In Carneyland, there is no room for libertarian principles based on freedom, open markets and free trade

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— Mark Carney, April 19, 2025.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney trotted out this bit of political military dodgeware twice over the Easter weekend as a sloganized introduction to his massively interventionist, deficit- and debt-ridden Liberal platform. Carney has used the line in the past, notably in his 2021 book, Value(s), a 500-page biblical call to overthrow market economics.

While Carney does not acknowledge the connection, it was economist Jeffrey Frankel who used the foxhole line in a 2008 column about Hank Paulson, then United States Treasury Secretary, who was attempting to justify the Bush administration’s US$700-billion bailout of the sub-prime economic and financial crisis. “They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Perhaps, then, there are also no libertarians in financial crises,” Frankel wrote.

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The Carney-Frankel/Paulson foxhole message is that since soldiers huddled underground in war inevitably become believers in God, it follows that in a financial crisis we all become believers in The State. In Carneyland, there is no room for libertarian principles based on freedom, open markets and free trade. When Lehman Brothers failed during the 2008 meltdown that helped trigger the Great Recession, “the free market was over,” writes Carney.

Putting an end to market freedom — often conflated with the ideas of