

That doesn’t mean you can’t poke and prod, but I don’t like and don’t do angry interviews where people yell at each other. Plus, the audience really doesn’t like it.

So, while Husain is friendly with Carney, she does push him on key points of interest to him and her audience.

Carney is fully naive on Israel…

Whatever strengths Mark Carney may possess on economics, they simply don’t translate into the world of foreign relations. That is clear when Husain turns to asking about why his government took the stance that it did in recognizing a Palestinian State.

These were his words just before his comments on promising to arrest Netanyahu.”

“I would say the foreign policy priority was the recognition, not the end,” Carney said.

“The end is a free and viable Palestinian state living side by side peace and security with the State of Israel. That’s the end goal. What we saw, just to be clear about why we did what we did, was that the actions of the current government, the Netanyahu government, were explicitly designed to end any possibility of a state of Palestine in violation of the UN Charter and going against Canadian government policy of whatever political stripe since 1947.”

First off, he said that the priority was the recognition of a Palestinian State, not the actual creation of a Palestinian State. I know that Liberals hate terms like virtue signalling, but Mark Carney was using Canadian foreign policy to virtue signal.

And, as I explained in today’s Toronto Sun column, it blew up Canada-U.S. trade talks - read the column.

Back to Carney’s comments and why he and other world leaders decided to announce their support for a Palestinian State while Gaza was still controlled by the terrorist group Hamas and the West Bank/Judea and Samaria were still controlled by the highly undemocratic Palestinian Authority/Fatah Party.

“We did this because the prospect was receding, as opposed to viewing it as any sort of panacea, game changer, fundamentally immediately leading to the outcome that we and others want,” Carney said.

Again, more virtue signally.

For him, on this issue and on foreign affairs generally, Carney is showing that he is out of his depth.

Relationships are important, but he keeps blowing them up…

During the interview, Husain asked Carney what surprised him about the job and at the beginning he described how it is relentless, as close to 24/7 as you can get. If you haven’t lived this or been close to it, as I have, then it’s hard to understand how all-consuming these jobs can be.

The job is never ending, relentless, and not for the lazy.

Given that Carney was the central banker in Canada and Britain, I’m surprised he didn’t fully understand this. That isn’t the part of the answer that bothers me though, it’s his comments on personal relationships that is troubling.

“The the importance of and the fluidity of international relations. I knew international relations are important, but the fluidity of those relations and the importance of those relationships, those personal relationships with with world leaders, some of which I had in advance, but others I’ve had to develop that has surprised me, the degree to which that is important,” Carney said.

Not to keep going back to my column in the Sun today, or yesterday’s piece on Canada being a bad trading partner, but my word, how is he so clueless.

This is a guy who keeps putting Canada in a worse position because he can’t properly manage the relationship between Ottawa and Washington. Carney is Canada’s PM, I want the country to succeed, therefore I need him to succeed but my goodness, this guy can be clueless on anything outside of his very tight wheelhouse.

Watch the whole interview here.

Another bureaucracy, just what we need…

On Monday, the Carney government did what they appear to do best, they announced another bureaucracy. This one wasn’t on housing or defence procurement, which they’ve both announced, this was on money laundering, fraud and extortion.

Forgive me, but don’t we already have federal agencies to deal with such matters?

Fintrac and OSFI, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, come to mind immediately. In fact, those two were raised to Franky Bubbles, AKA, François-Philippe Champagne, our Minister of Finance and National Revenue during his news conference.

A hat tip to Marc Nixon on X for the video clip of this moment of insanity.

I had hoped that when he was elected that Mark Carney wouldn’t become a prisoner of the bureaucracy. It seems that once again, I will be disappointed because all governments, to a degree become beholden to the bureaucracy.

It was fascinating having drinks with former Liberal and Conservative staffers at the Banff Forum on the weekend where they traded stories about bureaucrats too often getting in the way of what the government of the day wanted to do. In this instance, the government of the day is saying over and over again that we need more bureaucracy while also promising to move faster, the two things don’t work together.