By Jim Warren
Mark Carney’s quest for a New World Order was back in the news this month. And it was all thanks to over the top remarks made by his wife, Diana Fox Carney when she introduced him to the crowd at the Liberals’ annual convention in Montreal.
The introduction did not simply include the run of the mill platitudes you might expect from a woman introducing her politician husband to a partisan audience. Her remarks came off like they were tailor-made for introducing a megalomaniac with a messiah complex.
According to Fox Carney, our prime minister’s global leadership and his “now quite famous Davos speech,” are “providing a beacon of hope and a pathway forward in a confounding world.”
She says Canadians from communities across the country have been approaching her to say, “They can now sleep at night knowing Mark is our leader.”
Yes, humanity can now rest easy–a brave new world is just over the horizon. And what’s not to like about Carney’s vision? After all it won him a standing ovation in Davos this past January. Of course they liked it—Carney is one of them, a celebrated member of Team Davos.
Davos World is headquarters for an incestuous monoculture–a hotbed of virtuous group think. It is the incubator that nurtured and shaped the ideological framework for Carney’s New World Order. It is a world view that assumes a select group of financial, economic and political elites clearly know what’s best for the rest of us.
This may explain why the Liberals’ extensive list of policy failures seems to barely register with the prime minister. He appears oblivious to the concerns of ordinary Canadians, because he is. That’s what you can expect from a man on a mission. He’s laser-focused on paving the way to a pseudo-progressive Utopia run by his kind of people.
Issues like the rising cost of living, impossibly expensive groceries and sky-high housing prices are secondary. They clearly don’t drive the Carney agenda. Davos people have much bigger fish to fry. Most of them claim they are dedicated to rescuing us from the Apocalypse threatened by global warming and they will suffocate the conventional energy industries to do it. In Carney’s mind the New World Order will embrace the green transition along other European policies and values.
Carney’s dedication to the green transition has held firm despite significant setbacks. For example, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero he helped launch at the 2021 COP26 climate conference has embarrassingly under-performed.
Some of the prominent businesses that signed on to the Alliance and its mission to direct investments into renewable energy and away from fossil fuels have left the fold, citing the pact’s excessively restrictive investment guidelines as the reason. That hasn’t phased Carney, and apparently neither has the growing chorus of geopolitical analysts who claim the emissions reduction targets set by the 2019 Paris climate agreement cannot possibly be met. Even as those new realities were becoming apparent, Carney stubbornly defended the green transition goals and much of the climate legislation adopted by the Justin Trudeau Liberals.
At its core, Carney’s New World Order is intended to shelter virtuous middle-power democracies like Canada and the EU member states from the ravages of the tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum caused by the Trump administration. Middle power cooperation on things like trade, defense and climate change will limit their vulnerability to the brutality and injustice that oozes from warlords like Putin. It will reduce the impact of threats arising from the impending global domination of an anti-democratic China. And it will free the middle powers from their reliance on an increasingly unreliable US.
Oh, but wait, since making his Davos speech Mark Carney has determined that sheltering under China’s benevolent wing might be okay. His “revised” New World Order remains dedicated to middle power cooperation except when there are lucrative business deals to be had in China. This is a nod to Justin Trudeau’s China policy which was built on his admiration for the Chinese political-economic system.
So why not make China the global hegemon of choice for the virtuous middle powers of the New World Order? What could possibly go wrong?
Danielle Smith apparently once mused that if the Liberals secured a majority in the House of Commons it would free Mark Carney to reject the constraints of the Justin Trudeau legacy. I assume she meant that with the security provided by a majority, Carney would be able to discipline the environmental zealots and fanatically woke members of his cabinet and caucus even though it might cause a few to defect. Mark Carney, the real Mark Carney, the business-friendly economist and financial wizard would then emerge. He would salvage the Canadian economy and make it possible to export more Canadian oil and gas to countries other than the US.
Nope, that’s not what’s about to happen. Fasten your seat belts. Mark Carney will stay true to his international cronies, their culture and their ideological outlook. Unfortunately for supporters of convention energy, Carney’s peer group of mostly European leaders is the faction of the global elite who still promise to massively reduce the use of fossil fuels. Although, some of the more sensible among them have conceded they might need to slow the pace of the reduction.
Climate change alarmists have always imagined their campaign to combat global warming to be a massive task requiring a worldwide effort and expert management. That makes the quest for net zero a great fit for people with a zest for a level of global co-ordination and governance that requires nation states to surrender some of their sovereignty.
Companies like Brookfield, a company Mark Carney is heavily invested in, have acquired interests in the renewable energy and nuclear power sectors. This means that as the supranational institutions that comprise the New World Order further restrict the use of fossil fuels, the Brookfields of the world stand to hit the jackpot.
Some might say it’s a slippery slope. Once a globalist believes it can sometimes be wise to surrender a few facets of national sovereignty to a global system, it becomes easier to imagine all sorts of authoritarian global solutions to the world’s problems.
Our prime minister’s natural habitat is wherever you find the international financial jet set—at venues like the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, the Club of Rome, the secret conclaves of the Bilderberg group and anywhere else the modern day Illuminati, Gnomes of Zurich, and former central bankers convene.
These are the sorts of people and organizations that have conspiracy theorists panicked about the coming imposition of an authoritarian “one world government.”
Being prime minister of Canada provides Mark Carney with a reasonably prestigious platform and a big expense account to continue doing what he’s been doing for the past several decades. Furthermore, he really doesn’t have to hang around in Canada or the House of Commons very much. He’s free to travel the world visiting with the people who matter, those who think like him—they are, after all, the best people.
The bottom line is forget about a new oil pipeline to any coast, expect the taxation of carbon to continue apace, get ready for a methane tax on beef along with taxes and application limits for farm fertilizer use, and more.
But wait, didn’t globalism and climate change activism go hand in hand in the old, fatally “ruptured,” world order of yesterday? Today globalization is a discredited dead duck and climate activism has lost much of its former vitality.
Our prime minister gets that there has been a “rupture” with the global free trade model that operated under the aegis of the World Trade Organization. And he gets that longstanding defense alliances are becoming things of the past. Maybe he’ll also figure out that net zero has outlived its expiration date.
Polls now place combating climate change at around a distant 10th place among Canadian’s top of mind political issues. The overall cost of living, the cost of groceries and the high cost of housing are concerns that now rank miles ahead of climate change. If Mark Carney is as bright as his resumé suggests, you’d think he would see he’s beating a dead horse.
Notwithstanding my wishful thinking, it is highly doubtful our prime minister will abandon the climate crusade anytime soon, if ever; especially now with a majority government. But if he does indeed come to his senses and puts net zero on the policy back burner no one will be happier than me and a whole lot of other Canadians.
EnergyNow
