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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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So the PM can't have any investments?
This seems like overkill to me. Are they supposed to take the full capital gains hit and then stuff their money in a bank account while they're PM?
What is insufficient about a blind trust?
Yes, why the fuck does a Prime Minister need additional investments while in office?
Its not like they will ever hurt for money again after they leave the position.
If you want successful people to hold office, you can't make them divest their portfolios and take capital gains tax hits that could ostensibly cost them more than their salary and pension combined.
I know I know "boo hoo rich people" but if you think that Mark Carney is a good PM, why would you then set up a pre-requisite that repels people like him from even considering taking the position?
I don't want "successful" people in office!
I want someone who has community building experience. Someone with non-profit experience. Someone with the interest of people not someone that has demonstrated a thorough understanding of how to acquire personal wealth.
We have financial and economic specialists to advise the PM, but we act like that's the only fucking metric we can weigh our worth on.
I want a PM that is grateful for the opportunity to help Canadians and is humbled by the $400 000 salary as compensation, not someone that sees it as a small asset to their inflating portfolio.
Can we go higher on the salary, sure. Let's make it $1milion a year.
But, who do we want running the country? I'd like someone with the guts to raise the salary, but also say that they'll willingly dis-invest and put their assets in a blind trust.
Carney’s assets are in a blind trust. He has zero visibility into what investments he holds. All he knows is the overall performance of the total.
That's great, but I want someone who knows what they're doing with the economy, and as valuable as community building is, it's not a particular responsibility at the federal level.
It fucking should be. Running government as a business is what got the states into the fucking mess its in right now, and is also why all of our major infrastructure costs so fucking much compared to other countries.
We need a government that sees the current price gouging and foreign ownership of our resources as a bad thing, not as something that can benefit them personally.
Community building is a grassroots issue. I know a lot of community organizers who are fantastic people and good at what they do. I'm not sure they would do particularly well on the international stage.
But let's say maybe they are great leaders and would do well as PM. Would it not be better to establish laws that take money out of the campaign landscape and level the playing field so that people like this are able to have a fighting chance? That doesn't mean forcing them to liquidate once they're elected. It means controlling the influence of wealth on campaigns and providing guidelines that socializes the campaign process.
If you force liquidation on the PM, you won't solve the problem. You will just make sure that the average PM is a stooge. The guy who made his own fortune won't bother with this shit, but the sleazy prick with nothing to lose, out the career politician with skeletons in their closet will damn well jump at the chance to gain power at the behest of anyone willing to throw money at their campaign.
You're fixing the wrong problem. We want people with the wherewithal to become Carney-esque in the first place to run just as much as we want community organizers to have that opportunity, but placing barriers to entry to the former won't ensure the latter gets the job.
Like I said, we have a job for that. Its called the Finance Minister. The Finance Minister should absolutely be an experienced economist laser focused on the economy. The Prime Minister should be taking the Finance Minister's expertise into consideration, the same way they get expert advice from Foreign Affairs, National Defense, Agricultural, Industrial, Energy, and Environment Ministers.
The Prime Minister should be a leader for Canadians - the community of people that call this land our home - backed by the expert advice of their specialized ministers to best serve Canadians in all aspects of our lives. But the focus is always on them being a leader for our economy, which is a series of numbers that seeks to enrich the mean average which allows the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer so long as the rich can get more rich than the poor get poor. And we need someone who can temper the advise to make the average Canadian richer from the Finance Minister with the actual impact to Canadians. No community leader would ever yield "acceptable losses" to the the most vulnerable to benefit the well off.
I mean, that's nonsense. You're presupposing that a successful businessman or economist's only asset is their financial knowledge. To gain the success that someone like Mark Carney has achieved takes a lot more than just financial knowledge. It takes leadership, vision, guts, tenacity, and many other qualities that would make them excellent PMs, as he has shown himself to be.
Your prejudice against financially successful people is not constructive. Just because people have leadership qualities that they have acquired through means other than financial success doesn't mean that people who do enjoy financial success should be held away from leadership with a barrier to entry like this. It is flat out stupidity.
The article is about the idea that he should divest his assests so personally enriching himself is not a motivation for political action and your argument is that would dissuade people like him from taking office.
I'm saying people that seek power to personally enrich themselves that would be dissuaded from taking office if they couldn't stand to profit beyond the salary are not the people I want as Prime Minister.
If you can't see how someone refusing to divest their assets to be in a position of power could be a problem, I don't know what to tell you, other than look south.
Where does that stop? Do they sell their houses so they aren't manipulating the stock market? The blind trust is already there for investments. Forced liquidation of investments may just keep good people out of the race to solve a problem that is already mitigated by the blind trust. I know I know, if they REALLY love Canada they would give away all their money and crawl across broken glass for the privilege of being PM.
Imagine you work your ass off, become successful, campaign for Prime Minister, win a minority, sell all your shit, then six months later the opposition call for another election and you're out on your ass. That's a great way to attract the sharpest minds of our generation. No flaws in that plan!
First of all, YES! We have an affordability crisis and affording a place to live is at the top of financial stress. That cost has exploded because real estate is seen as an investment that can never be allowed to lose value. Why would we want a PM that stands to personally benefit from houses being more expensive?
Second of all, yes all of their houses. We give them a place to live. Normal people sell their house to move forward work all the time
Well that's a relief, I thought for a moment I was missing something, but it's just that you have no grounding in reality. Thanks!
If the loss of assets is enough to prevent you from considering the position, I don't want you in that position. The PM is supposed to make decisions good for Canada, not their assets in particular.
A very naive question. Carney knows exactly what his investments are, and how his trust would be impacted by his policies in the longer term, post political career. Data centers? Ottawa spending on AI initiatives? Brookfield projects, what a coincidence.
A better question is why would a very wealthy man bother to become a civil servant?
Oh no, what precedent would a Prime Minister set for paying taxes? "Full capital gains hit" = half the income tax rate and a >$1M lifetime exemption.
People in this country just want a corrupt government, small wonder we have one.
Thank you for (a) insulting me, (b) belittling me, (c) providing incorrect information, (d) building a straw man, and (e) making an unrelated and silly conclusion.
No - Carney knows exactly what his investments were when they entered the blind trust. He does not know what they are now.
I guess a 14 year old would believe this. Look up Brookfield's track record on tax evasion. This group does not play by rules.
Carney is just another Harper.
No, someone who understands how blind trusts work would believe it. Brookfield and Carney have nothing to do with how blind trusts work and zero control over the investments in his. You’re free to be a crazy conspiracy theorist, but own it.
That's very much not the case for his stock options, he will still know exactly what those are
Edit: after researching it, Carney’s stock options were included in the blind trust. This confirms he does not know what happens with them.
Regardless, options [to purchase stock] aren’t worth anything until they vest and are exercised by purchasing them. Unvested stock options are a promise by the company to allow the individual to purchase the options at a set rate once they vest. That’s it. They hold no immediate value. Generally breaking ties with a company means that your unvested options and RSUs are forfeit.
Just FYI it wasn't me who downvoted you - but for one thing, Carney will obviously know the vesting schedule. Secondly, I almost don't even want to entertain this claim because it's just not how things work, but, if they aren't worth anything, then why did Carney agree to be paid in stock options? And why is he holding onto them now, despite the criticisms?
In his book, Carney himself champions the idea of paying out things like executive bonuses in future options, because he says it incentivizes making decisions that will benefit the company over longer periods than just the next quarter or year.
The fact that it also creates a clear conflict of interest when that person suddenly jumps into government, well, that's his own damn problem brought about by his own lack of forethought, and he should waive his right to exercise (or have the "blind" trust exercise) those stock options.
I see what you’re getting at. We should find a way to make people in this situation whole after forcing the sale of their positions when they enter the trust
It would be interesting to explore something like requiring a PM to liquidate assets they hold beyond things like a primary residence but making it free of any capital gains tax, then have a separate fund that tracks a basket of assets designed to be representative of the wealth and wellbeing of Canadians broadly but having an adjustable RoR based on broad measures of wellbeing. Could even make that available to all MPs and requiring ten years before divestment or something.
Totally just spitballing, but interesting to think of different ways of aligning incentives.
This is functional reform in a capitalist representative democracy. So it will never happen! I expect guillotines before accountability.
There's more than one way to read "I expect to see guillotines before accountability."
liquitate these assets, buddy
It's insuffient because ...
The committe is also advising revisions that will affect other officials and cabinet ministers ...
It's all in the very short article link.
Well that's something of a circular argument.
It's absolutely true that placing investments in a blind trust isn't divestment - but I didn't really see why they considered full divestment (rather than a blind trust) necessary in the first place. The article made is sound like the committee just declared that as their goal.
Regardless, the public disclosure on a broader scale of politicians is a great idea. We deserve to see that.
Well their home is provided so I suppose they really have no need for assets while in power.
In addition to the other responses, a blind trust is especially insufficient in this case, since his remaining Brookfield stock options are only be able to be exercised in the future, meaning the operator of the blind trust cannot buy and sell them as they would with any other asset.
In other words, Carney knows the schedule of those options becoming available for him to exercise (or for the blind trust to exercise, depending on the schedule and whether or not he's still in public office at that point), and the blind trust operator has no control over that schedule.
Brookfield, incidentally, has a lot of money invested in places like Qatar and the UAE, as well as tens of billions invested in AI and data centres worldwide. The value of his stock options, therefore, is tied to the value of those investments.
THANK YOU!
This is the first substantive reason that anyone has given. I hadn't thought about deferred maturation.
That said, if they can't be exercised, that usually means he can't fully divest himself of them, so he'd be facing the same issue.
In either case, I guess the answer would have to be something like setting a fixed payment structure on them (maybe tied to a TSX index).
At the extreme end, forcing him to abandon all non-vested options wouldn't be the end of the world.
Honestly this is what I think should happen.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but Carney's own book champions the idea of company managers/executives getting bonuses paid in things like future stock options, because he notes that it creates an incentive for that person to make decisions that are good for the company (or, I guess, for its stock price) on a longer time scale than "this quarter" or "this year".
Well, turns out that same system also creates incentives for that person if they suddenly hop over into government. Carney only has himself to blame for this ending up as a conflict of interest.
If the trust cant sell them then he cant either?
I don't see any reason why he couldn't have signed away any claim on those stock options, or asked Brookfield to renegotiate things so he could cash out.
Some people might think it's somehow unfair, but I mean, he wanted to be PM, no one made him do it.
Does the blind trust need his permission to renegotiate them though? Couldn't they just do it?
Edit. ~~Or what if they costless collared them and effectively locked in the price on the date it went into the trust. Then it becomes this $x.xx is locked in at today's price until you can exercise them, but you wont really make or lose any money on them between now and then.~~
Edit: you need to own the underlying stock for the collar idea, not options.