Carney and Clark: together and apart again
On a fateful Vancouver day in 2011, B.C.'s premier dreamed of a Stanley Cup, while the Bank of Canada governor warned of an affordability nightmare.
In the same news cycle, Mark Carney threw his hat in the Liberal leadership ring and Christy Clark ended her bid to replace Justin Trudeau.
Former Bank of Canada governor Carney during a Jan. 13 evening appearance on Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Ex-B.C. Premier Clark by written statement on the morning of Jan. 14.
Clark blamed her lack of French proficiency. She did not mention how, four days earlier, the CBC caught the self-described lifelong Liberal lying about her 2022 Conservative Party membership.
It is not the first time Carney and Clark’s careers intersected.
Rewind to June 15, 2011.
The Vancouver Board of Trade featured Carney at a luncheon titled “Steady Hand, Uncertain Times.”
In the Crystal Pavilion at the Pan Pacific hotel’s lobby level, the central banker delivered an ominous speech about the state of housing in Canada. Years before housing affordability became the dominant national issue.
Carney’s key warning was this:
“…some pockets of the Canadian housing market are taking on characteristics of financial asset markets, where expectations can dominate underlying forces of supply and demand. The risk is that expectations become extrapolative, prompting the classic market emotions of greed and fear — greed among speculators and investors — and fear among households that getting a foot on the property ladder is a now-or-never proposition.”
Was anyone in power listening?
In 2017, the Ministry of Finance in Clark’s BC Liberal government told Vince Gogolek, executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, that it had no records about Carney’s Board of Trade appearance.
An appearance in the same complex as Clark’s Vancouver office.
Some six hours after Carney’s speech, the Boston Bruins were busy at Rogers Arena, beating the Vancouver Canucks in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final. Clark was there as a special guest of the Aquilini family, the Canucks’ owners who made their fortune in real estate and donated heavily to the BC Liberals.
The night ended in a downtown riot. The next morning, Clark came armed with a broom for a sidewalk photo op outside the boarded-up windows of the Hudson’s Bay department store. She was featured later at the Board of Trade’s annual general meeting.
Six years later, in 2017, Clark became B.C.’s ex-premier. In part, because she had done too little, too late to deal with the housing fear and greed that Carney warned of back in 2011.