Conservative leader jabs Canadian PM Carney with ethics proposal

Erik Hertzberg, Bloomberg News on Apr 13, 2025

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The leader of Canada’s Conservative Party promised to introduce legislation that he says would limit politicians’ financial and lobbying-related conflicts of interest if he wins the country’s April 28 election.

Pierre Poilievre said he would ban unregistered lobbying, require politicians to disclose where they paid taxes in the last seven years, and require cabinet ministers to “divest fully from tax havens.”

The proposals are a shot at Mark Carney, the prime minister and Liberal Party leader, who lived in the UK when he was governor of the Bank of England and then became chair of Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

“When you’re going into cabinet, including becoming prime minister, you’d actually have to sell all the assets, turn it into cash, hand that cash over to a trustee who would then invest it from scratch,” Poilievre said of his proposed law.

Carney’s personal assets have gone into a blind trust since he became prime minister last month, but Poilievre has sought to make a political issue of the fact that voters don’t know what those assets are or whether they include holdings of private Brookfield funds that can’t easily be sold.

“There is no blind trust when you know what’s inside that trust,” he said. “It is blind only to the public.”

Polls suggest Carney and the Liberals are on track to win, and the former central banker is now beating Poilievre on key leadership traits, according to a new survey by Abacus Data.

Carney is leading on the question of which leader is best to navigate a crisis and help households deal with their expenses. The latter is a shift, showing the Liberals gaining ground on cost-of-living issues — “terrain long dominated by the Conservatives,” Abacus Chief Executive Officer David Coletto said in a release Sunday.

Poilievre calls the proposal “Accountability Act 2.0,” and would also set the fine for federal ethics violations at C$10,000 (about $7,200).

Carney resigned his corporate posts, including as chair of Bloomberg Inc., when he entered politics in January.

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