For all of his experience as a central banker and economist, Mark Carney is still relatively new to the business of politics. That showed on Tuesday, when he made the fatal mistake of giving a straight answer to a question from a journalist about Canada’s Impact Assessment Act. “We do not plan to repeal Bill C-69, to answer your question directly,” he said.

Conservative MPs and proxies immediately clipped this response and started sharing it on their social media channels. It was proof, they claimed, of Carney’s apparent duplicity — he has previously said he would support new pipeline projects — and his supposedly “radical agenda” to keep Canada’s oil in the ground. “As Trudeau’s economic advisor, Carney’s anti-resource development agenda has made Canada more dependent on the US,” CPC shadow finance minister Jasraj Singh Hallan said on social media, assiduously ignoring the fact that the first new oil and gas pipelines to non-US tidewater in more than 70 years were both built under Trudeau’s government. 

That wasn’t the only lie of omission. Hallan and his colleagues also conveniently left out the words that immediately followed Carney’s supposedly........

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