Whose values are we talking about?

According to the Financial Post, Mark Carney stated at a March 26, 2025, election campaign stop next to the Ambassador Bridge connecting Windsor, Ont., with Detroit, MI, that "partners in Asia that share our values don't include China. … We obviously do have a large amount of trade with them [the Chinese], but we have to be very careful, very deliberate, and they need to meet Canadian standards."

Precisely whose values and what standards are we talking about?

A 2009 article on the Goldman Sachs website titled, "Goldman Sachs Expands its Footprint in Emerging Markets," describes its activities in "emerging" global financial markets during the 1990s, years that happen to coincide with Mark Carney's 13-year career at Goldman Sachs from 1990 to 2003, where, according to Wikipedia, his positions included "co-head of sovereign risk, executive director for emerging debt capital markets, and managing director for investment banking."

These 13 years also coincide with a period during which:

• China's GDP growth averaged 9.71% per year (median 9.25).

• In China, "on average some 1,092 km of new railways were opened to traffic annually, a 2.4-fold increase over the previous 10 years. At the end of 2004, railways in operation reached 74,200 km."

• China's "massive plan to upgrade its network" of roads began.

• China had, in 2003, "consistently graduated more engineers than the U.S., Japan and Germany combined every year since 1997, according to figures collected by the National Science Foundation in Washington."

These developments were financed by China's public banking system, whose purpose was not to enrich foreign holders of capital looking to make a killing loaning it into "emerging debt capital markets" but to build public infrastructure with which to support China's economic development.

China's public banking system is essential also to implementing its industrial policy because it steers investment into industrial sectors China's elected government decides, in consultation with industry and academia, to cultivate. This is in contrast to speculating in financial assets like stocks, bonds, land, housing, and consumer debt, in which enormous quantities of capital held in private hands are sequestered in the neoliberal West.

China's One Belt, One Road initiative finances and helps to construct transportation and communication infrastructure in Global South countries. Because its objective is to facilitate long-term, mutually beneficial trade with Global South countries rather than to trap them in unrepayable debt to "maximize investors' returns" in the manner of Western private capital, China extends loans at modest interest rates with generous repayment periods and "does not require political and economic reforms typically attached to Western developmental initiatives."

The Goldman Sachs article describes a different set of values, namely "trade liberalization, deregulation and the privatization of state-owned enterprises, including banks and telecommunication companies"; "advising governments on privatizations and assisting corporations in raising equity and debt capital in public and private markets internationally"; and "liberalizing economic reforms and opening up financial services sectors to foreign investors."

"Trade liberalization" means allowing domestic industries to be overwhelmed and, in "emerging" economies, strangled in their infancy, by cheap imports, impoverishing the domestic workforce so it can be exploited assembling low-value-added manufactured products for foreign corporations for low wages with no workplace protections.

"Deregulation" means eliminating rules democratically elected governments put in place to protect the environment, public health, workers' safety and financial security, and limit corporations' ability to circumvent competition and distort the economy with monopoly power.

"Privatization of state-owned enterprises" means putting essential public infrastructure – marine terminals, airports, public transportation, water systems, parking meters, garbage collection, etc. – and key state-owned industries like oil, gas, and mineral extraction, aircraft manufacturing, and banking in the hands of foreign financial institutions to use as vehicles with which to extract rents from the target economy.

Holders of privatized state-owned enterprises cut costs by undercapitalizing operations and downsizing and underpaying their workforces. Understaffing, overwork, reduced benefits and pay, and staff burnout undermine quality and access to service, as does corner-cutting such as deferring maintenance and relaxing safety standards.

Privatizing British Rail in 1993 is a textbook example of how privatization destroys a state-owned enterprise, as is privatizing Thames Water in 1989.

Holders securitize privatized state-owned enterprises so they can be traded in secondary markets, indebt them to the gills, and extract for themselves in management fees revenue government could otherwise use to support universal healthcare, public education, social housing, and other essential services.

"Right to buy" council housing in England and Wales starting in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher illustrates the colossal damage done by privatizing social services.

"Equity and debt capital" means foreign creditors lined up with their hands out for interest (debt) payments on or passive part-ownership (equity) in whatever industries they finance.

"Economic reforms" include eliminating capital controls so that when interest rates are low and transnational financial institutions have access to mountains of cheap money, they can flow it into "emerging" economies, loan it as outlined above, collateralized with public infrastructure, land, real estate, and whatever other assets they will grab when U.S. interest rates go up and "hot money" leaves the target economies, precipitating what are known euphemistically as "debt crises," meaning target economies cannot meet now-higher interest payments on their loans.

Once an "emerging" economy is trapped in odious debt and all of its assets are in foreign hands, either by privatization or foreclosure, helpful lenders like the IMF and World Bank step in to loan it enough to make its payments, and this process of rolling debt over continues forever, provided the government in question agrees to "economic reforms" such as cutting spending on healthcare, education, pensions, housing, and other essential public services and prioritizing debt payments to foreign creditors.

Wall Street bankers make enormous profits preying on poor people in weak countries by financializing their economies, trapping them in debt, and privatizing state enterprises.

Note that indebting others and other rent-seeking schemes like speculating in financial assets do not create wealth; they extract it from the productive economy and concentrate it in a few obscenely wealthy hands. Rent-seekers impoverish public services even if they do not privatize and thus eliminate them, by hoarding capital and thus starving them of funds.

Manufacturing economies, by contrast, do create wealth and, rather than creating poor, homeless, and drug-addicted people, raise people out of poverty, as the Chinese economy has, lifting 800 million people out of poverty since 1978 according to the World Bank (others say the number is 850 million).

Economies with proper tax and regulatory policies provide robust public services, as the Canadian economy did, building 20,000 units of social housing every year from 1968 to 1992 and providing Canadians fully staffed universal single-payer healthcare from 1957 to 1995, before CHST accelerated the defunding process that began in 1977, disproportionately advantaging the wealthiest 20% of Canadians.

Oligarchs financialize and loot economies. Mixed economies create prosperity.

It would be a big surprise if continuing to loot Canada's already thoroughly financialized economy is a "value" that most Canadians support.