Mark Carney cultivates the image of a sophisticated technocrat ready to fight Donald Trump’s tariff war. Accountability advocates warn his private-sector record tells a different story. “Prime Minister Carney has as many financial conflicts as Trump,” claims Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, one of Canada’s leading government watchdogs.

Launched in 1993, the non-partisan group campaigns for stricter oversight of public officials of all stripes. It files complaints with ethics commissioners, challenges government actions in court, and pushes for democratic reforms at the federal and provincial levels. High on Conacher’s list is strengthening conflict-of-interest rules.

Carney is a particular concern. He may not be hawking branded sneakers, fragrances, or coins like his American counterpart, but much of Carney’s reputation—and wealth—was forged inside the very financial institutions he’s now expected to regulate.

The prime minister spent a decade at Goldman Sachs, the powerful Wall Street investment bank, before serving as governor of both the Bank of Canada and, later, the Bank of England—two government roles that present themselves as neutral but are deeply enmeshed in the priorities and assumptions of global markets. Then, right before entering politics in 2025, Carney logged four years at Brookfield Asset Management, one of the largest private equity firms on earth. He held senior positions that likely left him very rich, with substantial holdings. Those investments, Conacher argues, risk blurring the line between what’s good for the country and what’s good for Carney.

Upon becoming Liberal leader, Carney moved to wall off his old financial life. He transferred his extensive portfolio into a blind trust controlled by someone at arm’s length with no personal, familial, or professional ties. In theory, Carney can neither know nor direct how his assets are being managed while he remains in office. And an ethics screen bars him from participating in policy decisions affecting firms he’s been associated with, such as Stripe, the multi-billion-dollar fintech giant on whose board he once sat.

These safeguards don’t go nearly far enough, counters Conacher. Even as the ethics commissioner, who answers to Parliament, is ultimately in charge of compliance, the day-to-day work of actually policing the ethics screen falls to an official appointed by the prime minister himself. And the blind trust is scarcely blind, as Carney is very aware of his initial holdings. “He knows what stocks he put in it,” said Conacher in a statement posted on the Democracy Watch website last year, “including stock options he will definitely own for years.”

And while the ethics commissioner must approve the trustee, the arrangement still leaves Carney with significant influence over the trust’s design, including the choice of trustee and any instructions they receive. “And the trustee is allowed to give regular updates,” Conacher told The Walrus, such as on the trust’s overall net worth, and any gains or losses.

More alarming, Conacher says, is how little of the blind trust is visible. A public registry allows Canadians to see that assets exist and how they are classified—not what they are. If the prime minister’s policy choices are working to his advantage, there’s no way to know.

To sum up: our system, meant to prevent conflicts, concentrates oversight in officials ultimately tied to the prime minister, while leaving him informed about—and influential over—assets he is supposed to be insulated from.

Carney is hardly an anomaly. This situation has been the norm for party leaders, cabinet ministers, and top bureaucrats of every ideological bent, going back practically to Confederation. Ethics screens and blind trusts notwithstanding, Canada’s political system has learned to live quite comfortably with a weak conflict-of-interest regime.

But Carney’s extensive assets, and the loophole-ridden rules meant to mind them, are fast becoming a test of how far our governing class has drifted into complicity. The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics is reviewing federal conflict-of-interest laws for the first time since 2012, just as the nation’s chief executive is rolling out a generational major-projects agenda that will route billions into industries that overlap with his financial history.

Which means a system already thin on teeth is facing a challenge far bigger than anything it was designed for. “I would hazard to say no one anticipated we would get someone like Carney in public office,” says Ian Stedman, an associate professor at York University’s School of Public Policy & Administration. “The laws in place could never have contemplated this.”

Stedman has spent years helping to advise officials on ethics rules. To him, Carney is a flashing warning sign. “We need to come up with a........

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