Liberal Leader Mark Carney makes an announcement at a campaign stop in Dorval on April 14.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Once upon a time, Humpty Dumpty was asked a question he did not much care for, by Alice, who met him after passing through the looking-glass into a wonderland. When pressed, he informed her that he would be the one to decide what his answer meant.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less,” Mr. Dumpty said.
More recently and closer to home, Liberal Leader Mark Carney has followed in the footsteps of the Lewis Carroll character with his use of language whose precision obscures rather than illuminates. Such as the verbs “to own” and “to meet.”
With his own wordplay, Mr. Carney was clearly trying to leave the impression that he had rid himself of any assets that might entangle him in a conflict of interest when he spoke in Windsor, Ont. earlier this month. “I own nothing, I own nothing but cash and personal real estate,” he said.
Those unschooled in the intricacies of federal ethics disclosure laws might take that to mean that Mr. Carney’s assets are entirely composed of a) cash and b) personal real estate. But that is almost certainly not the case, since the Liberal leader’s statement is not intended to include whatever assets he placed in a blind trust shortly after winning the leadership on March 9. (Mr. Carney took that step well ahead of the legal deadline for doing so.)
The federal ethics law refers to the creation of such a trust as “divestiture” but that does not mean that the assets have been sold off, necessarily, merely that they are no longer directly controlled.
The Liberal campaign says Mr. Carney is the beneficiary of that trust, and so it is accurate to say that he is no longer the owner of any assets held within it. That may be technically correct, but such language (helpfully) serves to obscure the larger question that Mr. Carney refuses to answer: What assets were put into the blind trust?
Mr. Carney, for instance, held Brookfield stock options worth millions of dollars, some of which would not be eligible for sale for years. Do those options form part of the trust? Mr. Carney has refused to disclose to the public any such details. The legal deadline for him doing so is more than two months after voting day. And the ethics law is lax enough that he could, as did Justin Trudeau, simply say he was the owner of a numbered company without further detail.
The Liberal Leader has not broken the ethics law. In setting up a blind trust early, he has in fact acted more quickly than required. But on disclosure, he has not moved so crisply, instead depending on semantic shuffles to avoid clear answers.
There is similar wordplay at work on the question of Mr. Carney meeting with executives of the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), a pro-Beijing lobby group, during the Liberal leadership race. The JCCC has ties with the United Front Work Department, which co-ordinates Beijing’s influence, propaganda and intelligence efforts.
Responding to a Globe story, Mr. Carney issued a very specific denial. “I’m sorry, but you can’t believe everything you read in The Globe and Mail,” he said, adding, “I’ve never heard of this group, okay, never heard of this group. Certainly didn’t have a set-up meeting with this group. Full stop.”
However, the Globe story had not stated that Mr. Carney had blocked off time in his daybook, but that he had met with top officials at the JCCC, a fact underscored by photos of him shaking hands with two top JCCC officials.
As with the disclosure issue, Mr. Carney’s careful choice of words obscures more important questions. Why is the Liberal Party putting forward a candidate, Peter Yuen, in Markham-Unionville who has been a director of the JCCC? And who attended the 70th anniversary celebrations of the People’s Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square – not far from where PLA tanks and infantry bloodily smashed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989?
Mr. Carney says he has no idea who the JCCC is. But he should – Mr. Yuen’s ties to the group should have been something he scrutinized, particularly after the incumbent Liberal MP for Markham-Unionville, Paul Chiang, resigned after making comments about someone taking his Conservative rival to the Chinese consulate to claim a bounty.
That myopia, not whether Mr. Carney inked something in his calendar, is the issue. Transparency with Canadians, not the technical definition of trust asset ownership, is the issue. And that, Mr. Carney, you can believe.