KINSELLA: Mark Carney not candid about deal to open Gordie Howe bridge
· Toronto Sun
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Did he lie?
Politicians fib all the time, unfortunately. Some of them, like U.S. President Donald Trump, lie a lot and get away with it. They’re mostly forgiven.
But some lies, some falsehoods, some untruths — some misstatements, to use the Nixonesque phrasing — aren’t forgivable. They’re lies about big and important things. Voters remember those.
So, did Mark Carney lie about the Gordie Howe International Bridge fiasco?
PM less than forthright on details
Sure looks like it. Sure seems that way. When the sordid details seeped out, like sewage, it became apparent that Carney had been far less than forthright. Canadians had paid to build the Gordie Howe bridge, but Trump refused to let it open on his side until he got what he wanted — half of the net revenue, paid into a fund totally controlled by the Americans.
A couple weeks ago, Carney was asked about those details, which his government had tried to keep secret. He said Canada would only split net profits with the Yanks — not net revenue. (Big difference.)
This week, Carney was confronted with the yawning gap between what he said, and what we now know. The prime minister was, as he usually is with impertinent media people asking questions he doesn’t like, a supercilious aristocrat. Said he: “Could I have explained it better on a Sunday morning at Stampede, with a cowboy hat on? Yes, I could have explained it better.”
Ah yes, the old “Wearing A Cowboy Hate At Stampede” defence. Works every time.
Conservative MP Shuvaloy Majumdar — who, full disclosure, is a good friend and the representative for the Calgary neighbourhood where this writer grew up, a short C Train ride south of the Stampede grounds — has been focused, laser-like, on the bridge bungle. Shuv, as he is called, is a human rights and foreign affairs expert, and he was in Windsor on Friday morning to make some important points about Carney’s abject failure to tell the truth.
“The agreement directly contradicts what the Prime Minister told Canadians after announcing the bridge,” Majumdar wrote in a letter to the minister in charge, Dominic LeBlanc. “It’s time to come clean and tell Canadians where our money is actually going.”
Earlier, Majumdar was even more direct: “Canadians are sick and tired of being made into a punching bag by President Trump and have the self-respect to fight for their existence and their country. They deserve a government that is willing to do the same thing.”
Unknown what revenue split will fund
The problem, as Majumdar characterized it in his now-public letter, is that “while Canadians now have clarity on how much of the bridge’s revenue the Prime Minister has conceded to the Americans, we still don’t know what exactly their split will be used for.” Namely, will it go to the owners and operator of the competing Ambassador Bridge, who are donors and supporters of Trump?
If true, that would make a crummy deal crummier. It was bad enough that Carney capitulated to Trump’s threats, clearly designed to fatten the wallet of his crony. It is even worse that Canada’s lunch money is now being used to reward the bully’s co-conspirator.
What do Canadians think about all of the government’s prevarication and posturing? Not a lot of polling has been done. But Eleanor Mueller, a Semafor reporter assigned to the White House, has noted that “there’s a lot of pressure for Carney to hit back — especially after Trump demanded Canada share revenue from the Gordie Howe Bridge. Six in 10 Canadians view a trade deal as urgent, per Abacus, but only one in five say Canada should make compromises to strike one earlier.”
Compromise a bridge too far?
So, was Carney’s compromise — his capitulation, to some of us — on the Gordie Howe International Bridge (sorry) a bridge too far? It’s still early days. But, summertime notwithstanding, the issue is still hot, and it has handed the Opposition Conservatives a golden opportunity to demonstrate that Carney’s “elbows up” stuff was a lot of cynical spin — and it has also given them licence to be critical of Trump, like Majumdar.
Some lies, some fibs, you can get away with. My hunch is that this one is going to come back and haunt Carney because it relates directly to (a) what he said he would do, and (b) what he’d never do.
Namely, (a) that he’d keep the elbows up. And (b), that he’d never bow down before Trump.