Mark Carney's sovereign wealth fund.

Mark Carney's sovereign wealth fund is a vehicle for the usual suspects – insurance companies, pension funds, investment banks, and of course high net worth individuals, foreign and domestic – to add a layer of interest payments onto the cost of industrial projects in Canada.

Carney doesn't even capitalize his fund with cash but launches it straight out of the gate $25 billion in debt, a sum eerily reminiscent of the $20 billion that Justin Trudeau claimed his increase in the inclusion rate on capital gains over $250,000 in 2025 from 50% to 2/3 – which Carney reversed precisely one week after he replaced Trudeau as prime minister in a palace coup on March 14, 2025 – would have netted, and which 0.13% of Canadian taxpayers would have paid.

Instead, Carney's sovereign wealth fund will indebt Canadians $25 billion to that selfsame 0.13% to provide rich people and big finance across Canada and the world an opportunity to indebt us even further by "investing" in it. Hint: "investors" loan money with the intention of being paid back in full plus interest.

Trudeau's $20 billion could have been used to capitalize a "nation-building bank," a name Carney, it seems, would have found agreeable, and that bank could have extended low- or no-interest loans to commercial ventures "like mining, gas, helium, lithium and so on, as well as our agricultural industries and manufacturing industries," in Carney's own words.

Using the Basel III minimum leverage ratio (dollars a bank holds divided by dollars a bank may loan), which is 3%, a publicly owned nation-building bank could theoretically leverage $20 billion in capitalization to carry on its balance sheet $666.67 billion in loans – more than eighteen times the total invested in all manufacturing in Canada in 2024.

Carney is a banker. He worked for 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."

A 2019 article on the Goldman Sachs website details the activities it, and therefore Carney, were engaged in in "emerging markets" at that time, 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."

These activities are designed to distribute enormous sums to the top of the net worth pyramid. There is nothing "sovereign" about them.

Canada is fortunate to have $7.8 trillion as of 2018 in the hands of domestic financial institutions and an additional $1.8 trillion in the hands of the top 1% of Canadian taxpayers today. This is a far greater tax base than is necessary to capitalize a "nation-building" bank with $25 billion.

What remains to be seen is whether Carney's "sovereign wealth fund" is really intended to "build" the Canadian nation, whatever that means, or if it is just another elaborate wealth distribution scheme like the secondary mortgage market BOC and CMHC colluded in putting together after 2001 to hoover $2.14 trillion in mortgage debt to the top of the net worth pyramid and leave 34% of Canadian renters paying more than 50% of their income on rent.

If Carney really wants to "build" the Canadian "nation," he should reinstate the Trudeau capital gains inclusion rate increase for one year to capitalize his bank and show us actual material output from industrial projects he professes to promote in coming years, not numbers on financial institutions' balance sheets that Canadian taxpayers will have put there.