Mark Carney’s triumvirate in Ottawa
For decades, through successive federal governments, executive and legislative powers in Ottawa have been centralized within the prime minister’s office (PMO). Today, government policy and some legislation is developed by PMO staff, not by parliamentarians and public servants as a functioning Westminster model government would have it. This centralization of power leads to a perverted democratic parliamentary system where unaccountable individuals in the PMO dictate the government’s agenda to partisan MPs and note-taking bureaucrats. The government benches in parliament are occupied by trained seals and even cabinet ministers are window dressing, cogs in the PMO wheel. Although this sounds disrespectful and harsh to Canada’s well-meaning elected representatives, it is the reality, and explains how individuals like Gerald Butts and Katie Telford – two people in Trudeau’s PMO who Canadians never voted for – wielded their power without reproach through the last ten years.
In the last few weeks the full complement of PM Mark Carney’s newly assembled PMO staff took their seats to set and marshal the government’s agenda in parliament and Ottawa’s bureaucracy. Carney has selected a triumvirate of men, who legacy media has heralded as a fresh start, a clean break from the increasingly scandalous Trudeau PMO backroom headed by Telford and Butts. Canadians are to be reassured that the key advisors whispering in PM Carney’s ear are earnest and uncompromised: a former Canadian United Nations (U.N.) ambassador, a former justice minister, and the head of Quebec’s largest public utility company. However, as independent news media sources have ferreted out, there is much more to PM Carney’s unaccountable PMO heads than what the Liberals have shared and CBC News, the Toronto Star, and like media have reported.
Let’s consider Carney’s triumvirate, beginning with the new “second most powerful man in Ottawa” Marc-Andre Blanchard. Mainstream media broadcasted that the PM’s new chief of staff Blanchard comes from a senior executive position with the Quebec pension investment fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and, before that he was Canada’s ambassador to the U.N. The details of Blanchard’s past that were not shared were his intimate dealings in the backrooms of the Liberal party supporting former PM Justin Trudeau. He was president of the Liberal party in Quebec before coming to Ottawa with Trudeau in 2015 to help with the Liberals’ transition of power. Blanchard personally vetted Trudeau’s first cabinet. After Blanchard’s Trudeau-appointed stint at the U.N. he came back to Ottawa in 2019 to become an economic advisor to the PM (similar to the position Carney held with Trudeau from 2020 to 2025).
While at the U.N. Blanchard was involved with advancing Canada’s support for the Global Compact for Migration. He was also the point man for advancing the initiatives of the U.N.’s sustainable development goals – and he was present when the work began at the U.N. on its Agenda 2030 (as well as the Migration Compact and the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples). Blanchard was fully engaged with the political imperatives of the Trudeau Liberals’ climate change agenda and he was responsible for orchestrating them on the U.N.’s world stage. Blanchard and Carney share many core beliefs relating to net zero goals and sustainable development initiatives to transition away from fossil fuels. Later in his CDPQ position, Blanchard championed energy transition and sustainability initiatives with the pension fund’s investments and corporate holdings.
Here is an interview clip where Blanchard expresses his shared views and commitment with Mark Carney and his wife Diane Fox Carney on the absolute need for the world to transition from fossil fuels. Kudos to investigative journalist Andy Lee who found this 2021 international forum exchange where Blanchard is discussing with Ms. Carney how he is managing $400 billion of CDPQ assets with a strict adherence to net zero – “exiting from oil production” and “excluding investment in new oil pipelines.”
Blanchard and Carney have had multiple dealings with each other in the corporate world as well. Just in the last year their respective companies, Brookfield and CDPQ, had teamed up to announce:
a $2.4 billion Catalytic Transition Fund for climate change investments (Brookfield media with quotes from Carney and Blanchard here),
the CDPQ acquisition from Brookfield of 25 per cent of the U.K.’s First Hydro Company,
the joint Brookfield-CDPQ $1.3 billion acquisition of Antylia Scientific, and
the Brookfield $9 billion purchase of the U.S. company Colonial Pipeline, which was partially owned by CDPQ.
The bitter irony of the last two announcements relating to Antylia Scientific and Colonial Pipeline is that these were made public on May 28th and May 30th respectively; Carney announced Blanchard as his man in the PMO on June 1st.
Another of Carney’s triumvirate, David Lametti, slipped into new principal secretary role this past Monday. Lametti is an old familiar face from the Justin Trudeau days. He served as Trudeau’s Justice Minister and proved to be very adept at weaponizing Canada’s justice system for political purposes. Lametti will be remembered for replacing the PMO-abused minister Jody Wilson Raybould and then providing the “get-out-of-jail-free” card to embroiled SNC Lavalin. He was also responsible for evoking the Emergencies Act during the Ottawa freedom protests – which is now ruled “unconstitutional” by Canada’s courts.
Lametti’s record as Justice Minister is dubious at best. He is responsible for the Liberals’ soft on crime policies, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and weakening the bail system, all of which resulted in increased repeat offenders and a 50 per cent rise in violent crimes in Canada.
David McKenzie, Conservative MP for Calgary Signal Hill, commented on David Lametti on X: “The Greek word Kakistocracy translates to “government by the worst possible people.” David Lametti, who broke Canada’s bail system and presided over a serious rise in violent crime as Justin Trudeau’s Attorney General, is now Mark Carney's Principal Secretary. Unbelievable.”
Lametti has demonstrated that he is unscrupulous when it comes to the application of law. Beyond playing footloose and being deceptive about SNC Lavalin and the need to evoke the Emergencies Act – he joked with fellow cabinet minister Marco Mendicino about bringing in tanks to turn back the protestors on Ottawa streets. Lametti is also responsible for countless judicial appointments made from Liberal Party donors and volunteer lists – something that to this day he boasts about: “I appointed judges at a faster pace than anyone in Canadian history,” exclaimed Lametti in a January 2025 CBC News interview.
Lametti is an old friend of Mark Carney from university days where they served as co-captains of the Oxford Blues hockey team. One assumes that, as principle secretary, Lametti will keep his “elbows up” for the PM. It raises serious questions about his counsel on enacting the C-5 law that will push the major projects of national interest, or applying those measures found in the Borders Bill C-2 that violate Canadians’ personal freedoms and privacy.
The third member of the triumvirate is Michael Sabia, appointed by PM Carney as the country’s top civil servant, the new clerk of the privy council. Sabia is most recently the former CEO of Quebec Hydro. It was also underlined by PM Carney and in legacy media accounts of his announcement that Sabia served as deputy minister of finance. In his illustrious career he has been chair of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, CEO of Bell Canada, CFO of Canadian National Railway, and president of CDPQ.
Sabia has been depicted to Canadians as a no-nonsense executive who is known for being a big thinker and creative policy maker. Sabia’s reputation for demanding competency precedes him, as trumpeted by the headline in business and technology newspaper The Logic: “Michael Sabia is ready to kick Ottawa’s ass.” The Ottawa Citizen’s recent front page article was also foreboding for the federal bureaucracy: “'The world waits for no one': The Michael Sabia era begins for the public service.” In that article, the Ottawa Citizen describes Sabia as “a disruptor who is corporate-minded and extremely smart.” This view is echoed in a recent Hill Times article, quoting Dan Lovell of Sussex Strategies: “He’s going to disrupt things for the public service… He knows how to navigate complex and challenging situations to try and get restitution, but also resolve.”
So, there is reason for hope that Sabia will prove to be a real change agent, that is until one learns that the Liberal spin doctors and government-sponsored media buried certain skeletons tied to the Trudeau Liberals. First, Sabia was deputy minister of finance during COVID when federal spending went unchecked and Canada recorded the worst financial record of all advanced nations. Second, he worked in concert with finance minister Chrystia Freeland to direct Canada’s big banks to unlawfully freeze Canadians’ bank accounts. Third, Sabia was with the Canada Infrastructure Bank when there were questionable contracts amounting to $35 billion with McKinsey and Co. – and he worked with former minister Catherine McKenna when she was embroiled in the Liberals’ multi-billion infrastructure boondoggle where money and project records went missing. Fourth, Sabia and Carney have a not-often-mentioned history together at the World Economic Forum (WEF), where Sabia served as co-chair of the WEF’s infrastructure and development, while Carney was serving on the WEF board of trustees, alongside his close family friend Chrystia Freeland. So all his accolades aside, the Liberal web of scandals is tightly woven around Sabia.
There are good reasons to be leery of Carney’s triumvirate. In a recent Globe and Mail opinion column entitled, “Carney’s inner circle of aging white guys has the experience the Trudeau team lacked”, Liberal apologist Lawrence Maritn lauded the PM for his choice of quality personnel for his advisors. He also made the observations that the PM and these three were “about as populist as you can’t get.” A few days later in the Globe and Mail, former Reformer Party Leader Preston Manning penned an editorial that picked up on Lawrence’s observation about “the three wisemen of the East”. Manning wrote:
“all three of these appointees are Quebeckers with primarily public-sector backgrounds and preconceived biases on the energy file. Thus the interests of the Canadian West – with its preference for private enterprise over public enterprise and strong support for the petroleum sector’s key role in sustaining and rejuvenating the national economy – are grossly under-represented in Mr. Carney’s inner circle.
Mr. Carney and his closest associates are about as elitist as you can get. They are therefore most likely to misunderstand and oppose populist sentiments and expressions at home and abroad in an era when democratic populism versus aristocratic elitism is becoming the defining political axis in much of the Western world.”
And more to the point about trustworthiness, consider this week’s political maelstrom about Mark Carney’s private investments, his “blind trust”, and the screening process that has been established by Carney and the government’s ethics commissioner to ensure the PM does not commit a conflict-of-interest relating to the 103 companies or funds listed, or the more than 500 stocks Carney is invested in in his portfolio. The most offensive item in this whole matter is the notion that Blanchard and Sabia will serve as the conflict of interest screen for Carney. Given Blanchard’s past business interests with Carney (and likely the fact that he is sharing many similar investments), and given Sabia’s record of faithfully serving the best interests of his political masters and their scandalous activities, having these two as the gate keepers against conflicts of interest is most inappropriate.
To appreciate the compromising details of this situation, view the news clip by Canadian political commentator David Simieritsch: “Carney Put BROOKFIELD Investors in CHARGE of “Screening” His CONFLICTS!?”, and read Sam Cooper’s latest column: “Democracy Watchdog Says PM Carney's "Ethics Screen" Actually "Hides His Participation" In Conflicted Investments.”
Canadians need to be alert to a prime minister who has been less than honest to date about his corporate and stock investments, not to mention the use of tax havens to manage his $300 million net worth. Similarly, Canadians need to be alert to the PM’s appointed lead hands, all who have personal history and vested interests with Carney that were not shared openly, nor covered in legacy media. All of this underscores the importance of making public the decisions and activities of this triumvirate -- holding those regarded unaccountable, accountable.
The article was published this morning in The Niagara Independent. The By George Journal version above includes additional text, quotes, and links to source media materials.
By way of a postscript, I want to express my thanks to industrious independent news sources, such as Canadian journalists Sam Cooper, Andy Lee, Brian Lilley, Catherine Swift, David Krayden, David Simieritsch, and Ryan Gerritsen, and to news outlets Blacklock’s Reporter and Juno News — all who do not hesitate pursuing the political news that the government subsidized legacy media in our country will not.
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