Mark Carney

Mark J. Carney (born March 16, 1965 in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories) is expected to succeed David A. Dodge as the Governor of the Bank of Canada on February 1, 2008. Carney was appointed by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on October 4, 2007. Carney is presently a Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Finance. Prior to joining the public service, Mr. Carney had a thirteen-year career with Goldman Sachs in its London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto offices. His progressively senior positions included Co-Head of Sovereign Risk; Executive Director, Emerging Debt Capital Markets; and Managing Director, Investment Banking. Mr. Carney received a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1988. He received a master's degree in economics in 1993, and a doctorate in economics in 1995, both from Oxford University.

Department of Finance

While at the Department of Finance, Mark Carney engineered the Federal Conservative government's plan to tax Income Trusts at source. The Department of Finance also eliminated a 15% withholding tax on foreign leverage buyout loans, and created capital insertion rules that restrict growth on Canadian trusts. This creates conditions which favor foreign entities who purchase Canadian Income Trusts and are not required to comply with rules that restrict growth.

On October 4, 2007 Brent Fullard criticized Mr. Carney for his handling of the Income Trust issue while working for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Fullard asserts "It was Mark Carney and Mark Carney alone who thought it was okay to leave out the 38% of taxes collected by the government from income trust distributions, in his fraudulent and highly intellectually corrupt scheme to rip off 2.5 million Canadians from $35 billion of their life savings, for a whole host of reasons, none of them good. No evidence took the form of 18 pages of blacked out documents that constituted Mark’s idea of accountability and transparency.

Bank of Canada

Mark Carney is expected to take power as Governor at the Bank of Canada at a time when the Canadian federal budget is experiencing a large surplus and an economy experiencing a strong dollar in comparison with the US dollar.

MPs on the Finance Committee reviewed the appointment on December 5, 2007. During the hearing, MP's Thomas Mulcair and Garth Turner questioned Mark Carney on his role as adviser to Jim Flaherty and Ralph Goodale and advice Carney gave relating to Income trusts Carney refused to explain his role in what Garth Turner described as a 'policy failure' and did not directly answer Thomas Mulcair's question on the real tax revenue loss caused by the recent foreign takeover of Canadian Income trusts such as Prime West Energy Trust by Abu Dhabi National Energy Company.