This post was initially written in response to a question from https://www.facebook.com/SaveTheCBC2025 at 9:00 pm on July 29.
The question:
“Where should governments draw the line between protecting sensitive negotiations and providing transparency and accountability to the public?”
. . . Really though, the following argument can just as well apply to any Kangaroo court situation. It might, for instance, help to clarify why Anthony Fauci was justified in claiming the Fifth during his summer of ’26 US Senate Hearing, the purpose of which was only to find evidence that his advice during the Covid Pandemic six years earlier was criminally negligent, and to ignore everything else he might say.
The argument:
The present administration in the USA is the enemy of everyone and every living thing outside its voting constituency, and in my view it’s even an enemy to 99% of those inside its voting constituency – under the present conditions. Canada’s Prime Minister knows this, but Carney also knows the current US administration is only the face of a more fundamental enemy, which has no borders: let’s call it ignorance in its literal meaning: “ignor-ance”
So… What to do?
Our current PM, and his staff, need to be silent of course on the details in ongoing negotiations with the current “trade-war” enemy; and this, I think, is a political reality that most of us can understand. But, what about that other area – more critical even than such economic “wars” for many of us – where Carney is being criticised for “breaking promises”? What about the burning issue of Climate Change; did he not promise to work hard on its remittance? Should those who “speak for us” at the National level not be as forthcoming as possible in this area?
Or are we dealing with “enemy negotiations” here too – with a crafty response to ignor-ance? Is our Prime Minister making promises (i.e. pipelines) for political reasons that he doesn’t really expect to be fulfilled in a rapidly evolving world? Has the economics scholar and trusted advisor of world leaders finally mastered the political craft of dissimulation? Here is a question of some importance to democracy itself; so let’s dig a little deeper. My suspicions, provisional at this time but I believe many other Carney supporters might share them, are as follows:
- Having given his somewhat oversized book, VALUE(S), a read (cursively in places) even before he was elected, I’m fairly confident Carney is being as fulsomely truthful as he can possibly be (which is both praiseworthy and refreshing to some – myself included – and perhaps boring to many others) when he talks to politicians, industrialists and other negotiators, without the media present. But here, I’m saying, is where truthfulness must be somewhat “contained”, because
- Ignor-ance does not listen, by definition! Carney may be telling Trump’s people, Danielle Smith, and even Fossil Fuel executives exactly what he thinks about the importance of climate change remittance, might even be giving them his honest “expectations” about the future of fossil fuels (there is no future). I think I can understand his willingness to make provisional promises to satisfy a Premier’s electoral base and to keep the conversation moving ahead among all participants.
(The majority of any electorate, despite “democratic” claims that “the voter is always right”, will necessarily be ignorant – in the blameless sense – of the minutia that must arise during such discussions involving global economics and climate science; so what does responsibility even look like in a modern electoral democracy? See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2025/04/01/counterintuitive/)
More questions:
And yet… Carney still does not speak in partisan terms; abstaining from Question Period in Parliament for instance, and not trashing his “opponents” by name or promoting himself personally. Rather he promotes his policies only so as to acquire the needed “social capital” – a ubiquitous term in his book, ‘VALUE(S)’. Does this sound like a career politician? As we know them in this 21st Century?
Or does it only make sense for the “man-with-a-job”: the man who anticipates finishing his job in about four years time and then moving on to another “job”.
I submit that it IS consistent with a policy of treating ignor-ance itself as the enemy. And of course I’m depending on such an enemy not using this current post – which questions Carney’s famously thorough forthrightness – as just another citation to promote the Heritage Project 2.0 foremost priority: to undermine the authority of all progressive world leaders. To say I’m calling Carney a “liar”!
I make this risky presumption because… well… the “fundamental enemy” by definition isn’t listening. Is he?
But then, what if we rather suppose the the listening – against all odds – begins here? Then may it be the beginning of political wisdom. The beginning of knowing the meaning of leadership for human beings. The meaning of leadership for a singular ‘technological animal’! And may this singular technological animal begin to understand its multi-specialised electorate’s ignor-ance of other people’s specialties as “mass gubernatorial ignorance”. Will our modern democracy-by-mass-electoral-majority thereby come to acknowledge the fundamental enemy at its heart?
For why should democratically elected leaderships, with their duly assembled advisors, need to dissemble before their variously specialised electorates? It seems the only ones who benefit are the anti-democratic. For further clarification see https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/06/04/a-short-diversion-from-essay-selections-after-the-2022-ontario-election-the-meaning-of-leadership-for-human-beings/
