Mark Carney’s “Values”: The last DEI champion standing

Author: Cosmin Dzsurdzsa

Carney’s “Values”: A new investigative series by True North that takes the Liberal leadership hopeful’s own words as a launch pad to uncover his beliefs, background and vision for the world. Read the first part on carbon taxes here and the second part on central bank digital currencies here.

For nearly two decades, Mark Carney has styled himself as the steady hand of global finance—a technocrat whose expertise has guided institutions like the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, and the United Nations.

But as he positions himself to become the next likely prime minister of Canada, Carney is increasingly presenting himself as the last champion of diversity, equity and inclusion in an era where public and private support for such measures is waning.

“While America engages in a war on woke, Canadians will continue to value inclusiveness,” Carney said in a recent speech during his leadership campaign.

It’s a familiar refrain from a man who, during his tenure as governor of the Bank of England, turned the country’s nearly 330-year-old preeminent finance institution onto the task of implementing “unconscious bias training,” diversity quotas, and identity-based hiring.

But as the broader public grows skeptical of DEI’s excesses—where merit often takes a backseat to ideology—Carney’s insistence on maintaining this course raises serious questions about his priorities.

Carney has long blended economic policy with ideological activism. In a 2017 speech as the governor of the Bank of England, he laid out the central bank’s three-pronged approach to increasing diversity: inclusive recruitment, developing an inclusive culture, and creating inclusive communications.

The initiative included mandatory bias training for leadership, setting identity-based hiring targets, and embedding DEI principles into the assessment of employee performance.

“This training is part of our broader focus on values. Values count heavily when assessing performance and reward,” Carney emphasized at the time. “All managers—including myself—are assessed by colleagues on their values and behaviours.”

Rather than prioritizing economic stability, Carney pushed a vision where the central bank’s role was not just to regulate currency, but to purge wrongthink.