The old Pierre Poilievre is back. After watching Mark Carney’s Liberals secure a majority government with a clean sweep in last Monday’s three byelections and with rumours of more floor crossers in the offing, the Conservative Party of Canada leader has decided to abandon his kinder and gentler personality reboot in favour of his more familiar brand of populist petulance. This time, though, he’s chosen the dumbest possible target for it: Mark Carney’s economic credentials. 

“There's one thing that's worse than being uneducated and it's being badly educated,” he told the CTF’s Kris Sims in a recent interview. “And Mr. Carney is very badly educated on economics.” You could almost see the delight spread across Carney’s face when Toronto Star reporter Tonda McCharles conveyed that comment to him. “Did he? Wow,” the PM replied, sounding like a heavyweight boxing champion being challenged to a bar fight by someone six beers deep. 

Poilievre’s attack on Carney’s economic credentials makes JD Vance’s decision to question the Pope on matters of theological interpretation seem modest by comparison. Challenging a guy with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard and a masters and PhD in economics from Oxford to a contest of who understands economics better is a new and previously uncharted form of machochism, especially from someone whose own education on the subject seems to primarily involve YouTube videos and podcasts. 

Even so, the decision to go after Carney’s credentials clearly wasn’t an accident. Two of Poilievre’s leading lieutenants also launched their own attacks, each in their own preferred style. House leader Andrew Scheer argued on social media that “if you have a degree from a fancy University, but believe: Money printing doesn’t cause inflation; Net-zero policies create prosperity; Governments can pick winners and losers better than free markets; Then you have been badly educated.” Michelle Rempel-Garner went a little deeper on her Substack but arrived at the same essential point: that Carney’s belief in things like climate policy and carbon pricing somehow reflect poorly on his education and judgment.

On Thursday, Poilievre decided to throw a few more wild swings of his own. “The gap between Mr. Carney’s boasting and his results is perhaps unprecedented,” Poilievre told an audience at the Canadian Club in Toronto. “As (American historian) Daniel Boorstin said, ‘The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge.’” 

If irony wasn’t already dead, Poilievre would have killed it right there. He is, after all, the very personification of illusory knowledge, someone who has repeatedly been proven wrong about everything from monetary policy and the Bank of Canada to the role of the consumer carbon tax on food price inflation and, of course — of course — climate change. 

“None of this is to despair or disparage Mr. Carney, who’s a perfectly fine gentleman,” Poilievre continued on Thursday. “It’s just to point out, and with the greatest respect, that Mr. Carney has been wrong about every major economic issue of the last decade.” 

I’m quite sure Carney would be eager to have a debate about Brexit, which was perhaps the defining issue of his time at the Bank of England — and which Poileivre and other leading Conservatives like Jason Kenney and Andrew Scheer supported at the time. It has been an unmitigated disaster for the United Kingdom, one that is costing the British treasury an estimated $165 billion each year in foregone tax revenue. All told, the British economy is anywhere from six to eight per cent smaller than it would have been if voters had elected to remain in the European Union — an economic dent roughly twice as big as the Covid pandemic. 

Carney was one the leading voices cautioning Britons against the economic risks associated with voting to leave. This naturally upset the country’s pro-Brexit political leaders, who would have preferred that the Governor of the Bank of England keep his opinions to himself. But Carney and everyone else who tried to flag the risks associated with Brexit has been thoroughly vindicated here by the passage of time and accumulation of self-inflicted economic damage that could, and should, have been avoided. Those who argued the other side have mostly left public life in some state of shame or, in the case of the pro-Brexit contingent in Canada, decided to pretend it never happened. 

It is true that housing prices soared in Canada while Carney was Governor of the Bank of Canada, but that might be an uncomfortable point for Poilievre to make since it was a Conservative prime minister that appointed him to the job, and he only served in it during Harper’s time in office. In other words, it’s hard to tease out the housing-inflating monetary policies of the Bank of Canada from the housing-inflating fiscal policies of the Harper government. And while Poilievre is welcome to re-litigate Carney’s previous support for consumer carbon pricing and belief in the importance of containing the financial risks associated with climate change, he won’t find much support for his critique among other actual economists.  

But then, this isn’t actually about executing on an intelligent political strategy. It’s about protecting Poilievre’s ego and re-living his happier days, when he was riding high in the polls and pontificating about everything from inflation to cryptocurrency in opposition to a PM he could demean as just “a drama teacher.” No, it won’t help him win back the more moderate Conservative voters who have flocked to Carney’s side and it probably won’t prevent more defections from his caucus. But at this point, there might not be much Poilievre can do that would. 

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