Carney’s Wealth Tests the Limits of Canada’s Ethics Laws

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 solution.”

Carney’s net worth is anyone’s guess. We know this much: he held about $6.8 million (US) in unexercised Brookfield stock options as of December 31, 2024, an amount that has likely fluctuated since. It isn’t clear if Carney cashed in those options before parking his finances in the blind trust, or if those options, which expire in the 2030s, are sitting there now.

That situation hardly squares with Carney’s self-portrait of simplicity. He claimed at a March 2025 press conference that, outside of his blind trust, he “owns nothing but cash and real estate”—a cottage and a family home. Conacher calls that, at best, a calculated half-truth. A trust doesn’t erase ownership: it just pushes it out of sight. Carney can insist he severed ties with the private sector, but anyone with ongoing investments will still have a stake in it. By Conacher’s count, Carney has interests in 554 companies that would be subject to a blind trust, and another 103 entries that are subject to an ethics screen. Carney’s financial entanglement may be unprecedented in scale: “The largest I’ve ever seen in Canada,” says Stedman.

Much of this debate hinges on how Canada’s Conflict of Interest Act defines a conflict in the first place. Carney, for example, isn’t necessarily required to disclose his registered savings plans or mutual funds. The act considers them “exempt” if investors don’t control what a fund buys or sells. Because the money is pooled with others’ and managed by professionals, the thinking goes no single investor can realistically influence—or even track—a portfolio’s exact composition, and therefore, they can’t exploit public office to steer decisions in their favour.

But that logic has limits. Many mutual funds are industry specific. A financial services fund, for instance, may be concentrated in major banks. So even if the prime minister doesn’t know its precise breakdown, any policy action that helps banks across the board could still benefit him personally.

And here the problem widens dramatically. Carney has extensive holdings in Brookfield, a conglomerate embedded in most of Canada’s major industries—including those involved in many of the nation-building projects approved by the Major Projects Office, such as fossil fuels, mining, nuclear energy, and shipping. “Pretty much every single time he makes a decision that affects any business sector in Canada,” Conacher says, “he has a financial interest in that sector, directly or indirectly.”

To hear Carney’s chief of staff tell it, none of this is a concern. Marc-André Blanchard has described the ethics screen as meeting the “highest ethical standards,” since it prevents the prime minister from participating in discussions or votes that affect his former employer. But an ethics screen can’t strip away knowledge someone already possesses. Carney can still shape outcomes if he already knows which outcomes serve him.

The Conflict of Interest Act distinguishes between two kinds of decisions. Those of “private interest” that would benefit a clearly identifiable person or company, like awarding a single firm a government contract, and those of “general application” that affect an entire sector, such as cutting corporate taxes. The first is restricted, the second is not.

But that distinction, Conacher argues, creates a loophole big enough to drive a fortune through. Barring Carney from case-by-case files still leaves him free to craft sweeping general policies that could enrich him personally. “If Carney makes a decision that helps twenty other companies alongside . . . Brookfield,” he says, “then he’s technically in compliance.” Conacher finds that gobsmacking. “Just because it helped other companies doesn’t matter. If it helped Brookfield, where he has investments, then he’s in conflict.”

Conacher cites Carney’s scrapping of the carbon tax as an example. Among the stated reasons the prime minister did away with the tax was easing cost-of-living pressures and defusing a politically toxic issue. But to the extent the move also favoured fossil fuel shareholders, Brookfield was among the companies that stood to gain. While the firm promotes a climate-friendly image—as does Carney—a 2023 report by Private Equity Climate Risks found it owned more than 215 fossil-fuel assets producing over 159 million metric annual tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, an amount greater than burning 81 billion kilograms of coal. The emissions figure was revealed to be fourteen times higher than Brookfield had publicly disclosed.

Ironically, at the time of the report, Carney was serving as Brookfield’s head of transition investing—the executive charged with the company’s pivot to low-carbon businesses. You can argue his carbon tax reversal was a betrayal of climate commitments, but if Carney held fossil-fuel interests through Brookfield, the policy sold as relief for Canadians may have also padded his bottom line.

The Carney government’s recent record only deepens concerns about his private-sector ties. The Liberals have repeatedly sided with corporate interests. They backed Air Canada and Canada Post in their stand-off against striking employees, shelved the Digital Services Tax under pressure from Trump, and scaled back the counter-tariffs that defined his elbows-up rhetoric. He has also left untouched lucrative weapons contracts that benefit American defence firms and is now pushing to revive the Keystone XL pipeline—a project that would further entrench Canada’s economic dependence on the United States while enriching a fossil-fuel sector dominated by American investors.

While it’s difficult to track whether any particular decision the prime minister makes will increase Brookfield’s share price, Carney’s investments are a problem even if he’s not making specific policy choices. “What a lot of people forget is you can further your private interests, and help a company increase its profit, by not regulating them, by doing nothing,” says Conacher.

“Consumers want consumer regulations, workers want worker regulations, environmental groups want environmental regulations,” he says. But those regulations cost money. So, when governments stay quiet—when they don’t act—“you’ve helped the company,” because “inaction can help a company that you’re invested in just as much as action can.”

All of which brings Conacher to his broader point about the government’s ethics framework itself. “It should be called the ‘Almost Impossible to Be in a Conflict of Interest Act,’” he says. “It is a truly Orwellian law. Everything Carney does is legal, but none of it is ethical.”

The problem isn’t unique to Carney. In 2013, upon becoming Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau put his roughly $1.2-million stock portfolio into a blind trust. At the time, the National Post reported that “he wasn’t certain” what it contained and that he relied on a trustee to manage it.

Whether that was ever true remains unconfirmed, Conacher says. Democracy Watch raised the concern a decade ago, to little media attention. To him, the episode highlights the utter flimsiness of Canada’s conflict-of-interest rules. Consider cannabis, he says. Only Trudeau knew whether the Liberals would promise to legalize it during the 2015 election—and whether he would follow through after the election. That meant that, before becoming prime minister, he could have quietly directed his trustee to invest in Canada’s leading pot companies. “Pot stocks of some Canadian firms exploded leading up to legalization,” Conacher says, suggesting Trudeau’s trust could easily have benefited. Trudeau could also have instructed his trustee to sell whenever the shares dropped in value (which they did, after legalization, when it became clear the industry was producing more than the market could absorb).

That scenario remains hypothetical. But actual failures of oversight surfaced elsewhere in Trudeau’s government. In 2016, Bill Morneau, then finance minister, brought forward Bill C-27, a major piece of pension-reform legislation. Democracy Watch pointed out that Morneau’s family firm, Morneau Shepell, a major pension administrator, stood to gain new billable services from the reforms. The ethics commissioner ruled the bill excluded Morneau’s private interests and cleared him of any violation, even as he held over 1 million shares in the company.

Trudeau’s cabinet offered no shortage of such conflicts. It included a fisheries minister closely tied to an executive at J. D. Irving Ltd, a company with major government contracts; and an infrastructure minister whose wife had holdings in a firm owning Alberta farmland.

What’s striking is how often this story repeats itself. A major scandal arose in the mid-1980s when Sinclair Stevens—Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s minister of regional industrial expansion—was found to have approved federal funds to auto parts manufacturer Magna International in exchange for a $2.6 million loan to a company owned by his family. Arguing he was following the guidelines, Stevens said he placed his holdings in a blind trust. In 1987, the Parker Commission—officially the Commission of Inquiry into the Facts of Allegations of Conflict of Interest Concerning the Honourable Sinclair M. Stevens—concluded that Stevens had violated conflict of interest rules no fewer than fourteen times. Stevens was forced to resign from cabinet but was allowed to remain in caucus.

Justice W. D. Parker, the judge leading the commission, called for banning blind trusts and forcing top politicians and government officials to sell off their holdings. Parker concluded blind trusts didn’t actually prevent conflicts—they merely concealed them. The only reliable solution was full divestment to eliminate the risk of private gain from political decisions. Full divestment can be punitive. If public service lasts twenty or thirty years, is it reasonable to expect officials to neglect their personal finances entirely? Officials who choose long careers in power must accept stricter limits precisely because their choices shape markets, regulations, and fortunes.

In response to the commission, Canada developed a federal ethics framework, complete with conflict-of-interest rules and the creation of the ethics commissioner role—but stopped short of adopting all of Parker’s proposals. In 2004, a federal court judge overturned the inquiry’s findings against Stevens, declaring the commission had exceeded its mandate.

But because Canada didn’t require public disclosure until 2006, we still know remarkably little about what earlier leaders stood to gain. We still don’t know, for example, how many companies former prime ministers, like Paul Martin or Jean Chrétien, were invested in. While Chrétien made use of an “ethics counsellor,” the role had no real investigative powers and reported directly to Chrétien, who had created it. The counsellor cleared Chrétien repeatedly—most notably during the Shawinigate, when allegations swirled around federal contracts, a family-owned hotel, and the political use of public funds in his home riding.

Conacher also notes that while Martin placed his company, Canada Steamship Lines, in a blind trust, he did not recuse himself from regulatory discussions affecting the shipping industry while serving as finance minister. He transferred ownership to his sons only in 2003, shortly before becoming prime minister. The company remains in the Martin family today.

• No Matter Which Way You Look at It, Carney Has Abandoned Climate
• Carney’s “Buy Canadian” Policy Doesn’t Require Companies to Be Canadian
• Who Is Mark Carney, Really?

Carney’s patience for financial scrutiny seems thin. When pressed by the CBC’s Rosemary Barton during a March 2025 scrum, he became defensive, stating that she should “look inside herself” and insinuated her questions were ill-intentioned. “I have left my roles in the private sector, at a time of crisis for our country,” he said. “I’m complying with all the rules.”

Conacher wasn’t impressed. “What he implied was, ‘and therefore I’m a good person, and nobody should question my motives, and everyone should just trust me.’” Carney had framed his bid for the Liberal leadership as a patriotic step into politics: he selflessly gave up his high-paying former life to serve Canada amid mounting US threats. But that doesn’t mean he would never try to exploit a situation, counters Conacher. “Conflict-of-interest rules apply whether you have good intentions or not. They exist to give the public confidence.”

But it’s not hard to imagine a prime minister’s reflexive demand for trust harming the effectiveness of any enforcement regime. According to Stedman, Canada’s ethics system traps senior officials in a kind of institutional tension. They are expected to both safeguard the public interest and remain in the good graces of the person who controls their job. Such subordination creates conflicted loyalties.

That dysfunction was laid bare during ethics hearings late last year, which revealed an oversight system that was largely hollow. Asked who screens Carney’s texts and phone calls, Blanchard could not provide a clear answer—reinforcing the impression that Carney is left to enforce those standards himself. The ethics commissioner, Konrad W. von Finckenstein, seemed unaware that a budget bill contained a tax credit benefiting a Brookfield-owned firm. He also acknowledged that Carney should not have met alone with Brookfield executive Jeff Beber in October.

Solutions have been scarce. While the Conservative Party included proposals in their 2025 campaign program for closing some of these loopholes, they were, according to Conacher, “confused, contradictory.” Whether these campaign promises will ever translate into meaningful action—the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois could push through a new ethics bill if they chose—is hard to say. After all, the entire political class profits from lax conflict-of-interest enforcement. And given the current minority government, the loopholes that benefit Carney today could conceivably benefit opposition leader Pierre Poilievre tomorrow.

“Therein lies the rub,” says Stedman. “It’s the ultimate conflict of interest in conflict-of-interest laws.” Stedman notes that Stephen Harper used ethics problems during the Sponsorship Scandal to topple the Paul Martin government in the 2006 election, but that subsequent Conservative Party leaders haven’t been able to replicate Harper’s success.

Asked why Canadians tolerate it, Conacher points out that the public’s faith in the political class has been abysmally low for quite some time. “When all politicians from every party are doing that, then how do you vote?” asks Conacher. “You don’t—and our voter turnout is very bad.”

The real problem isn’t public tolerance. “We don’t have ethical leadership in any of the parties.”