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Poilievre wants Carney to cash out blind trust, says ethics screens insufficient
(www.nationalobserver.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
50 points (91.7% liked)
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Fine by me. Most of the policies Carney proposed will support big companies and people with stocks.
If Carney sells his stocks and doesn't have investments he'll be like a significant proportion of Canadians.
Join us, rich boy.
(And Poilievre can sell his ten rental properties and donate his parliamentary pension to cats or something)
It’s a blind trust. Maybe they’ve already been sold. He doesn’t know. And because it’s in a blind trust, if he did want them sold he:
This is as stupid as the excuses to not get a security clearance
The problem is, his stock options may not have vested, and Carney would be aware of the vesting schedule. It could be years before he (or whoever is managing the trust) could exercise those options and/or sell those shares.
In other words, the trust may not be 'blind' in practice.
This was the original criticism from reporters such as Rosie Barton, and many of Carney's supporters never bothered to try to understand the issue.
As soon as they vest, they are entered into the blind trust and Carney will have no knowledge or input into what happens with them
Unvested stocks can’t really be part of a blind trust because the holder can’t do anything with them until they have vested, and the vesting schedule being known means that the “blind” isn’t there in the blind trust
And when will that be? Will that happen while he is PM? Carney knows, and we don't. And that's the problem!
When they vest? Generally stocks vest to a schedule like x% per month over 4 years from when they were issued.
So why doesn't Carney disclose this? Do you agree he should?
He could I guess, but it’s pretty standard stuff so the outrage over it seems manufactured to me.
Personally I've not heard of a PM having millions in unvested stock options before this one, so, not sure how standard it is.
If Poilievre was doing the same, would you have the same response?
If Pierre wants to go get a job and succeed to the point where he gets stocks, good luck and more power to him.
IMO this hasn’t really been an issue in Canada before because generally we elect lawyers or career politicians. If we want a higher bar for divestment then let’s get that into law so that it applies either later in Carney’s term or for the next PM. In the meantime I am happy that Carney has fulfilled the requirements of the ethics commissioner and don’t believe that we have any clear mechanisms today to deal with unvested stocks owned by our politicians.
It is IMO very unlikely that a large percentage of Carney’s net worth will be from (currently) unvested stocks. He’s entered everything that can be into a blind trust and once vested these currently unvested stocks will go to the blind trust. Until that happens this grey area seems like much ado about nothing.
And to be 100% clear I did not vote Liberal in this latest election.
We don't have a clear legal mechanism, but we to have the power of public outrage.
The whole point of conflict of interest legislation is that politicians should not have, nor be seen to have, opportunity for personal gain.
Carney could easily clear this up to satisfy critics like myself. Choosing not to only makes it look worse, frankly.
People mad about Poilievre not having a security clearance should also be mad about this.
I disagree. I think drumming up outrage over this is a ploy to manufacture outrage over him being rich. We all already know he’s richer than any of us could ever dream of. I just want the government to focus on keeping Canadians safe and stable while our former ally wages economic war against us. This is a distraction at best.
Pierre not having a security clearance on its own is odd and disappointing, but fine on its own. The problem is that he used not getting a security clearance as a way for him to spread conspiracies about the things he could not know without clearance, but would know about with clearance. It was a bad faith argument.
If this were simply a ploy to manufacture outrage, then Carney's best move would be to neutralize that ploy, or 'distraction', by calling people's bluff and actually being transparent.
Instead, he got angry at reporters for asking him about it, and denied that there could be any possible conflict.
Meanwhile he continues to pitch projects in sectors that Brookfield has tens of billions invested in.
His reaction isn’t great and agreed he should find a way to placate people who see it as a problem but IMO his reaction is separate from whether unvested stocks are an issue or not. When he took the job, taking a loss on his unvested stocks wasn’t part of the ethics screen, so presumably he’s annoyed at the goalposts having moved after he took the job.
The only equitable solution I can see is if the taxpayers wanted to pay Carney his unvested stocks at current market value (or as they were valued the day he took office), and then sign ownership of the stocks themselves over to the public. I can’t see that going over well with anyone so it just looks like a lose-lose situation.
If there are other solutions that don’t end up in such a quagmire I would like to understand them, but so far all the solutions sound worse to me than the problem
I mean, he didn't have to run for the Liberal leadership on the first place. I heard one commentator describe it as the 'opportunity cost' of running for PM.
Am I surprised that someone who sets up funds in the Caymans is trying to use the letter of the rules as a get out of jail free card? No.
But he must have known it would look terrible. If all this was a surprise to Carney, then we should be very worried about his ability to govern this country.
What solution would you suggest?
He should waive his right to exercise those stock options. Or step down if he values the money more.
This is why a PM gets a good salary and pension: they're giving up things to be in a position of immense power. That's the trade.
Dude that’s crazy. As I said I didn’t vote for the guy but be realistic here. Asking someone to pay money to become PM is not a good precedent. Especially when we are talking about one of the world’s most prominent economists, taking a position like you have just makes you seem like you hate the person and nothing will make you happy.
Lol I figured you'd say that.
Why is it "crazy" to want to ensure the leader of a country doesn't have multi-million dollar conflicts of interest?
Sorry, but I don't think we should be casual about this stuff. He's making decisions that affect 40 million people.
If Carney doesn't want to be PM then he can step down. If he does, then he has to accept limitations on what counts as a "blind" trust.
I don't think this is unreasonable in the slightest.
We are going in circles now, but keep in mind that we are talking about unvested stocks. In my opinion the only way to have an equitable solution is to find a way of transferring the current market value of the unvested stocks into Carney’s blind trust. I can’t think of how to do this in a way that I would be happy as a taxpayer and he would be happy as a (former) shareholder, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution.
The complexity of the problem is one of the reasons why I don’t feel it is worth solving immediately.
You mentioned precedent before.
What precedent would it set if someone could work for a company, be handed millions in stock options, and then run for office with the secret but explicit understanding that the stock options were arranged as a way to incentivize certain policy positions?
I wouldn't be totally opposed to what you're suggesting, but as you say, there's no mechanism for doing it.
So, too bad for Carney, he should have thought of this before he agreed to be paid in stock options and then run for PM. This is his own mess!
And frankly I'm kind of shocked that anyone is defending a multimillionaire who's doing something so brazenly counter to the spirit of our ethics rules.
Well, I'd expect it from Trump or Poilievre supporters, sure.